Disc Reviews

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not really out to get you. That old axiom has never been more true than for David Vincent in the Martin Quinn series The Invaders. Quinn was best known for his police procedural shows like The FBI. At the time of the The Invaders, Quinn was coming going into the final season of one of his most popular shows, The Fugitive. While most people over the years has compared The Invaders to that Quinn production, they were really not as similar as all of that. In The Fugitive the hero, Richard Kimball played by David Janssen had a very specific mission. He was wrongly convicted of killing his wife and was on the trail of the real killer, whom he had witnessed. The “one-armed man” became an iconic figure in television history and provided Dr. Kimball with his “holy grail”. David Vincent’s mission was far more complicated and seldom so cut and dry. He was honestly more akin to Dr. Bennell, played by sci-fi favorite Kevin McCarthy from Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. In both cases you had one man who knew that aliens were invading and even replacing humans. As I watched this collection of Invaders episodes, I couldn’t help but be reminded of McCarthy’s famous scene running down the street trying to convince the world of the impending invasion.

The Invaders maintained several Quinn trademark touches. The episode was broken down into four acts and an epilog, each labeled as you came out of the commercials. Quinn also used a stable of actors as guests that showed up on almost all of his shows. If you look up most of the guest stars on this set you will find a vast majority of them also made appearances on The FBI, The Fugitive, The Streets Of San Francisco, and Manhunter. He was very much like his contemporary Irwin Allen, who was producing cheesy science fiction shows at the same time. Quinn writers were adept at quick, punchy dialog that was also a common thread in his productions. None of these characters spoke like normal people. There was always a theatrical but often abbreviated cadence to what was being said. Quinn also made heavy use of narration and The Invaders is no exception. Each episode begins with a short narration, often setting up the story and finally moralizing in the end. The music and narration sound very much like Outer Limits episodes.

My very first impression was that this show was very ambitious from the gate. Perhaps the show’s fatal flaw is that it attempts to tackle far too many serious issues, complete with complex undertones, with the largest ensemble cast I’ve seen yet. Add this to the fact that the world is still a little sensitive to terrorist attacks, and you have a recipe for keeping your audience relatively small. None of these things are bad elements in and among themselves, and I’m certainly not suggesting that these issues need to be abandoned. I’ve been a high school teacher, and one thing any of us can tell you is that there’s only so much a person can absorb in a given amount of time.

The premise almost sounds simple and unoriginal in the telling. Several terrorist organizations in a coordinated attack manage to nuke at least 22 American cities. Far enough from a Denver blast to survive are the residents of Jericho, Kansas. We’re talking small town with small-town politics and mentality. Jake Green (Ulrich) has been away for some years. He was back visiting when the attack occurred and finds himself taking a lot of the town’s survival on his shoulders. He’d been kind of the renegade son of the town’s long-time mayor. The series begins to resemble the popular Lost from here on out. We’re talking a group of people isolated from the rest of the world under mysterious circumstances. The characters remarkably mirror Lost, down to the pregnant woman and the man with a sinister past who happens to know a lot about surviving a nuclear attack. Also like Lost, the characters’ past is often explored, leading to common threads they might not even know they share. The nation’s surviving towns become almost sovereign states unto themselves. Each develops a unique political structure and raises fighting forces. Before long these other towns begin to engage in disputes and attacks. The problem for me is there are far too many characters and way too complicated situations, so that I was never able to connect with any one character on the series. It’s obvious we are intended to relate to Jake, but I was never able to do that.