“The Captive” takes place in a Russian embassy and invokes the spectre of the Cold War. “We did that in about a week,” said Eckstein. Guest Stars: Laurence Naismith, Alfred Ryder, Karen Black, Anthony Eisley, Lawrence Montaigne, John Ragin, John Graham, Ron Husmann, Christopher Held, Joe Quinn. “He demanded quality. “The Pursued,” another intelligent outing, cast Suzanne Pleshette (in a variation on her “Mutation” role) as the product of an alien experiment in duplicating human emotions gone awry. “I was driving a car at the time and had to roll the windows down. Smith, who had guest starred as a NASA official in the first season’s “Moonshot,” had been a minor leading man during the 1940s, best known for starring in the Val Lewton horror classics Cat People (1942) and The Curse of the Cat People (1944) and for playing Peter Keating, Ayn Rand’s apotheosis of mediocrity, in the film version of The Fountainhead (1949). Andrew J. McIntyre took over as the series’ regular photographer, creating a look that effectively blended the garish primary-color palette style popularized by Batman with shadowy, washed-out lighting more suited to The Invaders’ dark tone. It was great working with Roy. Rintels’ favorite of his own Invaders scripts is “The Peacemaker,” a Vietnam allegory that shows the aliens in a much more sympathetic light than usual. Smith, Don Kennedy, Rick Murray. Thinnes says he was shocked in 1968 when the series was canceled.             It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy. The Invaders may not have been cutting-edge science fiction, but it was a beautifully produced and vastly entertaining bit of escapism, a mood piece that still holds up thirty years later. “He had written an end credits [theme] that Quinn didn’t like and I didn’t like, and he wanted it to stay, and Quinn said no, so that was it,” said John Elizalde. (17) “The Condemned” (5/9/67) Directed by Jesse Hibbs. [But] they couldn’t get me going on the next one fast enough.”, Shirley Knight and Roy Thinnes in “The Watchers”. Finally, the Invaders Prime return to England, where they reunite with Spitfire and Union Jack, and give their rallying cry for the last time in this volume of Invaders. Ultimately Vincent finds evidence of extraterrestrial activity in a small town near the landing site, but the discovery gets his best friend and business partner Alan Landers (James Daly) killed. They had huge expectations for it, so when it just did okay, there was a sense of disappointment.”, The last episode, “Inquisition,” cast Mark Richman as a McCarthy-like federal prosecutor who starts a witch-hunt to implicate the Believers in the assassination of a U.S. Directed by William Hale. The segment is filled with alien stormtroopers in drab green coveralls, who retain their human form but blow their cover with silly-looking rayguns. Each one was narrated by an almost impossibly deep baritone (most famously, Cannon star William Conrad on The Fugitive) who proclaimed over the opening credits that the series was “a QM Production.”  Every episode was divided uniformly into a prologue, four acts, and an epilogue, and lest the viewer remain unaware of this neat schematization, a superimposed title announced the beginning of each act. 1 decade ago. Sturgeon did receive a partial story credit on the creepy “The Betrayed,” and in the second season sci-fi novelist (and Star Trek writer) Jerry Sohl contributed a pair of scripts. Moving to Desilu – where his wife, Madelyn Pugh, was one of Lucille Ball’s head writers – Martin made a name for himself by producing The Untouchables and turning it into a huge hit. Indeed, Smith failed to make much of an impression in The Invaders, but it was as much the writers’ fault as his own. Since Dominic Frontiere’s stormy departure, only three scores had been commissioned for the series, one each by Richard Markowitz, Sidney Cutner, and Irving Gertz (“Quantity Unknown,” “Condition: Red,” and “The Enemy,” respectively). Senator. And I think we all relate to that, because his job and his goal are so difficult to achieve. David Vincent may have been television’s first really nasty, hard-to-like antihero. Directed by Sutton Roley. Fans of the show frequently point to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the eery 1956 B-picture in which Kevin McCarthy discovers that his friends and neighbors are gradually being replaced by identical “pod people” from another planet, as the most obvious precedent for The Invaders. Vincent travels to a small and unaccountably hostile town, where a mentally unstable schoolteacher’s account of a carnivorous locust