We watch so many shows that even if we’re ardent fans of a particular show, it takes awhile for us to recall characters and situations from one season to the next, especially if there are multi-year gaps between seasons. Let’s just say we’re happy when a show comes back and does a bit of a reset, while keeping many of the show’s familiar characters around, like Invasion does.
Opening Shot: Mission control tries to contact Trevante Cole (Shamier Anderson), who went into the alien mothership with Caspar Morrow (Billy Barratt). When the ship crashed, it was assumed that neither of them made it out.
The Gist: Two years later, the planet is celebrating “M-Day,” commemorating the day when Trevante and Caspar made their ultimate sacrifice. There has been no alien activity in the two years since that day, but as a random resident in what used to be the U.S. finds out the hard way, the aliens are still around.
In the meantime, an object is detected under the hatch of Portal Site 11 in the Atlantic Ocean. When the officers open it, they don’t see an alien but Trevante Cole, somehow still alive. He’s questioned by a detached voice belonging to Jack Hollander (Eric Lange), in charge of intelligence for the WDC. He’s skeptical that this is actually Cole, given how the aliens can shapeshift and read thoughts. He has also never been a fan of Cole, given how Cole’s platoon in Afghanistan perished in a suspicious way.
In the meantime, in what used to be England, Jamila Huston (India Brown) has moved on from Caspar’s death in some respects but not in others. And when she hears that Cole is alive, she makes a point of going to the ceremony celebrating his return; she wants to know what Caspar went through on the mothership.
Cole keeps having visions of something from the mothership; they’re debilitating visions, the vision becomes clearer when Jamila shows him one of Caspar’s final EEG readouts. He swears that the aliens are still alive and are deadlier than ever, but his WDC military contact thinks he’s suffering from PTSD. He can’t provide Jamila the closure she’s looking for, but when he runs from the WDC as the visions get stronger, she goes with him.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by David Weil (Hunters) and Simon Kinberg (The Martian), Invasion feels a little more like Independence Day at this point than what we said before its first season, which felt more like Signs.
Our Take: Given that Invasion started eons ago (2021) in the streaming world, and its last season was over two years ago, its understandable that viewers might need to catch up a bit. But thanks to Kinberg, who wrote the Season 3 premiere, you don’t have to be an expert in the show to know what’s going on.
The earth united against the aliens, Cole and Caspar sacrificed themselves to defeat them. Cole is now back two years later, and the aliens never went away. He and Jamila are going to find the others who helped Cole and Caspar, like Mitsuki Yamato (Shiori Kutsuna), Aneesha Malik (Golshifteh Farahani) and Nikhil Kapur (Shane Zaza), among others.
This is a rare case that, while this is part of a continuing story with lots of characters that are familiar to fans of the show, it’s in a way an entirely new story and adventure. We’re not sure if this is the kind of new adventure that will feel unnecessary, given how seemingly conclusive the second season of the show was. It does seem like Kinberg found the way in to continuing things by just giving the mysterious alien invaders the ability to go dormant, to the point where their ignorant human victims think that everything is dead.
Sex and Skin: Nothing.
Parting Shot: As Cole and Jamila speed away, Hollander tells the world president that “Your big hero just became the most wanted man on the fucking planet.”
Sleeper Star: We will take Eric Lange as a mostly-evil intelligence officer any day of the week. Few character actors can spew venom the same way he does. We’re also looking forward to seeing the new character Erika Alexander plays.
Most Pilot-y Line: “I’ve got this itch in the back of my head that I’m never gonna scratch,” Cole says to Jamila, referring the the fact that he doesn’t remember what happened to him and Caspar on the mothership.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Invasion is as much about human relationships that evolve in the face of an extinction event as much as it is about thwarting the invasion, and reestablishing these relationships, and introducing us to some new ones, will go a long way in not making this season feel like a rehash.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.