Watching The Invaders

Along with watching movies for The Enemy Within, I’m also tackling TV shows, so the past week and a half I’ve watched about half the first season of the sixties television series, The Invaders.

This was TV’s first shot at a Bodysnatchers-style alien infiltration series, wherein architect David Vincent (Roy Thinnes) discovers aliens are among us, posing as humans, plotting to take over the world by various means (getting nuclear weapons banned, buying up towns they can populate with their own people, turning insects into killers). Throwing away his job and his old life, he criss-crosses the country, hunting for any evidence he can use to alert the world to the threat.

Which is what now leaps out at me when I watch them: In contrast to most ET invasions, the emphasis isn’t on stopping them, it’s on proving they exist. Nor is there any hint of an X-Files style cover-up—the government here appears to be sincere in wanting the truth, just skeptical (in one episode, military officer William Windom reports events, but tells Vincent they’ll be buried in investigative bureaucracy forever).

Does that reflect that the sixties were a more skeptical time about UFOs? Or that the premise was simply harder for audiences to swallow back then (much less SF on TV) and that was reflected in the story? Or just a decision by the creators to keep David isolated (though he did get some supporters mid-second season)?

The isolation is the other thing I notice: He’s very much in the style of the drifter/loner hero so prevalent in the sixties and seventies, as seen in Then Came Bronson, Route 66, Coronet Blue, The Immortal and of course, The Fugitive (which was the big previous hit for Quinn-Martin, the company that gave us The Invaders).

Another significant difference: In contrast to The War of the Worlds, Threshold and other later series, there’s no actual body-snatching here: The aliens take human form but they don’t replace real people, which makes it a lot less creepy and paranoid. Of course, the stiff direction and plots don’t help: A number of these could have been stock enemy-spy plots on I Spy, say (even though the creators say they didn’t mean this as a Cold War metaphor or anything).

Would I have noticed any of this if I watched it straight, without the critical filter of The Enemy Within? Maybe not.

Does it matter? In the grand scheme of things, no. In the spirit of writing a good book, definitely!