The Invaders (TV)

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Name: The Invaders
Abbreviation(s):
Creator:
Date(s): 1967-1968
Medium: Television Series
Country of Origin:
External Links:
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The Invaders was a science fiction television programme screening on ABC for two seasons in 1967-1968. It was about the efforts of one man, David Vincent (Roy Thinnes), who witnesses a UFO landing and spends the next year trying to warn the world of a secret alien invasion. He is hampered not only by the aliens themselves, who are disguised as humans, but by the disbelief of officials and the general public.[1]

Season One featured David Vincent's almost solo quest to expose the aliens, and Season 2 introduced a group of "true believers" who attempted to assist him in this quest.

At the same time the television series was on air, a series of tie-in books was also released.[2]

There were plans in 1980 to revive the series:

TV producer Quinn Martin has plans to revive his old "The Invaders" show as a weekly series. The aliens travel from their dying planet to earth intent on making it their world. Unlike the old show in which the aliens assume human form, in the new series the aliens can actually possess a human being and utilize strange powers. There is no sign of David Vincent (a heart attack victim?) but there is a group of "believers" who travel around the country looking for proof of the aliens' existence to show a disbelieving world. [3] [4]

In 1995, another attempt to revive the series was made, with a miniseries being released. In it, the original main character David Vincent (still played by Roy Thinnes) is in jail, where he meets a formal Air Force officer (Scott Bukula), who is convinced of the truth of the aliens and takes up Vincent's mission. The series met mixed reviews and the possibility of a new series didn't eventuate.[5]

Themes and Fan Interpretation

Episodes followed the same TV formula as "The Fugitive", with a story of the week revolving around a chase ("Each episode is a study in status..."[6] and featuring the protagonist versus an often unknown (alien) or openly sceptical/hostile human antagonist. However, some of its mystery and nuance might be found on another level of allegorical/metaphoric storytelling:

This was not my first adventure into such territory: the figure of the ‘other’ was more than an academic concept to me. I recall, as a child, watching a TV series from the late 1960s, The Invaders, which combined the ‘flying saucer’ craze with anti-communist fears from the McCarthy era. Even at my young age, I somehow knew that its conspiratorial warning – that ‘they’ were among us – held a more ubiquitous meaning.


Within a few years, as a teenager coming to terms with my awakening homosexuality, I would come to understand the larger metaphor of the ‘other’ in [our] midst...[7]

The series contained a heightened sense of mystery and ominous foreshadowing ("The series has a high-octane rush of paranoia"[6]) which led one French fan to later jocularly recall that it led him, as a child, to pretend to search for signs of "extra-terrestriality" in his best friend's parents.[8]

This air of mystery might be seen to anticipate the same in the British series UFO (1969-1970) which also featured a covert alien invasion of Earth.

Fandom

The fandom surrounding the television show appears to have developed much later in the 1980s and 1990s, decades after the show was originally on television. A number of multimedia zines and websites featured fanfic or fanart based on the series, often as crossovers. AO3 has a total of 24 fanworks archived, the majority of which were written by AlienEyes (aka LauraDove). Fanfiction.net has 20 fanworks under its The Invaders (1967) tag, with at least half written by Claira McGarrett (aka Lisa Sargent)[9].

The series also garnered international fan base, with fanfic (see below) and websites in French[10] and Portuguese[11] and comics published in Brazil as well as the US[12].

Shipping

Unusually, most of the fanworks for this fandom are gen. With its focus on a solo protagonist and the mission-of-the-week episodic format, the genre lends itself more to casefic, much like The X-Files, as well as "what if" stories. Some stories have appeared focussing on Grace, the main character's sister-in-law who appeared in one episode, "Wall of Crystal"[13]. There is one pairing tag on the fics archived on AO3 (Ellie Markham/David Vincent) and no slash pairings.

Fanfiction

Fanart

Vids

  • The Invaders-I.D. by Crusoe89 (2022) Fanvid for 'The Invaders'; Music: 'I.D.' by Kasabian

Zines

Mailing Lists

Websites

Archives

External Links

References

  1. ^ The Invaders - Wikipedia
  2. ^ The Invaders - Books
  3. ^ from Probe One #16 (January 1980)
  4. ^ There is no mention of these plans on Wikipedia; it's unclear what became of it.
  5. ^ The Invaders (miniseries) - Wikipedia
  6. ^ a b Grant Stacey, Crosscuts: Brief DVD Review: The Invaders Season One (1967), The North American Review, Vol. 298, No. 1 (Winter 2013), p. 46. (JSTOR)
  7. ^ Geoff Allshorn, From Queer to Eternity, Humanist blog, 8 November 2020.
  8. ^ Georges-Claude Guilbert, RFEA: Les Envahisseurs, Revue française d'études américaines, No. 100, Florilège (MAI 2004), pp. 72-73 (p. 72). (JSTOR).
  9. ^ The Invaders - Fan Fiction - Lisa Sargent
  10. ^ Série télé les Envahisseurs
  11. ^ The Invaders - Brazil
  12. ^ The Invaders - Comics
  13. ^ The Invaders - IMDB
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