attack convinces him that the aliens are at work. A person riding on the bus this morning could be one of them. But for the producers, the addition of Scoville and company represented not a carefully thought-out way of adding more tension and credibility to The Invaders, but a desperate move to save the flagging series from cancellation. Thinnes became a member of Quinn Martin’s unofficial stock company, appearing on The Untouchables, Twelve O’Clock High, The F.B.I., and The Fugitive. “He tended to play the role as if the world were against him,” said Armer of Roy Thinnes. Directed by Don Medford. At one point, for example, Vincent wonders if Gilman is taking advantage of his invader rhetoric to fabricate a fraudulent defense for murder. He inserted an element of subtle political content into The Invaders, just as he had with his previous series,  the Chuck Connors western Branded, about a Civil War soldier falsely labeled a coward. This trend began with the first season finale, “The Condemned,” in which eleven high-ranking aliens commit suicide after Vincent uncovers their secret identities, and continued into the second year. “Turns out I owned the film rights,” said Larry Cohen. Martin’s greatest strength as a producer was his devotion to production values. As suspected, the Intruders TV show has been cancelled after one season of eight episodes. Initially, when we meet me, I’m getting out of prison because they successfully controlled me to kill someone for them. Guest Stars: Shirley Knight, Kevin McCarthy, Leonard Stone, Walter Brooke, Robert Yuro, Harry Hickox, John Zaremba, Paul Sorenson, James Seay, Marlowe Jensen. “Task Force” retells the familiar story of a weak-willed human (Linden Chiles, who had played Vincent’s brother in “Wall of Silence”) who sells out to the aliens. A pair of aliens who want to return to their home planet and make a political argument against the invasion of Earth ask Vincent to help them elude an intensive police manhunt. The Invaders featured perhaps the most imaginative variation on this visual tic. Directed by William Hale. “It hasn’t stopped running,” Thinnes says. The Invaders tried to adapt this structure to episodes like “The Leeches,” in which the aliens’ efforts to kidnap a leading scientist shared screen time with a cliched love triangle between the scientist, his wife, and his best friend; “The Betrayed,” which opens with Vincent inexplicably in love with a pretty but rather dull blonde; or “The Condemned,” which focuses more on a father-daughter reconciliation than on the father’s efforts to fight the aliens who have taken over his factory. Frontiere began as an arranger for Twentieth Century-Fox and began writing music for television after he became a partner in Leslie Stevens’ independent production company Daystar. Even though Peyton Place was at the height of its popularity, having expanded from two broadcasts a week to three, and the Batman craze had begun, Scherick and company opted not to produce the show as a serial. Vincent gets involved with the marital problems of a top electronics expert who believes that he, like other major scientists before him, will be kidnapped and tortured by the aliens. After military service as an M.P., Thinnes moved to Los Angeles and married a then better-known actress, Lynn Loring, who had spent ten years as a juvenile lead on the daytime serial Search For Tomorrow (and who would guest-star in the Invaders segment “Panic”). We all have certain areas that we feel secure in, that we feel we know how to do well, and I think Quinn didn’t feel that about The Invaders.”  In the second half, he becomes involved in a plot to stop the aliens from killing an environmentally conscious politician at the dedication ceremony of the Los Angeles subway system. “The extended pinky used to be a symbol of effeminacy,” Cohen recalled. The episode’s storyline takes “Beachhead”s is-she-or-isn’t-she dilemma a step further. (9) “Quantity: Unknown” (3/7/67) “We had lunch a couple of times, discussing what a leading man has to have in a series – all of these things that are going to make the audience care about you and root for you and like you,” said Alan Armer. (13) “Storm” (4/4/67) That project never happened. (38) “The Peacemaker” (2/6/68) Directed by William Hale. All along, Larry Cohen had monitored what he felt was the decline of his original concept. “I did just a little touch of jazz in it, and they were not at all used to that,” said the Paris-trained Tatro, a former member of Stan Kenton’s band, of broadening QM’s musical horizons. Infiltrating a lab where an intercepted