In this one David Vincent investigates the Invaders again (with a lead from a little girl’s story of seeing a melting truck that made the news) and he winds up in a plant they are using as a communications hub and kills an Invader in front of a crowd of people at the beach. Since he did all of this under his own name, as always, the Invaders know this is their constant enemy David Vincent and they have a chance to frame him. The body of the Invader disappears, as always, but they provide a corpse that is unidentifiable from the sea and claim this was the man Vincent killed. And what’s more, they claim is was Mr. Tate, another of their enemies, one who they think they killed in that melting truck incident. So Vincent is at risk of going to prison for a crime the Invaders committed. It may have worked, if Tate had actually been killed.

But Tate survived the attack on him and he stole a valuable file from the aliens that eleven of the highest-level Invaders, so they want that back. Anyway, Tate and Vincent team up. There’s a whole thing where the Invaders capture Tate’s estranged daughter as bait. There’s a bit where Vincent bribes a kid who works at a pharmacy for info, which the kid does for the money, but then the kid calls the cops on the suspicious man anyway. In the end the good guys win, though Tate is vaporized by one of the alien’s space guns, and we’re told that Vincent getting the file out and shutting down the communications hub is actually a major setback for the aliens. Most of the time Vincent is just barely getting by, surviving and doing what little he can, but we’re told this was a world-wide operation that he shut down. Good for him.

Overall it was a standard episode of the show, but no complaints.

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.