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.

This time, instead of David Vincent learning about an alien plot in the newspaper, he sees a guy he recognizes as an alien from one of his other adventures (I assume an off-screen adventure, but I didn’t look into if the actor had been on the show before or not). He follows the guy to a place called the Midlands Academy and he learns it is an alien training headquarters! They are teaching newly-arrived Invaders how to fake human emotions. They are using Venture Bros-style learning beds to fill their brains with all sorts of information they’ll need to know about Earth and humanity. And they are training all the Invaders posing as young people (especially the ones who look like teen girls drawn by John Romita) to promote all sort of subversive thoughts like drugs and disrespecting the police (gasp!).

Naturally Vincent is captured, but naturally Vincent escapes. He gets a cool moment where he crawls around on the outside of a moving van. He’s really growing into a top-quality alien-fighting action hero.

But Vincent isn’t the only human caught up in this Midlands Academy business. The aliens are once again trying to recruit a human, and it is once again a war veteran with marriage troubles. Barney Cahill is a pilot with a younger wife who loves money that he has trouble providing. When he stumbles upon the aliens, they decide not to kill him, but instead pay him for his services as a pilot. He will pick up newly-arrived Invaders and fly them to Midlands for training.

Vincent’s attempt to bring cops to the school is a failure (they’ve covered their tracks and appear as a normal school) but he learns about Cahill and is able to track him down and talk to him. Eventually, Vincent is able to convince Cahill to work with him, they are gonna betray the aliens, but Cahill’s wife wants money and she betrays them. But Cahill doesn’t let that stop him. He crashes his plane into the Midlands Academy, dealing what must be quite a blow to the Invaders.

Some things of note: When reporting the school to the authorities, Vincent refers to the Invaders as “foreign agents” which helps them take him seriously. What tips off Cahill about the aliens is seeing one of them wounded, with a big crack in his arm that doesn’t bleed. It makes the human disguises they use seem like plastic shells or something, which is kinda neat.

I’m happy to say that this one is another loss for David Vincent. I don’t want to sound like I’m rooting against our guy, but I do think this kind of show works better if the hero can lose. It needs to seem like it’s a struggle for the hero to get by.

The story is like this: Vincent is investigating a guy called Nat Greely, who saw the aliens. The government is going to hold a committee of some kind about the aliens and a military guy named Mitchell Ross wants Vincent to testify that they exist. And another boss alien is working against them all. Like Mr. Nexus, this one has a name: Magnus. These aliens love having a cool villain name.

Vincent is willing to go along with Ross to testify, but he figures that if he finishes his investigation into Greely, they’ll have another guy who can testify with them. Unfortunately, it all goes bad when Magnus captures Greely’s wife and son and convinces Greely to betray Vincent. Vincent is captured and shown the inside of a flying saucer, then is shown a fake vision of how great the world would be if he worked with the aliens. They apologize to Vincent for the mistakes they’ve made so far, reminding him of the history of colonialism on Earth to show how mistakes can be made when cultures meet. They appeal to his old career as an architect, showing him a city he always wanted to design and he would be able to with then. They make him feel less lonely, seeming to reunite him with an old friend and an old girlfriend. I have to wonder if the other people who have been brainwashed by the Invaders have had similar visions. Anyway, Vincent sees through it all and escapes the delusion, but not the grasp of Magnus’s forces.

Then we get back to the plot of the episode, when we find out that Magnus is going to have Greely’s wife and child murdered unless they agree to call Ross and tell him they aren’t going to testify, that there are no aliens. Vincent doesn’t want the innocent people to die, so he does as he was told. That saves the wife and son, but the aliens then proceed to force Vincent and Greely to get drunk and stick them behind the wheel of a car and send it careening downhill. It’s lucky for our hero that he is able to wake up and drunk-drive well enough that their accident is non-fatal. It’s even luckier that the aliens decided to try to dispose of them with this make-them-look-drunk manoeuvre instead of just using their usual heart-attack inducing technology. But anyway, Magnus had David Vincent, their biggest foe, at his complete mercy and this was how he decided to handle it. Sure, Magnus. Why not? But hey, the plan did indeed ruin Ross’s testimony with that political committee thing. So, though Vincent survived, the aliens won this one.

There’s good stuff in the episode, but I really think it ought to have been two episodes. The whole brainwashing thing could have been one plot, and the stuff with Greely and the government committee could each have been given more room.

In this one, our main guy David Vincent learns how he can’t trust anyone during this alien invasion. I mean, he already knew that, but this one really drives it in.

He comes along for his latest investigation. He read reports of a plane that crashed and when it was investigated, there was nobody on board. He figures, the aliens disintegrate when they die, so they were probably flying. The military or science types who investigated the crash found a cylinder made of alien technology in there and bring it back to their base, and ol’ David Vincent assumes they’re gonna want to get it back so he shows up to stop them, once again not even hiding his name. He’s able to convince the organization to help him set up a trap for the Invaders, but they don’t show up and Vincent looks a bit of a fool.

