Elizabeth Driscoll

Elizabeth Driscoll is a fictional scientist and a central character featured in the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers by director Philip Kaufman. She was played by actress Brooke Adams.

Biography
Elizabeth Driscoll was a microbiologist who worked for the San Francisco Department of Health during the 1970s. She was a colleague and confidante of health inspector Matthew Bennell. In addition to her job, Elizabeth was a botany enthusiast and lived with her boyfriend, a dentist named Geoffrey Howell, at his home.

In 1978, Elizabeth discovered a rare breed of flower which she believed to be a Grex and brought it home. What she didn't know at the time was that an aggressive alien organism had cross-pollinated with the plant, creating a pod-like creature that could generate clone duplicates of living people. These doppelgängers shared the same physical attributes and memories of their subject, but without the capacity to express human emotion.

On the morning after finding the plant, Elizabeth discovered that Geoffrey was behaving very strangely. He was cold and dispassionate and she immediately recognized that something was very wrong with him. She expressed her concerns to Matthew Bennell who suggested that Geoffrey might be having an affair or is afflicted with some other "social disease".

Elizabeth kept a close eye on Geoffrey and spent the following day spying on him. She tailed him from his office where she found him conducting a series of strange, secret meetings with groups of people that she didn't recognize. Anxiety eventually overtook Elizabeth and she became convinced that Geoffrey was literally no longer the man she believed him to be.

She reiterated her concerns to Matthew who recommended taking her to see a local celebrity psychiatrist named Doctor David Kibner. On the way to a book store where Kibner was attending a signing, they were accosted by a panicking man who screamed "They're coming! They're coming!" Moments later, the man was struck and killed by a passing motorist.

At the book store, Elizabeth witnessed a woman named Katherine Hendley tearfully telling Doctor Kibner that her husband was not her husband. Elizabeth empathized with the woman's confusion and tried to offer her comfort. She told Doctor Kibner about her reservations concerning Geoffrey, but Kibner dismissed her concerns, declaring that this sort of dissociative behavior is just a symptom of someone who is afraid of commitment and responsibility.

Elizabeth returned home that night and Geoffrey gave her a flower bud. The bud spawned a duplicate version of Elizabeth that grew from a pod as the real Elizabeth slept. By this point, Matthew had learned the truth about the pod people and feared for Elizabeth's life. He broke into her home to rescue her and found the duplicate growing inside of a garden in the back yard. He took the real Elizabeth, still unconscious, and brought her back to his house to keep her safe. Geoffrey offered no resistance, satisfied that sooner or later, his lover would be fully subverted by the conquering species.

Elizabeth soon determined that it was the exotic flowers that had been blooming all over the city that was responsible for transmitting the alien spore. Along with fellow survivors Jack and Nancy Bellicec, she surmised that victims were lured in by the scent of the flowers and that the act of sleeping served as a catalyst for the duplication process to take place.

Later that evening, four fresh pods blossomed in Matthew's garden, giving birth to duplicates of him, Jack, Nancy and Elizabeth. They all awakened, interrupting the process and fled from the house. Matthew destroyed the pods but in doing so, alerted the other pod people to their presence. All four of them began running through the streets of San Francisco, desperate to evade their alien enemies. Elizabeth and Matthew split off from Jack and Nancy and doubled back towards the Health Department office. They knew that nearly everyone in the city was now a pod person and it was only a matter of time before they would fall asleep. Rummaging through one of the labs, they found some speed pills to help keep them awake.

David Kibner, Jack Bellicec and several others came into the office building. They had all been replaced by pod people by this point. They restrained Elizabeth and Matthew and gave them both sedatives to make them sleep. Kibner continued to reassure Elizabeth, telling her that before long, she will no longer wish to resist them. Elizabeth fought back, smashing Kibner across the head with a beaker. Matthew and she escaped from the building and continued racing through the streets of San Francisco.

They eventually came to a shipyard situated next to a factory where they were growing the pods. The supplanted humans were preparing to ship the pods overseas. Matthew left Elizabeth alone for a moment so he could scout out the area. During this time, sleep overtook Elizabeth and she collapsed in the underbrush. Matthew returned to her side, but it was too late. The process had begun. Elizabeth disintegrated in Matthew's arms and her duplicate rose from the weeds a moment later.

The duplicate Elizabeth chased Matthew into the factory and alerted the other pod people to his presence. Try as the might, they were not able to stop him from burning the factory down. Elizabeth's doppelgänger soon resumed her predecessor's position as a technician at the Health Department.

Notes & Trivia



 * Elizabeth could perform a trick wherein she vibrated her eyeballs at an accelerated speed.


 * Elizabeth's subversion took place at an accelerated rate than that of the others. Doctor Kibner implied that the entire duplication process takes approximately twenty minutes, but Elizabeth's duplicate was born and matured within seconds of Elizabeth falling asleep.