I think this aired in 1986, on the old NBC Monday Night Movie, in the summer when it was usual to see lost TV pilots aired as movie-of-the-weeks. Told the tale of a newspaper reporter(Chapman) who has to miss a vacation(having won a "contest")with his girlfriend Angela, a scenario which, in the style it was filmed starts off very prosaic and normal until, as he narrates the entire film as a flashback, he finds her return plane had "gone off the radar" for 90 minutes, and returns, but delayed. He gets unnerved watching Angela speaking to a mysterious man in sunglasses,who seems to be watching the passengers leave the plane, asks who it was- and she denies having spoken to anyone. She is also unaware the plane was "delayed and missing". She begins acting strangely and having odd meetings with unknown people, and as the reporter begins to investigate things and ask more questions, she tries to kill him and he finds she's now a terminator-like robot(complete with the same kind of eye-tracking visuals from that film). Truly panicked he finds himself a wanted man, framed, and on the run with nothing more than the passenger list he got after dispatching the Angela robot. The only hint or clue we're ever given is one passenger who appears to be normal who claims "nothing went wrong on the flight, I slept, then felt a bump..and I had that awful nightmare.." . The reporter asks "What kind of nightmare?" and before she can say more, she's killed by another one of these robots. He finds out a little more, from another,older passenger who seems to be in charge of a localized group of these beings-he manages after a fight,to damage the mechanical brain and he begins talking incoherently about "Dynamitards...are the collective of Dymogeny" and how they intend to fully take over. We learn nothing else, other than he sets off,alone, in Fugtive-like fashion to find other normal passengers from the list-who were apparently checked off for termination-before the robots do. Obviously it was intended to be a series along the lines of Nowhere Man or The Fugitive, finding more clues along the way.
The film had some interesting "rock video" sequences,very much of the time-dissolves and used a perpetual "Los Angeles Sunset/Sunrise" for lighting. The use of Bowie's Ashes to Ashes and visual references to religious buildings and at one point, the hero seems to be standing in front of painted angel's wings, lead one to think these were possibly not aliens but something darker or even homegrown on earth.
