I'll be brief. I watched this show for most of the first season, then lost interest. It is basically what we writers call an "homage", which means anything from borrowing story ideas and plots to outright ripoff.
In this case, the series is a blatant rehash of the classic 1960s Sci Fi series "The Invaders". The shows share identical plot lines and devices, for instance: In "The Invaders", architect David Vincent (Roy Thinnes) stumbled upon an alien plot to take over the earth, and spent the rest of the series trying (usually in vain) to get people to believe him.
In First Wave, Cade Foster (Sebastian Spence) stumbles upon an alien plot to take over the earth, and spends the rest of the series trying (usually in vain) to get people to believe him.
In "The Invaders", the aliens, when killed or wounded, glowed red and disappeared, thus leaving no corpse or no evidence.
In "First Wave", the aliens, when killed or wounded (though not always when wounded) glow and (unlike Invaders) begin to show their true form and then disappear, leaving no corpse or evidence.
Along the way, David Vincent meets unusual people (usually aliens, whom he kills so they can vanish), but sometimes he manages to convince people that he's NOT a nutcase, and he even forms an alliance of sorts with an alien resistance. Cade Foster gets a human partner, conspiracy nut Crazy Eddie (the underrated Rob LaBelle) and gains an alien ally in the form of Joshua (Robert R. Cross) and another human ally as well, Jason Radcliffe, hottie and ex-porn star Traci Lords.
David Vincent discovers the alien plot by taking a wrong turn and seeing a flying saucer.
Cade Foster, in an imaginative twist, stumbles on the conspiracy by discovering a "lost" book of Nostradamus which details the coming alien invasion in a whole lot of the usually cryptic Nostradamus quatrains, although given Nostra's reputation for being undeniably vague, I wonder just why he chose to interpret "went with Marcel to get coffee and croissants" as "big alien invasion coming, earth doomed unless stalwart human hero with mixed-bag of dubiously intelligent sidekicks can save it", is beyond me.
On the whole, First Wave was an Okay Show, which different writers kept screwing up by drastically altering plot and story lines, which didn't save the show. (Idiot writers. When will we ever learn?) However, The Invaders comes out way ahead, for its originality (which actually paid 'hommage' to the Cold War 1950s and the really creepy Invasion of the Body Snatchers), and was very gritty for its time and surprisingly daring (by then-TV standards) story elements, while First Wave wasn't really innovative but was eerily prescient when it's realized that the events of 9/11 had yet to occur.
Anyway, if you pick it up in reruns on SciFi channel, go ahead and watch. It's an Okay time killer.
In this case, the series is a blatant rehash of the classic 1960s Sci Fi series "The Invaders". The shows share identical plot lines and devices, for instance: In "The Invaders", architect David Vincent (Roy Thinnes) stumbled upon an alien plot to take over the earth, and spent the rest of the series trying (usually in vain) to get people to believe him.
In First Wave, Cade Foster (Sebastian Spence) stumbles upon an alien plot to take over the earth, and spends the rest of the series trying (usually in vain) to get people to believe him.
In "The Invaders", the aliens, when killed or wounded, glowed red and disappeared, thus leaving no corpse or no evidence.
In "First Wave", the aliens, when killed or wounded (though not always when wounded) glow and (unlike Invaders) begin to show their true form and then disappear, leaving no corpse or evidence.
Along the way, David Vincent meets unusual people (usually aliens, whom he kills so they can vanish), but sometimes he manages to convince people that he's NOT a nutcase, and he even forms an alliance of sorts with an alien resistance. Cade Foster gets a human partner, conspiracy nut Crazy Eddie (the underrated Rob LaBelle) and gains an alien ally in the form of Joshua (Robert R. Cross) and another human ally as well, Jason Radcliffe, hottie and ex-porn star Traci Lords.
David Vincent discovers the alien plot by taking a wrong turn and seeing a flying saucer.
Cade Foster, in an imaginative twist, stumbles on the conspiracy by discovering a "lost" book of Nostradamus which details the coming alien invasion in a whole lot of the usually cryptic Nostradamus quatrains, although given Nostra's reputation for being undeniably vague, I wonder just why he chose to interpret "went with Marcel to get coffee and croissants" as "big alien invasion coming, earth doomed unless stalwart human hero with mixed-bag of dubiously intelligent sidekicks can save it", is beyond me.
On the whole, First Wave was an Okay Show, which different writers kept screwing up by drastically altering plot and story lines, which didn't save the show. (Idiot writers. When will we ever learn?) However, The Invaders comes out way ahead, for its originality (which actually paid 'hommage' to the Cold War 1950s and the really creepy Invasion of the Body Snatchers), and was very gritty for its time and surprisingly daring (by then-TV standards) story elements, while First Wave wasn't really innovative but was eerily prescient when it's realized that the events of 9/11 had yet to occur.
Anyway, if you pick it up in reruns on SciFi channel, go ahead and watch. It's an Okay time killer.