cylinder is being studied, Vincent makes the acquaintance of a helpful female scientist and a security guard who claims that the aliens killed his family. The radio stations all said there was no military craft [flying]. Invaders conflict as plausibly as possible. You could never put much humor in. Written by John Kneubuhl. It was just fantastic! But the biggest change came in the thirty-first episode, “The Believers,” in which David Vincent finally gave up his solo fight and joined with a consortium of wealthy and influential Americans who had all encountered the aliens first-hand. “They were looking for a sound for the spores, and Elizalde had the idea in post-production – he got recordings of seagulls and played them backwards,” recalled Duane Tatro. The alien trick of making Vincent look like a buffoon in front of the authorities, as well as the ever-popular stiffened little finger, make their first appearance here. Written by Barry Oringer. The aliens’ experiments with artificial human emotions go awry when one of their subjects, prone to homicidal rages, defects to Vincent’s side. “Actually, because [Martin] came in, I got a very good deal from ABC. I always enjoyed this show even as a boy but now, in retrospect, I can see why The Invaders was cancelled after only its second season. To play David Vincent, Quinn Martin had chosen one of the television heartthrobs of the moment, soap opera veteran Roy Thinnes. No doubt Martin considered a similar switch on The Invaders, but ultimately Thinnes kept his job. He created the protagonist, David Vincent, a Santa Barbara-based architect who suddenly becomes a pariah after he sees a flying saucer and tries to warn a disbelieving public of the alien danger. “We all got covered with sweat trying to think these things out,” said writer Jerry Sohl. (14) “Panic” (4/11/67) “Frontiere created a little motto that was just a half-step thing. Scott Bakula, the likeable star of Quantum Leap, starred in the remake and seemed an acceptable successor to Roy Thinnes, but sadly he was all the new Invaders had to offer. It just got sillier and sillier.”  After the show wrapped, David Rintels turned down Quinn Martin’s offer to move over to the long-running The F.B.I. In “Vikor” Ryder’s character was referred to as “Mr. With the pressure of their January deadline looming, the Invaders producers scrambled to get an abbreviated season of 17 episodes into production. Unfortunately, Martin and Frontiere had a falling out over the initial batch of Invaders scores. Also starring are Elizabeth Pena and Richard Thomas. And not aliens of the “E.T.” variety, either. Answer Save. Gilman spots an alien in his home town of Lincoln City, but before Vincent can identify the invader Gilman kills him. Written by Franklin Barton. (8) “Doomsday Minus One” (2/28/67) (15) “Moonshot” (4/18/67) Directed by Robert Douglas. Which leads one to the obvious question: Why would a quirky, paranoid, covertly political fantasy like Larry Cohen’s The Invaders attract Quinn Martin? But the broadcasts have been scrambled because Wood had infant autism. By contrast, said QM producer Anthony Spinner, “If it was a hit, may he rest in peace, it was Quinn Martin’s hit. “They were a certain kind of actor,” said second-season Invaders producer David W. Rintels. “How many times could they not kill him?” asks Anthony Spinner, who struggled to come up with non-lethal ways for the aliens to interact with their nemesis. The term antihero had previously been applied to characters like Richard Kimble and Route 66’s Tod and Buz because they in some way defied the establishment, but their rebellious attitudes didn’t get in the way of their basic cuddliness. For some reason, the writers decided to change the show's overall, and critical, premise - that of a man alone, persecuted, laughed at battling not only alien invaders but sceptics and disbelievers who would rather see him thrown into an insane asylum - … “And Quinn said, ‘Oh, no, John, we’ll never see that spaceship again.’”