The Invaders was a 60s sci-fi show from Quinn Martin created by the great exploitation auteur, Larry Cohen. It was sort of a mash-up of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and QM's recently completed the Fugitive.
Tom Nichols (yeah, that Tom Nichols) recently wrote an appreciation of MeTV's late night line-up and here's what he had to say about The Invaders.
The Irwin Allen festival is a truckload of cheese (except on the Land of the Giants planet, where it wouldn’t be enough for one hors d’oeuvre). But at 5 a.m., you have the opportunity to catch up on one of the greatest science-fiction programs ever made, a paranoid thriller from the Quinn Martin factory: The Invaders.
The Invaders took the idea of a lone person spotting aliens out in the boondocks, but then asked: What if that one person, instead of being some idiot out fishing in a swamp, was actually a really smart and brave professional and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer when telling his story?
They cast the very intense Roy Thinnes as the hero, architect David Vincent. The show had a real air of menace, not least because the invaders were indistinguishable from humans, but also because they had some scary tech, including a little gizmo that could kill you without a trace by inducing a heart attack. Over the course of the series, David starts gaining the upper hand, even at one point saving a town by negotiating a truce with the invaders. This was pretty intelligent stuff and it’s a shame the show never had a proper finale.
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