Which version do you prefer?

As a fan of the show I was stunned by the episode The Cat with Ten Lives and the reveal that the aliens are really non corporeal entities that just use stitched together human bodies to travel space and attack the earth (a bit like a space age Frankenstein planet) But which of us prefer this scenario to the original premise of aliens who are dying out and need to replace their ailing body parts with human organs?
At the time of seeing Cat I was taken with the new idea but these days I'm not so sure...

Yeah, we really don't get to know a lot about the aliens.  It's almost like they were not as interested in human parts as much as they were just fixated on making trouble for SHADO!  They were devious simply for the sake of being devious.  Later episodes like Timelash, Mindbender or Reflections in the Water seem to have them resorting to rather ridiculous schemes. The motives and actions of the aliens certainly left a lot of room for confusion if one tries to piece it all together.

And one thing I don't ever remember seeing is a ufo firing back at Sky1 when it was being chased!

I prefer the concept that Jackson puts forward.

"They may have no physical being at all and therefore need a vehicle, a container.... our bodies"

This actually makes a lot of sense. Why would an alien race have compatible bodies to are own, so similar they could use human body organs? I favour the idea that once the 'entity' had entered a body it was stuck there and hence the need to collect replacement organs.

One of the biggest downfalls of having humanoid life all over the universe, is we are what we are because we evolved from fish! This is why we have two eyes, two nostrils, lungs developed from gills etc. An alien entity would not have been likely to have followed the same evolution, not unless each alien race had common ancestors.

So I like the concept, that the aliens only exist in a physical form by steeling human bodies, then require replacement bits for them. How they stole the first bodies then becomes an interesting question!!

Yes i wondered how they first came to get a human body! Unless it was from an unknown space mission which crashed on their planet years before but then that would have been in the fifties and sixties and we know that mankind didn't have that kind of technology back then (or now)
Plus if human evolution is confined to the earth and only humanity evolved from fish it appears you need to see more Star Trek my friend!

> ...the aliens are really non corporeal
> entities that just use stitched
> together human bodies....

The very title of The Cat With Ten Lives implies that the Aliens also possessed this episode's cross-eyed feline 'guest actor', and therefore at least some other mammalian species are also suitable hosts.