Okay, this time the Invaders try a sort of religious tactic to get their conquest of Earth going. Brother Avery is an Invader posing as a preacher or something who does a trick for his congregation: he takes a pill that starts killing him, then he starts to glow in the way the Invaders do as they die. But instead of burning up, after he shows off the glow he heads off the stage to one of the regeneration chambers they use to not die. It’s a pretty effective scam, so he’s got a whole bunch of people showing up to his performances. What’s more, he’s preaching that they should prepare for “the coming host of angels” so they will accept saucers bringing people from space with glee instead of trepidation. It’s a good plan, but obviously David Vincent is on the case.

Vincent knows the alien red glow, so he sees through this one immediately, including understanding that they’ve probably got the regeneration chamber backstage. He offers his services to Now Magazine (We must sadly assume that in the universe of the Invaders this magazine is not owned by J. Jonah Jameson’s) to get pictures of Avery’s whole operation. To get into the church, he actually bothers to use an alias! He almost never does that! He poses as Dennis Victor and, though the Invaders see through, but he focuses on a non-alien member of the church, Sister Claire.

Most of the episode is typical Invaders stuff, with Vincent doing action hero stuff like dodging a car and sneaking around, but the Claire stuff is interesting. It’s clear that Claire has made a lot of mistakes in her life and that Brother Avery’s miracle has given her a faith that has helped her turn her life around. She does not want to believe David Vincent and his claims, but the Invaders have no qualms about using her to capture Vincent and then killing her. And the thing about a show like this one is that when Claire is in danger, there’s as much chance that she could be saved or be killed. Watching the episode, I have no way of knowing if she’ll survive or not. One may say that, since the show doesn’t bring back characters like this, it doesn’t actually matter if the guest stars survive or not, but if we go that way we’d say it doesn’t matter in any movie who survives if there isn’t a sequel. As far as this story is concerned, we want the characters to survive, but the fact that the Invaders is willing to kill off such characters means we can’t be certain. That’s what I love about horror, and I’m glad the show does it. Anyway, Claire survives and Vincent ends the episode with another ally ready and willing to join the fight against the Invaders but we presumably never see her again. Maybe Vincent sent her off to help his brother with his underground alien-fighting operation.

A couple of special-effects-related comments on this one: One, when we see Brother Avery regenerating, there is a sort of wiggly mass visible inside him that we’ve not seen before and I wonder if anything can be inferred from it about the Invaders’ true forms. Two, there’s a scene where Vincent shoots through a car window to kill an Invader and to show the bullet breaking the glass they do a special effect wherein they just draw a crack pattern over the window. It’s very badly done and, in a show that usually has fairly good effects for its time, really stands out as funny. It’s better than I’d do, for sure, and I’m sure the people doing it had budget and time concerns to worry about, but it doesn’t change that it is an amusingly bad effect. I loved it.

It’s the first Part Two episode of the show! Things continue from the previous episode! How novel!

As established last time, David Vincent and his friend Mike Tressider are dealing with the latest plan by the Invaders. The aliens are flooding earth with radiation except for one place in Scandinavia, so all the world leaders are now having a meeting there to figure out what to do about it, and the Invaders plan to blow up the place and wipe out all those leaders. But on Vincent and Tressider’s side is Ellie, an Invader who thinks the massassination plan is going to backfire and make humans aware of the Invaders so she wants to stop it.

So our heroes get to travel down a cool elevator into the EURAC (“European Allied Command” apparently) base and do espionage kinda stuff. The main Invader baddie in this arc (Alquist) is working for Halvorson, the leader of the host nation which I don’t think is identified, and it turns out that Halvorson is aware that Alquist is an alien! They’re keeping it secret for typical Men In Black reasoning (they think people will panic and riot), but Halvorson believes Alquist when he says that his people are willing to work alongside humanity.

The most important things in the episode are these: 1) There’s an indoor jeep chase. Sure, the production values of the chase are nothing special, but it still happens. 2) Halvorson sacrifices himself to save the day. Imagine a politician willing to do that. 3) My favourite part is Vincent and Ellie debating the merits of their species. Vincent is all “Your people can never know love” and Ellie is like “But we also don’t know hatred. Isn’t that better?” This debate never really comes to a resolution, though we are obviously supposed to side with Vincent, but Ellie points out “Your way is no better.” I love getting glimpses into the way the Invaders see the world, so it worked for me.

In the end, Mike Tressider doesn’t survive the episode, but Ellie defies my expectations by making it. I foresaw her as a probable “tragic female sacrifice” who dies for the cause, but this show is better than that. Instead, after they succeed at saving the day, they part by acknowledging that they are not friends and if they meet again they will be at cross-purposes. She probably does not show up again on the show, but it’s neat that she’s out there.

This episode is full of shocks. First of all, it is the first (and I believe only) two-parter of the show, so we know David Vincent isn’t getting it all wrapped up in time for the end of the episode.

Okay, here’s the setup: radiation levels around the world are increasing except for one place in Scandinavia. It’s all part of an Invader plan to get a bunch of world leaders together for a summit meeting (like in the title) so they can kill them all. Over the course of the episode we learn that they have Invaders in positions high enough in the various world governments that if they wipe out the leaders, they will be able to take over. A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies.

But maybe not. It turns out that not all the Invaders like the idea. David Vincent goes on a date with a woman, but it turns out she was an Invader sent to kill him, but she doesn’t do it because she needs his help to stop the plan! That’s right, Vincent is working with the Invaders again! But unlike the Invader who fell in love with him way back in the Mutation, this sexy lady is NOT interested in Vincent. She thinks the plan is stupid, it would draw attention to their actions and the radiation ruins the very world they are trying to conquer. She makes it clear that outside of his help on this, she has no desire to see David Vincent continue to live. He feels the same way about her.

