One thing about David Vincent is that he is an extremely direct person. I’ve faulted him multiple times for being so open about his fighting of this alien invasion. Well, in this episode he actually uses an alias to disguise his identity! Daniel Baxter he says he is! He gets a job as the driver of the wife of the guy is suspects and says a fake name. He’s learned how to be subtle.

And then he gets to the place he wants to investigate and immediately just runs into rooms he’s not supposed to be in and gets caught. But he’s learning.

Anyway, Vincent read reports in the newspaper of a guy who died claiming he’d seen alien things in the headquarters of Vikor Industries. Vickor is run by George Vikor, a former war hero who has sold out his species and is working alongside the aliens. Posing as her driver, Vincent befriends Vikor’s neglected wife Sherri and brings her up to speed about the invasion and how her husband is a traitor to humanity. They try to reason with George, and it seems like it could work. George lost a leg in Korea, and got a plate in his head, and was lauded as a hero. But still, when he got back home things weren’t enough for him. He may be the owner of a successful company, but it isn’t enough. The Invaders can let him be a ruler of what remains of humanity in the world they conquer. That power is what he needs.

Anyway, thanks to some truly impressive quick-draw-shooting Vincent manages to escape. He leaves a phone message with Vikor Industries thanking Vikor for helping him escape, which the aliens believe and they kill Vikor. Unlike last episode, this time Vincent does report to the FBI, though the aliens have cleaned up Vikor Industries, so there remains no proof that any of it happened. Sherri survives, though. Another in a growing list of potential allies for Vincent, or potential victims for the Invaders.

I need to note that the head villain in this one is pretty good. He’s even got a cool name: Mr. Nexus. He survives at the end and would be great as a recurring opponent for Vincent, but having spoiled myself that we don’t get returning characters for a long time yet, I guess it wasn’t to be.

For the record, they do have the finger thing again in this one. Good.

Okay, this time the aliens are growing something in a big vat! Those dastardly dastards!

The episode opens with a cop pulling over a car that turns out to have Invaders in there. And they’ve got something so shocking that when the cop see it, he basically goes catatonic. What did he see? Well that’s a secret.

Our hero David Vincent hears about this cop going comatose and figures “that sounds like alien work” and comes to town to investigate. He arrives, once again using his full name and not at all pretending to not be an anti-Invader crusader. He winds up teamed up with the cop’s friend, other cop. The first cop dies, so now the second cop gets to be called “the cop” for the rest of this.

Anyway, Vincent gets absolutely almost killed by an alien who know who he is, but the cop saves him and witnesses the disintegration that occurs when the alien dies, and thus learns about the aliens. So, once again, Vincent has an ally in the form of an authority figure. They go on an investigation and learn that the Invaders are taking over a sea lab. I don’t need to go through full details, but fisticuffs at the sea lab result in a fire that burns the place down and foils the aliens’ plans. The cop and another ally who works in the lab both survive and Vincent has two more allies in the world. He really needs to make a team of these people. But in this one, the cop offers to accompany Vincent to the FBI and Vincent basically says “Nah.” I would guess the idea is that he’s worried they have infiltrated the government, but it sure isn’t consistent with how his life has actually been going.

What were the aliens’ plans in the sea lab? Well, they’re doing an experiment that simulates primordial conditions in a vat so they can grow new life, but also they seem to be growing their leader? I guess. Considering I’ve started taking notes while I watch, I’d like to have a better idea, but I don’t. Blame the episode, not me. Or blame me. Either way. What’s important is we learn the aliens also have some sort of hypnotism technology and, even more important, we see some more of the pinky fingers being used to spot aliens. I thought that might have been forgotten, but it hasn’t!

Hey, Internet! This website has been active for TWENNY YEARS TODAY!

I don’t remember the exact details of what I was putting on here two decades ago, but I made this post in 2006 to announce that the Book of PDR was beginning. That’s this very website! It’s twenty years old.

It’s some kind of accomplishment, surely. How many still-active websites are older than two decades old? I don’t know! Someone probably has a general idea, but I don’t. But probably not a whole lot of them. I have to assume The Book of PDR is now a venerated old pillar of the Internet community.

Haiku!

Book of PDR.
A most important website.
Twenty freakin’ years.

Here’s to another twenty years and another twenty visitors to the site.

This one time, one of Spider-Man’s villains (it was a Mysterio, for posterity) wanted to know Spider-Man’s secret identity so badly that he kidnapped a bunch of people who know Spider-Man and stuck them all in a machine that combined their memories and personalities and stuff to create an illusory virtual world. But one of those people, Flash Thompson, apparently had a personality so strong it overwhelmed the illusion and created a fantasy world in which he and Spider-Man were a heroic team of heroes. Et cetera, et cetera, amen, this ends with Flash imagining his wedding day and it getting attacked by a bunch of supervillains.

One of those supervillains is the Rocket Racer.

And look, he’s wearing a neat silver version of his suit and board. I prefer the yellow and red, but I admit it’s neat to see him in a different way for a change. The question that arises is, why is Rocket Racer a silver-clad criminal in this fantasy? It’s a world made up of the combined minds of a bunch of people Spider-Man knows, so who there provided this imaginary version of Bob? The story is a bit vague about who is in the machine. We know for sure it includes Flash Thompson, Peter Parker and MJ and Aunt May, Jonah Jameson and his wife Marla, Robbie Robertson, Jill Stacy, and at least one other guy I don’t see identified. But there’s also tubes in the machine that could imply several more people. Basically, I don’t think I can actually narrow it down based on that information. It’s all supposition.

But, in the real world, at this time Bob is a good guy, harmlessly trying to get through university. Peter, at the very least, would know that. My instinct is to just blame it on Jameson. That guy’s always judging people, but usually he’s more concerned with masked vigilantes than the likes of a publicly-known figure like Bob. And the Daily Bugle ran a feature about Bob’s life story once, so surely he’s aware that Bob is actually a good guy (That goes for Robbie too). That still leaves us with too many suspects.

I could, perhaps, argue that one of the unseen people in the machine we don’t get to see if Bob himself. He’s known to be a Spider-Man ally and could on a villain’s list of people to be kidnapped, right? If he were in that machine, imagining some other world, would he cast himself in the role of a criminal out of some kind self-hatred? Possible, but I’d need even one single more bit of confirmation before I committed to that reading.

We’ll never know who imagined Bob to be a baddie during the period in his life when he was most on the side of “the law”, but I guess we can probably just assume it’s Aunt May’s fault. Maybe she just confuses him with the Silver Surfer.

Also, I need to address it: by the rules (such as they are) of Marvel’s multiverse, they say that any reality that can be imagined is real out there somewhere in infinity. I’ve always found that silly, but that’s how they roll, and at some point they designated this world as Earth-99727, so this counts as a Into The Rocket-Verse post. I have to wonder what the life of this version of Bob is like as if he exists as a real person. Well, I’m gonna say that both the fact he’s wearing silver and that he’s an actual supervillain (not for hire or nothin’, he’s just attacking the good guy’s wedding here) indicate that his lust for wealth has overcome his good sense. And Spider-Man and Flash have probably foiled his schemes so often that now he’s degenerated into a standard “out for revenge” type of villain. A truly tragic specimen of Alternate Bob Farrell.

Of course even if, on that world, we can accept that Spider-Man is not Peter Parker, but some person whose identity is as-yet unrevealed, we also have to assume that when Rocket Racer and a bunch of his criminal allies attacked Flash Thompson’s wedding, the whole affair did NOT end with them realizing their reality was fake, but continued on in some other way and that this silver Rocket Racer probably got beat up or something.