The Invaders 1.08

Doomsday Minus One

David Vincent is summoned by Charlie Spence, a reporter, to Utah. Spence disappears before Vincent gets a chance to meet with him. He meets instead with Major Graves of the US Army who tells him what he knows. Spence claimed that a big crater near the US Army Utah Proving Ground was made by the crash of a UFO. Spence also told Major Graves that he saw another UFO near the crater. 

David Vincent does some investigating. He spies General Ted Beaumont, the commander of the base, meeting with Mr. Tomkins, an alien. Vincent tells Major Graves about what he saw but Graves doesn't believe him. Vincent gets a job on base, as suggested by Graves. He sneaks into a restricted part of the base to check up on Carl Wyeth, someone Graves is suspicious of, but Vincent gets caught. He is turned over to the Department of Justice. 

The agents from the DOJ are aliens. They have plans to kill David Vincent but he manages to turn the tables on them. They crash their car and are killed. Mr. Tomkins insists that General Beaumont move up the schedule for the nuclear test that was planned for the following week. Vincent and Graves have less than 24 hours to stop it from happening.

David Vincent and Major Graves catch up to General Beaumont with less than an hour to go until the nuclear test. They finally get him to open up. He explains that it isn't a nuclear test but a test of an anti-matter bomb. The loss of life will be huge but Beaumont believes that it will convince the leaders of the world that nuclear weapons must be abandoned.

Vincent and Graves convince General Beaumont that the aliens aren't being honest with him. All three men rush to the test site. They kill the aliens setting up the bomb for the test, including Carl Wyeth. The General drives the bomb back to the aliens and gets there just as it detonates.

There is an inquiry into the matter by the Army but it gets wrapped up in so much red tape that it might take years before anything is decided.

Notes

William Windom played the part of Major Rick Graves. Windom appears in two more episodes of The Invaders but plays a different character in them. He has almost 250 screen credits according to IMDb, most of them are guest appearances on TV shows from the late 1940s to the early 2000s. He played Commodore Matt Decker in an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series (The Doomsday Machine).

Andrew Duggan played General Ted Beaumont. He has over 175 screen credits according to IMDb most of which are guest appearances on TV shows. This is his only appearance on The Invaders.

Thoughts

I always get a thrill when the aliens disintegrate after getting killed. It is one of the things that I distinctly remember from when I watched this show in the mid to late 1970s.

This one was a bit over the top ridiculous, especially General Beaumont's sacrifice at the end, but I enjoyed it.