The Invaders

The Invaders

Roy Thinnes-- --David Vincent


The Invaders, alien beings from a dying planet. Their destination: the Earth. Their purpose: to make it their world. David Vincent has seen them. For him, it began one lost night on a lonely country road, looking for a shortcut that he never found. It began with a closed, deserted diner, and a man too long without sleep to continue his journey. It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy. Now David Vincent knows that the Invaders are here, that they have taken human form. Somehow he must convince a disbelieving world that the nightmare has already begun.

High tension, mystery, and paranoia flavor this series, which in some ways anticipates the same feel of the more recent The X-Files. The series kicks into high gear in the first episode: as the opening narration alludes to, David Vincent is lost on a country road at night, and pulls over to take a nap next to “Bud’s Diner.” He awakes to see a classic flying saucer land nearby. Naturally, no-one believes him, the roadside hashhouse has become “Kelly’s Diner”, and a honeymooning couple in a camper nearby state that they were there all night, had been awake and getting ready to go fishing at the precise time Vincent says he was there and saw the saucer, and saw neither flying saucer nor Vincent and his car. A small physical clue which Vincent (and the audience) quickly discover, a defect in the fingers is the giveaway of most of these human-disguised aliens. But . . . some of them do not have this flaw. After involuntary hospitalization and an attempt on his life, Vincent drops out to pursue these alien invaders – but neither he, nor we, can be sure who can be trusted.

. . .

There is a bit of ambiguity as to what degree The Invaders was meant as an ikon of Cold War fears. One analysis suggests that producer Quinn Martin simply wanted a show which could emulate the motif of The Fugitive (which, with Dr. Kimball, had just ended its run), with a lone man always on the move for some reason, giving us a new locale and mostly new characters every week. Like The Fugitive, the episodes are presented in a series of “Acts”, with an “Epilog” to conclude.

In retrospect, it is easy to assume that the Cold War colored much of the popular psyche, intentionally or not. On the other hand, even Freud said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; perhaps sometimes alien invaders are just alien invaders.

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