Quinn Martin's The Invaders in Social Context
Architect vs. Architects of Doom
Employing covert technology and networking, the titular menace thrust its influence into every stratum of human culture. From self-made oil mogul to small-town newspaper boy, anyone could be one of the extraterrestrials, with only the series hero, David Vincent aware of their presence and plans to subvert humanity. With each community he visited, Vincent (played with simmering restraint by Roy Thinnes) grew into a pop-cultural UFO authority, or meddlesome crackpot, depending on one's point of view.
Along the way, questions of civic duty, family loyalty and personal beliefs were addressed within an atmosphere of suffocating paranoia. Grave past misjudgments that someone may have just begun to learn to live with poked into the light of day like pesky weeds with the arrival of the crusading one-time architect and his virulent suspicions.
The result was well-nuanced suspense from Larry Cohen and the late Quinn Martin (producer of The Fugitive crime drama) that was as adult as it was speculative. Since The Invaders was not as extrapolative as Star Trek or as outlandish as Lost in Space, its social commentary operated on a more subtle level than other speculative television of the same decade.
David Vincent and The Man
For example, the best episodes explored the enemy's casual authenticity in feigning the human condition, resulting in the most sympathetic characters ultimately exposed as aliens who had influenced those around them with a well-honed sociopathic skill.
This ability did not come by readily. Upon arrival to terrestrial shores, Invaders often entered an orientation facility, where the normally uniform, emotionless creatures received training in the emulation and manipulation of human motives and responses.
"The Ivy Curtain" introduced just such a set-up, via the bogus Midlands Academy. Passing from classroom to classroom, a spying Vincent stumbled on a coffee house replica, complete with extraterrestrials impersonating college students, pretending to argue over the folly of Establishment policies in an effort to virally erode the confidence and security of humans they would meet in the outside world.
In jagged opposition to this sham of social interaction, Vincent found in an adjoining room fresh arrivals, each lying on metal pallets, their brains directly plugged into an instructing computer.
The overall picture built by these and other inhuman scenes throughout the 1967-68 run of The Invaders reflected the frustrated sentiments of the counterculture movement of the same time. The image of the citizen smothered into self-absorbed indifference to world events by the forces of consumerism and conformity comes to mind with the recurrent incredulity Vincent encountered, even by those who have personally witnessed the clandestine machinations of the aliens, but "know better" than to trust their own eyes.
Deniers and Reluctant Believers
In the "Valley of the Shadow", an entire town nearly succeeded in convincing itself that the publicly-witnessed glowing disintegration of an alien was an elaborate hoax. Even after Vincent had found a fellow believer, this did not guarantee he had also found an ally. While some were in league with the outworlders for imagined personal gain, a discouraging number were simply too afraid to expose the greatest threat to humanity since nuclear war.
Marrying such narcissism with the detail-oriented pragmatism of the aliens' default guise as respectable businessmen invokes comparison with the imposing, cool demeanor of The Organization Man. Published in 1956, William H. Whyte's book described the post-war cultivation of a new breed of corporate citizen, so encouraged to embrace an employer's values at the expense of his own, he became little more than a cell in a massive compartmentalized organism.
Hence, the forbidding manner of that brusque stranger encountered on a city street was taken by the series to be literally representative of an extraterrestrial--truly the most strange of strangers.
Roy Thinnes' Summer of Love
Like Flower Children from the same period, David Vincent struggled to champion a more objective view of industrial society, by warning its members about those who were taking advantage of its weaknesses for their own purposes. In contrast to the Haight-Ashbury crowd, however, Vincent was compelled to battle from within the culture to do this, rather than starting another one altogether--a battle all the more arduous because the values and allegiances of modern life actually aided the foe in gradually attaining world dominance.
If one lasting point of inspiration can be drawn from the intrigues of The Invaders, it is how, following their encounter with a noble stranger who had sacrificed career and a comfortable existence for their sakes, disparate people were drawn together by a universal threat, forcing them to regard one another with a renewed appreciation of their humanity, tempered by vigilance for forces (terrestrial and otherwise) that would extinguish that unique quality.
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