This is why David Vincent needs to be stealthier. It’s the third episode and the Invaders have already set a trap for him. They are clearly aware he’s out there and he still just uses his real name.
The trap is that he comes to some town where the military have been investigating UFOs and meets some people who claim to be on his side. They aren’t on his side. One of them is named Vikki, who is a sexy lady they were clearly trying to seduce him with. The thing is, she’s the one who gets seduced! Vikki is a “mutated” form of the aliens, capable of feeling emotions, which apparently the rest of them can not. And she has fallen in love with Vincent and his inescapable blue eyes. This, more than anything, felt to me like whenever a female villain on the Adam West Batman show (a contemporary of this show) would fall in love with Batman so easily and question her life of crime. Anyway, as one might expect, Vikki is torn between her people and her love, and Vincent isn’t sure if he can trust her, but does learn some new things about his foes. Naturally, like a Batman villainess who has to fall into a nuclear reactor or whatever to end the episode, Vikki tragically does not survive this one.
Among the things we learn about the aliens in this episode is that when they die on Earth, they disintegrate into a flash of red light, which leaves no remains, so there’s no evidence to show anyone. How convenient for the aliens. I mean, maybe not “convenient” because it means one of them dies, but for their conspiracy it sure is helpful. You know what I mean. What we don’t know is if this is the result of, like, the chemical makeup of Earth’s atmosphere reacting to their bodies or something, or maybe it is the result of being killed while they are in a human form. The former would imply their natural forms are so alien to our world that it really makes you wonder why they’d even bother trying to take over the planet.
A couple Star Trek Thought back I talked about Captain Solok, who was in charge of the T’Kumbra,a ship with a predominantly-Vulcan crew. Although Solok is a complete tool, I am completely a fan of there being Starfleet vessels where humans are in the minority, it they’re there at all.
The T’Kumbra is not the first such vessel. I know that the USS Intrepid on the original series was a Vulcan majority ship that was destroyed. And I don’t remember the name of it right off, but I believe that Geordi LaForge’s mother captain a vessel that had a crew largely composed of Vulcans. That ship was also destroyed. The T’Kumbra is lucky the Dominion War ended before someone decided to say it was a casualty. Anyway, as far as I’m aware, that’s the full extent of what we’ve canonically been shown for Starfleet ships where Humans aren’t the bulk of the population.
Granted, pretty much ALL Starfleet vessels are made up of a mix of species working together, which is as it should be in the Federation, but if 99% of Starfleet is human, it feels like tokenism when we see an alien. Obviously they want a mostly-human cast for the ships that the shows are set on, but you’d think we’d at least get glimpses of ships with crews made up predominantly of the other Federation founding races now and again. Give me a ship with Tellarite or Andorian crews at the very least.
But it isn’t just my desire to see a more diverse Starfleet that makes this make sense. Alien species should also be adapted to different climates or atmospheres or gravitational constants. Surely you’d want a ship for Starfleet officers who are best suited to live in arctic conditions, and why not have one for aquatic species? These would be easy enough to convey by just having our boring human captains talk to them over a viewscreen and it would make the universe feel that much more rich.
As I write this, I’ve watched four episodes of the Invaders and I have not taken notes while doing so, because I only decided to do posts about the show after watching them. But one thing that I’ve noticed in all three episodes that came after the first, including this one, is that protagonist David Vincent is not wandering stealthily from town to town like a lonely fugitive on the run, but instead he operates openly under his own name and meets other people also aware of the Invaders.
Anyway, in this one there’s a Professor who knows about the Invaders and I think he made a public claim of having proof he was going to reveal, which seems like a mistake given the conspiracy. Vincent shows up to do a team-up with this Professor, but things go badly. The Professor is killed by the aliens, leaving only his son (played by young Roddy McDowall) with any idea where the proof may be. The problem is, the aliens have a brainwashing machine in this one! They have the Professor’s son under their control and thus, after Vincent locates the evidence, the aliens get (and I think destroy it), so Vincent loses. He does, however, help the Professor’s son fight against the brainwashing, but he also dies. Basically, Vincent has lost two potential allies here, and gained nothing. Oh well, the brainwashing machine is broken.
The thing about watching the show for the first time and now knowing much about it was that I genuinely had no idea who the protagonist was going to be. The story begins with David Vincent stumbling across a landing alien spaceship and reporting it to the authorities, At this point I found it equally likely that Vincent could be the star (as he is by the fact I remember his name) or it could be a thing where he gets killed off and that makes the cop he was talking to realize that something is up and then HE becomes the star. Even just that little bit of uncertainty increased the tension of the episode
But it turns out that David Vincent (played by Roy Thinnes) with his impressive blue eyes is indeed the show’s star. Vincent has stumbled onto an ongoing alien invasion in which the Invaders are taking human form and infiltrating society. Anyway, the pilot episode lays all the tracks to have him lose any connections to his old home and begin wandering the country, nervous about who he trust. A perfect setup.
There’s a point in this episode where I got the impression that a human character identified someone as his aunt and that aunt turned out to be an alien. Did that mean the alien had replaced his actual aunt? It was unclear to me. Overall, it seems like the Invaders don’t replace existing humans on Earth, but just take a new human form and try to blend in. One thing that comes up in this episode is that their human forms have trouble simulating the pinky fingers of a human hands, and you can recognize an alien if their pinkies are stuck out, like polite little weirdos. This is an interesting start, through the episode takes that away fairly quickly and we’re told that not all of them have that problem. It does make me wonder about the natural form of the Invaders, though. Maybe they have hands with one less finger? Perhaps time shall tell.