That’s not the worst of it, though, because after that he gets captured by one of that company’s security guards, a guy named Swain. Swain tells his story, about how his daughter thought she saw a spaceship and his wife went with the kid to see and Swain saw them both get killed. And now he wants to kill Vincent, saying he thinks that he’s an alien. Vincent is able convince Swain that he’s human and they agree to work together. Vincent has had plenty of allies on the show so far, but this is the first time he’s had a guy who is going about it like he is, proactively hunting the Invaders for as long as Vincent has, if not longer. These guys, working together, could be the beginning of a true resistance to the Invaders.

Of course, instead, it turns out that Swain is one of them. It was all a plot to trick Vincent into helping them steal the cylinder, which has alien war plans on it, from the company for them. Vincent figures it out, but way too late. There’s a big foot chase and Swain dies, but he’s touching the cylinder when he does, which apparently means that it disintegrates with him. The aliens don’t get their plans, but neither does Vincent or the science people who wanted to study it.

Vincent already knew that looking for the bent pinky fingers wasn’t a reliable way to spot the aliens (and Swain even checks Vincent for it when he’s pretending he thinks Vincent is an alien), but in this one he looks in Swain’s eyes while he tells the story of his doomed family and he sees the tears. With the exception of the woman from The Mutation, Vincent knows that the aliens don’t have emotions as we understand them, so he was certain Swain was human. And it failed him. We don’t know if Swain had a mutation similar to that woman, or if he was just good at pretending for the sake of deception, but Vincent got a real kick in the teeth there. This is the kind of thing I want in a show like this, an atmosphere of paranoia. Anyone can be your enemy during this invasion. I bet he doesn’t just show up at his next investigation using his real name. I bet…

But perhaps most importantly, there’s a bit where Vincent is going to a bar to meet with Swain and he catches the eye of a woman, who hungrily stares at him until a man, presumably her boyfriend or something, pulls her away. It plays out entirely in the background never getting any attention drawn to it. Funny that way.

Another human in a position of power has sold out the human race to work with the Invaders. And like the last time, it’s someone who has been through war and been injured and lost loved ones. But this guy, General Beaumont, is more genuinely torn up about allying with the Invaders than Vikor was. You see, Beaumont hates war, and thinks that with the help of the Invaders, he can put an end to the nuclear bomb.

The setup is one we can officially say we’ve gotten used to: someone is suspicious of stories of alien activity and they reach out to famous anti-alien crusader David Vincent, so he shows up and uses his real name while opposing the alien conspiracy. It’s interesting that, in spite of having no tangible proof of the aliens and having apparently abandoned his job as an architect, Vincent still manages to live a life just wandering from case to case. Such was life in the 60s, I guess.

Anyway, this time the guy who calls for help (and it is a man, I don’t think there was a single woman in this episode. I guess they used them all up last episode) is a Major on a military base where they are testing a nuclear weapon. Vincent investigates with his usual methods, so obviously he gets captured and is handed over to some aliens posing as Department of Justice guys. He has to escape and dodge a car while handcuff so that if falls off a cliff. It’s all good stuff. He’s very good at that part of the job, which is probably why he has never bothered to learn how to NOT get into that kind of predicament.

Anyway, eventually Vincent discovers that General Beaumont has sold out to the aliens because Beaumont, as I said, wants to stop the nuclear bomb. The aliens are going to mix some anti-matter into the next nuclear bomb test so that the explosion will be so bad that it will cause earthquakes countrywide. The plan is that everyone will think that the explosion was a normal nuclear blast and immediately ban nuclear weapons, saving the world. The millions who will die because of the blast will be worth it for the end to nukes, Beaumont reckons. I mean, the Invaders are just trying to do the damage, but Beaumont’s goal is noble. Anyway, in the end Beaumont comes to join Vincent against the Invaders and gives his life to prevent the disaster. Really shows what a loser that Vikor guy was. The Major survives and tries to help Vincent convince the authorities about the Invaders, but it doesn’t work.

The Invaders posing as Department of Justice guys who intend to kill Vincent give a real Men In Black vibe, though it’s implied that they are not actually working within the real government. Still, it seems to me like there must be some infiltration of the Invaders in the government if they can keep finding ways to deny their existence even though Vincent keeps gaining more and more allies and is gaining such a reputation as an authority on the topic.

Also worth noting: when Vincent first meets with the Major they are at the scene of a crater caused by a crashed spaceship. To my untrained eye, it absolutely looks like a naturally-formed canyon or something, but it is a very impressive location to see on a television show. It’d be impressive now, let alone in the ’60s.