This episode is so star-studded that they kill off Peggy Lipton from Twin Peaks in the cold open. She is one of two newlyweds who are accidentally exposed to a crystal that destroys the oxygen in the immediate area, causing them both to suffocate even though they are outdoors. Obviously David Vincent investigates that, discovers the crystal, and knowing that the regular authorities won’t be help enough, he brings it to a news guy called Booth who has both a radio show and a regular news article to use to spread the news about the aliens. Booth is played by none other than everyone’s favourite Burgess Meredith: Burgess Meredith! Booth is impressed by the crystal, but isn’t convinced about the existence of the aliens until he hires a scientist to study it and the aliens kill that scientist. Booth is in. He’s going to help Vincent spread word about the Invaders.

So then the Invaders need a new plan. The leader of this group of Invaders is played by everyone’s favourite Ed Asner: Ed Asner! The Invasner is head of a batch of Invaders who are developing this crystal so they can destroy the oxygen on Earth and make the planet more suitable to the aliens. He knows he can’t let humanity find out about them, so he has to stop Booth’s story. To that end, he brings David Vincent’s family into it.

It turns out that Vincent has a brother, Bob, who has a pregnant wife, Grace. That’s right, it’s Bob and David! The relationship between the brothers has been strained over the last year or so, however long it has been since David has been on his alien-fighting crusade. Bob doesn’t believe in the aliens, so he believes his brother has gone crazy, which changes when the aliens kidnap him and hold him hostage unless David gets Booth to drop the story.

I don’t need to go through all the details, but our heroes struggle with this one. Bob tries to fight his way out of the alien base, proving that action hero-ness runs in the family, but he is not successful. David is willing to discredit himself to save his brother, but Booth asks if Bob’s life is more important than the human race. Booth refuses to back down. It all ends in a climax wherein Invasner, his batch of aliens, and Booth are all killed and all evidence of the alien scheme erased, as usual. And, also as usual, David Vincent walks away leaving just a few new believers behind, except this time, they are his family.

We get some minor details about the aliens’ true forms as well. Oxygen is often considered a necessity for life in our universe, but these guys? They don’t care for oxygen! It actively harms them. It makes me wonder if they aren’t in some way metallic in nature, and they are rusting in a way. It also makes me wonder why they’re bothering to conquer Earth when Mars is right there, with much less oxygen.

Some astronauts die in a mysterious way, so you know that David Vincent is gonna look into that. After a bare minimum of pretending to be a reporter to get into a NASA press conference, he winds up giving his real name and being recognized. But, fortunately for NASA Vincent wasn’t recognized by the Invaders, he was recognized by Gavin Lewis, who is a human who works for NASA. Eventually the two men team up, with Lewis bringing Vincent in as security.

See, the thing is, NASA is right about to make their first trip to the moon and those astronauts that got killed off were replaced by fresh astronauts, and Vincents investigation makes him suspicious that one of them is an Invader. Here’s the thing: the aliens on this show take human form, sure, but they don’t take the form of existing humans. It isn’t a pod person situation where they step into an existing person’s life, right? Well, this time it is. This Invader has taken over the life of a guy: Hardy Smith, who was badly burned in a fire in Saigon, and had his face reconstructed, thus explaining why he looks different. He was an existing guy, with a life, including a wife. It’s the wife who is finally able to confirm this ain’t the real Hardy Smith and gets NASA to call Smith off the moon mission. But the Invader posing as Smith isn’t happy with that, so he hijacks the rocket and it explodes. The moon mission will have to be postponed, but the Invaders’ mission has been foiled.

When I learned we were getting a story about the space race, I was hoping we’d see a lot of footage from real space stuff, like in the Gary Seven episode of Star Trek. There’s a bit, but I would’ve preferred more.

Still, overall a good one. We learn that the Invaders don’t have heartbeats, which is something I don’t know we’ve heard before. The fake Smith had a little machine he could shine on himself (that he can charge with the cord from an electric razor) that makes him have a heartbeat long enough to pass a medical though. Oh, and also there’s a bit where Vincent disarms a gun-weilding Invader and flips him in one smooth motion. He’s getting to be a regular action hero he is.

This one mixes things up a bit. David Vincent is following a trail of mysterious deaths. He finds the killer easily enough: it’s an Invader going by the name Nick. Nick, it turns out, has a virus that causes a slow death for the Invaders if untreated, but if he comes into contact with a human is freezes them to death. He’s just trying to get to a saucer landing site so he can get fixed up, and he’s willing to kill any human who gets in his way (and even a dog!). Anyway, he is captured by Vincent and there’s a family that gets involved, that stuff is less interesting, but in the end, when Nick makes it to the saucer landing site, they casually shoot him. They absolutely did not care about saving this kid’s life. I mean, the fact that he had some other Invaders trying to kill him for the whole episode could have clued him into that, but I assume he was in denial. I mean, what other choice did he have.

