The Invaders
We seem to have reached the death throes of a glut of alien invasion shows, with Falling Skies ironically being one of the last survivors. None of the recent efforts have been able to match the haunting intensity of the 1967 TV series The Invaders, however. Starring Roy Thinnes as architect David Vincent, its two seasons laid out a terrifying plot in which Vincent stumbled upon a secret alien invasion, already underway. With aliens disguising themselves as regular humans, Vincent sets out to undermine their plans and warn the world – but he struggles to make people believe him.
The natural descendant of The Invaders TV show is The X-Files – so much so that Roy Thinnes appeared as a shape-shifting alien in a two-episode X-Files arc that spanned the break between the third and fourth seasons – and while The X-Files itself is being revisited, there is still room on the schedules for the unique approach of The Invaders. This is made possible by the series ending, which saw Vincent convince Edgar Scoville (Kent Smith) and District Attorney Andrew Hatcher (Peter Mark Richman) of the existence of the alien invasion force – leading the three of them to form a defence against the Invaders.
While there was a three hour mini-series in 1995 featuring a passing of the torch to new character Nolan Wood (Scott Bakula), this was not a true continuation of the story, and so can legitimately be consigned to the status of spinoff. Instead, there is scope for a return to the slow-burn, unsettling menace of the original series, with a new generation of characters. Perhaps David Vincent has a granddaughter, whom he has carefully educated with the disturbing truth, and perhaps she then leads the descendants of Scoville and Hatcher in a fight against a new wave of Invaders.