Also in the episode is a friend of Vincent, Mike Tressider, who is America’s largest defence contractor. It’s treated as if he and Vincent have met before and dealt with Invaders together, but I think that may have been an Untold Tale because I don’t think we know that story. Anyway, the Invaders hypnotize Mike and he shoots Vincent, fortunately only managing a flesh wound before snapping out of the mind control. His connections to the government will be what allows him, Vincent, and Ellie the Invader to get into the summit meeting next episode.

We also get a human villain in the episode, a General who has sided with the Invaders because he sees them as strong and powerful and that’s what he values. He gives a good little speech about how Mike could have been such a great scientist to help the world, but he sold out for money from the government in the military industries. It’s a nice little bit about humans and their ability to betray their own kind, which I think it excellent in this kind of story. It’s also, I think, the third time a military guy has betrayed humanity to join the Invaders. It speaks to the kind of society the Invaders offer to those they ask to work with them.

But the single most shocking thing in this entire episode comes near the beginning when we learn that David Vincent is, and presumably still has this whole time, still been doing architect jobs. It really felt like he stopped that as soon as he began his quest to fight the Invaders, but no, we see him working late into the night. It explains how he has money to do anything, I suppose.

At this point I assume David Vincent just scours the newspapers for any report of a cerebral hemorrhage because when the aliens kill two guys in their usual way, of course Vincent comes to town to check it out. There he finds them doing their thing, he investigates, winds up on a saucer going into flight, and then lands somewhere else (it’s the Vasquez Rocks again). For a moment he isn’t sure if he’s still on Earth and neither is the viewer, which was neat. But he was on Earth, and he comes across a science class on a science hike or whatever. A teacher and five teenagers. Vincent tries to convince them there was a flying saucer nearby and it doesn’t go well.

Then we get a scene that I can’t help but find darkly amusing. Vincent and the teacher go off to explore the supposed aliens and they find a military base to sneak around in. They find what may be the biggest Invaders operation we’ve seen on the show so far, there’s like twenty of them around. Anyway, Vincent takes the opportunity to sneak in like a cheeky little guy and steal a piece of their technology, and it ends up getting the teacher killed. So then Vincent has to go back to the student and be like “Yeah, I went off with your teacher and he’s dead now, but you can trust me.” A very funny situation for our hero to be in (actual line of dialogue: “He’s dead. The people from the flying saucer killed him.”), though the Invaders make it easier on him by showing up posing as the real army and bringing the whole lot of them in.

What follows is the Invaders trying to get their crystal back from Vincent and the students, the students don’t know who to trust, various alien schemes, eventually the kids come around the Vincent’s side and win the day. Of course, when they bring in the real military to see the base, the Invaders have left no evidence of their operation there. A victory for Vincent and his allies (five of them survive this one!), but they can prove nothing. Typical fare, but not a bad episode.

The operation at the base, incidentally, was one we’ve seen before where they bring their people in to regenerate them. One Invader at the start of the episode (named Fletcher) is being brought there because he has chicken pox. That raises some questions for me. Is there something about their human forms that make them semi-susceptible to our diseases? If so, Vincent needs to look into biological warfare. The other question though is about why they’re bothering to heal Fletcher at all. We’ve seen these guys throw their lives away pretty casually (like the ones who killed themselves immediately after testifying against Vincent’s friend) so why is Fletcher worth saving? Was he a key part of some scheme? Alien stuff. Hard to get one’s head around.

The most important thing, though, is that one of the students is played by Dawn Wells! Another Gilligan’s Island actor! Between the previous one showing up in The Trial we’ve had the entirety of “The Rest” on the show.

Gene Hackman as an Invader! This is one of the few things I knew going into the show, that Hackman would appear, but I don’t think I knew he was playing an Invader (and before I had seen the show, I can’t say I would’ve known what that meant anyway). I can say that he is probably not my favourite of the featured Invader enemies David Vincent has faced, but he’s dang good at it.

Okay, so the Invaders’ plan in this one is that they have these spores that they are experimenting with. If they work, they will be able to grow aliens in new bodies by the dozens. This addresses something that I’ve been thinking for a while: it seems like the Invaders are coming to Earth a handful at a time. It can be a struggle for them to get saucer here and when they do there’s only like five of them on there at the best of times. Take that (and the fact that David Vincent has been mowing them down when he can) and I don’t think there are a lot of the Invaders on Earth at any given time. Probably no more than a few thousand across the whole globe at any given time. That’s why these spores are so important, they could really build up their Earth-based armies.

Anyway, the spores are in a box for most of the episode. First the Invaders have . Then it gets stolen by some hot-rodders. Then, to avoid the Invaders who are after them, they stash it in some couple’s car. Then the couple gets rid of it so some kids have it. It’s a regular macguffin chase with the Hackmanvader getting frustrated by how hard it is to get his seeds back. This is the episode you’d have the Coen Brothers direct if you could.

Through all of this, of course, our hero David Vincent is on the case. He partners up with a cop named Ernie who saw the Invaders but he has a history with alcoholism that means he won’t be believed and could lose his job if he reports what he’s seen. Without getting too detailed, David Vincent uses a molotov cocktail to destroy the Hackmanvader and his seeds, so he’s got another victory and another ally. He tells Ernie not to file a report on what he’s seen, though, because he doesn’t want Ernie to lose his job. They can meet up in a year after Ernie has retired, they say, which means that I absolutely believe that in the era after the show ends David Vincent and Ernie do some alien hunts together.

After what I mentioned last time, I would be remiss if I didn’t notice that this episode also features a Black character, another cop at Ernie’s station, with more lines than the guy last episode. If this trend continues, hopefully the show can get to a point when it isn’t noteworthy every time it happens.