Obviously I am very interested in the alien aspects of the show. I definitely want to know more about the Invaders, and the introduction of this disease is interesting to me. But also, while Nick is captured by Vincent, he makes his case that not all of the Invaders are bad. He points out that there are good humans and bad ones, and his people are like that too. Most of them, he says, are simply following orders. Is there any truth to what Nick says? He’s certainly willing to lie to everyone else he meets, and has no qualms about killing humans (and a dog!), so he could be trying to play Vincent. But is there a “working class” among the Invaders? We know there are sub-groups, like the mutations who have emotions and are disliked. I don’t know if the show will ever give us answers, but I am curious to find out.

Much like when they were trying to detonate that anti-matter bomb, this is one where the Invaders are just trying to do massive amounts of damage. And this time, they do a good job of it. They create a hurricane that does damage to a bunch of towns and the only reason David Vincent comes to investigate (other than the fact it was a hurricane in February) is because they spared the town they were in. But David Vincent does indeed come to investigate, but gets amchurched (which is when you get ambushed in a church, as you all know) and even though he manages to take out one of the attackers with his own weapon (I don’t even know if I’ve mentioned that the aliens have these little weapons they can stick on people to make it look like they died of natural causes, but Vincent turns it on one of the aliens here), our boy is still beaten up. But, luckily, he fell on the church organ, so before they can kill him, some people come to investigate the noise.

As I assume must have been normal in the ’60s, because Vincent was injured in the church, he has to stay with the priest at the rectory. Probably hospitals weren’t invented yet. Anyway, the priest is more or less the main character in this one. His friend was killed by the Invaders, his housekeeper is secretly an Invader, and his church is being used as a hurricane-making headquarters by the Invaders. This is his episode as much as Vincent’s (though Vincent gets to take up a huge portion of it by getting drugged and taking forever to walk down some stairs). Anyway, the priest is turned against Vincent at first, but then it made to realize who the real villains are and becomes Vincent’s latest ally. They defeat the Invaders, but not before one of them actually throws himself on the sci-fi weather controls and kills himself so that they all dissolve with him as he dies. Gotta give that one Invader credit for his devotion. Against Vincent’s wishes, the priest lets the other Invaders escape alive because of his religion or whatever.

This was a decent episode and, for whatever reason, the focus on a priest kind of mentally moves the story from the purely sci-fi space it usually occupies to something closer to, say, the John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. There’s no real focus on religion in the episode. Sure, the priest prays, but there’s no God Magic unless you count David Vincent’s cool alien-fighting skills. But somehow the mental shift is there, and the episode feels more like cosmic horror to me, and I like it.

David Vincent is staking out an alien operation, sneaks in and starts randomly pushing buttons. This is his right, and I won’t take that from him.

Anyway, this one picks up three months into Vincent’s current investigation. He’s got a job (under his real name, of course) with an oil company, and there’s a whole thing where he steals some alien stuff and he brings it to a guy who used to work for NASA to study it and there’s hypnotism and subterfuge and all that. But what this episode is really about is that David Vincent has a love interest. Susan Carver, the daughter of the oil company boss. During those three months we didn’t see, she and Vincent fell in love (why would a story want to focus on that part, when it can just introduce her and tell her they are in love at the same time?). The thing is, her father has some shady dealings in his past and the aliens use that information to blackmail Susan into working against Vincent. She comes to regret it, but the story still has her sacrificing her life to save our hero, who shall single-manly go on to have more adventures.

I got to thinking during this one how shows in this era would just roll in a love interest for the hero now and again, and how often they were doomed women. My mind went to David Vincent’s contemporaries Captain Kirk and Batman. I haven’t seen it in decades, but I swear there’s an episode of Batman where the love interest is a criminal woman who, per the narrative must be punished for her crimes, and she dies in a similar radiation thing to the one Susan does here. And, of course, the closest thing Vincent has had to another love interest in the show so far, the Invader with the mutation in The Mutation episode of the Invaders, was not as close to Vincent as Susan is here, but she was similarly doomed. I’m definitely gonna keep track of how many more doomed love interests we get during the run. (I also just remembered that during that episode with the hallucination of a better life working with the aliens, we learned of an old girlfriend he had in the past. She probably got out fine because he wasn’t an adventure show hero when they hooked up.)

Um. In other news, the aliens have some sort of energy weapon guns in this one. I don’t think we’ve seen those before. They’re getting more dangerous.