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This article is about the television program titled The Invaders. For the Marvel Comics comic book series, see The Invaders (comics). For the Twilight Zone episode, see The Invaders (The Twilight Zone).
The Invaders is a science-fiction television program that ran in the United States in the 1968-1969 season. Roy Thinnes starred as architect David Vincent, who learned of an alien invasion underway and thereafter travelled from place to place, trying to foil the aliens' plots and warn Earth of the danger.
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. The other was the wave of "alien doppleganger" films which had come ten years before in the 1950s, typified by Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the British film, Quatermass 2, 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 wandering from place to place and that would explain why he couldn't tackle the police by going to the authorities (not only had the aliens infiltrated human institutions already, but most humans would dismiss a claim of alien invasions as paranoid delusions.)
The spaceship by which they reach the Earth is a flying saucer of a design derivative of the 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.
The Invaders were never given a name, nor was their planet. They were not even shown in their true, alien form, from which they required periodic treatments requiring equipment that consumed a great deal of electrical power so as to not revert automatically, though there was one scene which showed one beginning to revert, filmed fuzzily and with flashing lights. They had certain characteristics by which they could be discovered, such as their absence of a pulse. Nearly all were emotionless and had little fingers which could not bend, although there were many "deluxe models" who even had emotions similar to the humans who were fighting them and who could manipulate this finger. One frustrating gimmick of the series was that their existence could not be documented by killing one, for their dead bodies would always glow red and disappear, along with their clothes and any items they were carrying at the time.
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