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.

Captain Quaid is a beekeeper who appeared in a couple episodes of a show based on the Disney movie Tangled.

In a town called Vardaros, Quaid was once the sheriff. He was good at the job and beloved by the people of the town until some especially tough baddies show up and he can’t defeat them alone. But the people of the town don’t step up to help Quaid, so he fails to prevent Vardaros from becoming a crime-ridden cesspool and he retires, ashamed and hurt that nobody was willing to help him. But then, in the present day where the show happens, the protagonists bring him back into the job to help clean up the town again. He is reluctant at first, bitter about how the townspeople left things, but he does come back out of a sense of duty, as well as to protect the fields where his bees live.

It isn’t specified that he didn’t keep bees before retiring, but he really becomes a beekeeper only after leaving his job as the protector of Vardaros. He loves the bees because they come together and work for a common cause. He seems like a pretty big success as far as beekeeping is concerned, with many hives making multiple varieties of honey and he knows how to use bee pheromones to achieve various effects. And, I doubt it has to do with his apiarist skills as much as existing in a cartoon world, but his bees are also really smart and can do the thing where they cloud together to make shapes that are pictures communicating ideas.

So, he’s good at bees, is he good at the other parts of being a cool beekeeper? Well, in his prime he was so good with his sword that they called him Quaid the Blade. He was cunning and strong and could use a lariat. In the present he’s a bit rusty, but his talent has not abandoned him and it comes back as he goes, but now he has the additional skills offered to a beekeeper. He can use honey to make things sticky, or he can sic his bees on a foe. He’s older, but still powerful, and now he has allies both human and insect to help him do his job. He even manages to bring down a baddie who is wearing a suit of armour that is essentially the medieval equivalent of a mech.

I also appreciate that his job is not just fighting criminals, but he does things like saving cats and discouraging polluters and even just build town spirit. He’s genuinely trying to protect “the hive” that is the city. And from what we see in the episodes we get, it is working.

Four Honeycomb out of Five. This feels like a low four, once again proving it would have been smart for me to have done a scale of six, but the thing that just barely gets him into the 4 bracket is that when he comes out of retirement he gets a sheriff’s badge with a bee on it. That’s cool.