THE INVADERS

The Invaders, a Quinn Martin Production, was an ABC science fiction television program created by Larry Cohen that ran in the United States for a season and a half between 1967 and 1968. Dominic Frontiere, who had provided scores for The Outer Limits, provided scores for The Invaders as well.

Season One has been released as a DVD set in the United Kingdom. The first season was released on DVD in the United States on May 27, 2008.[1] [2]

Narration

The opening narration reads as follows:

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.

Premise

The series was produced by Quinn Martin, who drew on two sources for the inspiration for the show. One was his previous series, the immensely popular The Fugitive, which had ended in 1967. Unlike Richard Kimble of The Fugitive, however, David Vincent of The Invaders is more the pursuer than the pursued.

Another inspiration was the wave of "alien dopplegänger" films which had come ten years before in the 1950s, typified by Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and the British film, Quatermass 2 (1957), known in America as Enemy from Space. While these paranoid tales of extraterrestrials who posed as humans and lived among us while planning a takeover are usually linked with a Red Scare subtext, Martin simply wanted a premise that would keep the hero moving around and that would explain why he couldn't go to the authorities (not only had the aliens infiltrated human institutions already, but most humans would dismiss a claim of alien invasion as a paranoid delusion).

Roy Thinnes starred as architect David Vincent, who accidentally learns of an alien invasion already underway and thereafter travels from place to place, trying to foil the aliens' plots and warn a skeptical populace of the danger. As the series progresses, Vincent is able to convince a small number of people to help him fight the aliens, most significantly millionaire industrialist Edgar Scoville (Kent Smith) who became a semi-regular character as of December, 1967.

The Invaders were never given a name, nor was their dying planet. They were not even shown in their true, alien form; their human appearance was a disguise. Unless they received periodic treatments requiring equipment that consumed a great deal of electrical power, they would revert automatically to their alien forms. One scene in the series showed an alien beginning to revert, filmed fuzzily and with flashing lights.

They had certain characteristics by which they could be detected, such as the absence of a pulse. Nearly all were emotionless and had little fingers which could not bend, although there were many "deluxe models" who could manipulate this finger. There were also a number of mutant aliens, who unlike the majority of aliens had emotions similar to those of humans, and who opposed the alien takeover. Their existence could not be documented by killing one, for their dead bodies would always glow red and disappear, along with their clothes, any items they were carrying at the time and anything they touched when dying.

An Invader ship landing.

The spaceship by which they reach the Earth is a flying saucer of a design derivative of that shown in the contestable photographs of George Adamski, but instead of having three spheres on the underside, the Invaders' craft has five shallower protrusions. It was a principle of the production crew to not show them with set and prop designs and control panels that were utterly alien from the conventional human ones (such as H.R. Giger would later present in Alien). The Invaders' favorite means of killing someone is by applying a disk with five glowing lights to the nape of the neck, which will cause a cerebral hemorrhage.

In 1995 the series was reprised as a three-hour TV miniseries also titled The Invaders. Scott Bakula starred as Nolan Wood, who discovered the alien conspiracy, and Roy Thinnes reprised his role from the series of David Vincent, now an old man handing the burden over to Wood. The miniseries has been released in some countries on home video, edited into a single movie.

Books

There was a total of seven paperbacks and two hardback published based on the TV series:
by Pyramid Books in the US, all in 1967 : Invaders and Enemies from Beyond, both by Keith Laumer; Army of the Undead by Rafe Bernard.

by Corgi (a Transworld imprint) in the UK : Halo Highway by Keith Laumer (1967), Meteor Man, by Keith Laumer under the pen name "Anthony Le Baron" (1967), The Autumn Accelerator by Peter Leslie (1967), Night of the Trilobites by Peter Leslie (1969).

by Whitman (a subsidiary of Western Publishing) in the US in hardback : Dam of Death by Jack Pearl (1967).

The Invaders: Alien Missile Threat, by Paul S. Newman, A Big Little Book, Whitman Publishing Company, 248 pages, hardcover, 1967.

Note that Army of the Undead by Pyramid and Halo Highway by Corgi are the same story.

Trivia

The pilot episode of the series, "Beachhead", was remade years later in 1977 for another Quinn Martin series, Tales of the Unexpected, where it was retitled "The Nomads".

Frank Black's "Bad, Wicked World", on Teenager of the Year, is about The Invaders

Gold Key Comics published four issues of an Invaders comic book based upon the TV series in 1967-68, years before Marvel Comics published their own, unrelated Invaders superhero series.
A pre-Internet urban legend (of the missing show kind) has circulated about a hypothetic final episode of the original series. According to it, David Vincent finally manages to convince the authorities and the mainstream of the Invaders' plans, and a massive invasion attempt is successfully thwarted. However, the final scene shows Vincent speaking through a transmitter to a different species of space invaders, to tell them that the coast was now clear -i.e. Vincent's fight had taken place in his position as a mercenary of the second alien race.

Starlog ran an episode guide, in an issue in the 1980s.

Episodes

Season one (1967)
1-Beachhead
2-The Experiment
3-The Mutation
4-The Leeches
5-Genesis
6-Vikor
7-Nightmare
8-Doomsday Minus One
9-Quantity: Unknown
10-The Innocent
11-The Ivy Curtain
12-The Betrayed
13-Storm
14-Panic
15Moonshot
16-Wall of Crystal
17-The Condemned

Season two (1967-1968)
1-Condition: Red
2-The Saucer
3-The Watchers
4-Valley of the Shadow
5-The Enemy
6-The Trial
7-The Spores
8-Dark Outpost
9-Summit Meeting - Part 1
10-Summit Meeting - Part 2
11-The Prophet
12-Labyrinth
13-The Captive
14-The Believers
15-The Ransom
16-Task Force
17-The Possessed
18Counterattack
19-The Pit
20-The Organization
21-The Peacemaker
22-The Vise
23-The Miracle
24-The Life Seekers
25-The Pursued
26-Inquisition

External links

The Invaders at the Internet Movie Database -- the original series
The Invaders at the Internet Movie Database -- 1995 miniseries/movie
The Unofficial Web Site and Episode Guide -- fan site