. Perhaps for this reason, The Invaders initially hewed close to Larry Cohen’s idea of keeping the aliens and their gadgetry off-screen or in disguise as much as possible. Twenty-seven years after the series left the airwaves, David Vincent is still on his mission in Fox’s new four-hour thriller “The Invaders.” This time around, though, he enlists Scott Bakula (“Quantum Leap”) to help him alert the world to the alien invasion. Directed by William Hale. Directed by Paul Wendkos. If the sci-fi trappings of the series were to be short on creativity, they would at least be long on credibility. Written by John W. Bloch. It wasn’t like The Outer Limits, where you were on Pluto today and Mars tomorrow,” said John Elizalde, who worked on both shows. When he brings the skeptical town sheriff (J. D. Cannon) back to the area, there’s no UFO, and Vincent’s insistence that he has encountered aliens from another planet earns him a stay in a sanitarium. Diane Baker guest stars as the first incarnation of one of the series’ archetypes: the lonely single woman and potential romantic partner for Vincent, who may or may not be an alien temptress. With Roy Thinnes, Peter Mark Richman, Susan Oliver, John Milford. (35) “Counterattack” (1/9/68) For once, the aliens’ actions are clearly defined and plausibly motivated, and despite certain similarities to the Twilight Zone episode “The Parallel,” “Moonshot” is a taut suspense piece with an excellent cast. The Invaders are getting easier to defeat, and their methods are getting sloppy: When Invaders use the CHIND on the ambulance attendants at the beginning of the show, they merely pass one of the devices over the guy's neck rather than holding it there. “They were mostly writers that Alan had used on The Fugitive, and had been sort of house writers for Quinn Martin,” said Anthony Spinner of Invaders authors like Dan Ullman, Don Brinkley, and John Kneubuhl. “The Vise” rather bizarrely combines alien intrigue with race relations, incessantly referencing the Detroit riots as well as Vietnam. Cancelling each other out in the ratings, Surface, Threshold, and Invasion all lasted less than a season, making the airwaves safe again for humans . “The Prophet” and “The Miracle” criticize religion, obliquely but cannily. Science fiction shows get cancelled at the drop of a hat these days. Quinn Martin was a notorious obsessive. Guest Stars: Ron Hayes, Joe Maross, Nan Martin, Harry Townes, Ted Knight, Jon Lormer, Robert Sorrells, Hank Brandt, James B. Sikking, Mark Roberts, Don Eitner, Claudia Bryar, Wayne Heffley, Phil Chambers, Jimmy Hayes, Richard Gardner. In writing the narration that would accompany the opening titles of all the post-pilot episodes, Anthony Spinner discovered that no one had bothered to examine the reasons behind the titular invasion. “That’s basically the Hitchcock formula, which he’s used over and over again, and it always seems to work and creates a tremendous amount of suspense, and you identify with this sympathetic character who’s really an underdog,” said Cohen. Sutton Roley, one of the few television directors to impart a truly cinematic look to his work, helmed both “The Innocent” and its immediate predecessor, “Quantity: Unknown.”  In “The Innocent,” he uses wide-angle lenses and bleary soft-focus to create an otherworldly look to the aliens’ faux paradise, which was actually the picturesque Rossmore Leisure World, a home for the retired in Laguna Hills, California. Alan Armer, who eventually left television production for a career in academia, felt that “it kind of became a downhill spiral. “Beachhead” was cut down to fit into a regular hour timeslot when it was first broadcast in January 1967, and Alan Armer has said wistfully that in its original form the pilot constituted The Invaders’ finest and subtlest effort. Concept Art Reveals Apparently Canceled Left 4 Dead Successor, Invaders. When most of the residents of a small town observe the incineration of an alien on Main Street, Vincent must bargain with the aliens to keep them from annihilating the entire village. The increasing issues-consciousness of The Invaders was part of a larger campaign to make the series more adult-oriented. “We interviewed people who claimed to have seen spaceships, or that we were doing very bad things and the aliens were very unhappy. Directed by Sutton Roley. “The Life Seekers” offers a rare glimpse into the aliens’ background and politics, and profoundly changed the series’ concept of its antagonists. Though he was always courteous and professional, some crew members found Thinnes distant and intense – a reaction that may have carried over to the show’s audience, as well. On the other hand, the world was against David Vincent, and it is logical that the daily grind of risking one’s life in an ongoing battle with superpowerful extraterrestrials would tend to make a man tense and irritable. (24) “The Spores” (10/17/67) Within minutes I could hear on the radio that everybody in the city had seen it, especially people in Malibu who were calling in. But it took away from Roy somehow, and I went with it grudgingly because I felt somehow it took away from the kind of classic sense of one guy trying to [defeat a foe alone].