(courtesy IMP awards)
INVASION season 2
Episode 1: “The Ones We Leave Behind”
When last we visited the blighted citizens of Invasion Earth, the alien mothership had crashed into a mountain range, heroes, U.S. soldier Trevante Cole (Shamier Anderson) and British schoolboy-turned-alien-psychic Caspar Morrow (Billy Barratt) were MIA, presumed dead, and it looked, LOOKED, like humanity had won the battle over its extraterrestrial aggressors.
So, hurrah, season three will be all parties and victory parades and getting used to post-invasion life on a newly united planet?Ah, sweet summer child with their head in the interplanetary sand, how very wrong you appear to be.
We say “appear” because ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- one spiky, suburban dad killing alien alone – weirdly this prologue death seems to have gone unreported with no one in the WDC (World Defence Command you would assume) referring to it in their ongoing campaign to say everything is “fine just fine” – there’s no apparent alien activity anywhere on earth – not at the dead zone around the crashed mother ship and not at any of the known alien portals, now nicely capped off and surrounded by bristling military defenses.
But of course, this has to be the calm before the storm, and so it is when Trevante Cole suddenly pops up, very much alive and in his astronaut gear, in one of the portal wells, which looks for all the world like an immersion pool, and after a brief period of peace, starts having flashbacks to something not being quite right.
No one wants to listen to him, ascribing his “itch at the back of his head” as PTSD and nothing more, and it’s only when Caspar’s schoolfriend and fellow fighter Jamila Huston (India Brown) turns up at the ceremony to welcome Cole back, prepared speech and hero worship engaged thank you very much, that she hands him a piece of paper with ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- Caspar’s EKG patterns on it, that they both realise that the threat is far from over.
But what is the threat exactly? Neither of them is sure, beyond Cole remembering something in the walls, and so, with the WDC refusing to accept there’s any kind of threat anymore – yes, for a show that’s happy to push boundaries, Invasion is happy to entertain certain well-travelled tropes such as the dumb-as-shit moronic military which should know better – they make a break for it, back being fugitives and with a huge mystery pressing down upon them.
The first episode of Invasion‘s third season is as meditative and visually and narratively thoughtful as the preceding two seasons, a sign that though it’s going to ramp up the action soon and very soon no doubt, that it’s still happy to let events play out in something approaching real time and build the tension rather than putting the pedal to the metal straight away.
Invasion‘s narrative patience has always stood it in good stead and it’s good to see it hasn’t foregone and it still willing to dangle questions and what-ifs ahead of an avalanche of quite terrifying answers …
Episode 2: “The Message”
The second episode switches gears to a key member of the ensemble cast, a fiercely intelligent, grief-stricken Japanese woman named Mitsuki Yamato (Shioli Kutsuna) who, after her pivotal role in bringing down the mother ship after working out to speak to it and thus “hack” it essentially, has retreated to the quietness of the central Japanese countryside. She just wants to be away from people and aliens and has formed a lovely relationship with a self-sufficient older man and his granddaughter, the only two people with whom she has any comtact.
But something this pure and good for the soul can’t last; not when the aliens are stirring again, and yes, this time the WDC is aware the spiky aliens are on the move, hunting and tagging them like some sort of twisted wildlife survey, and when Earth’s delightfully fascistic world government deems the welfare of the individual to be less important than the collective safety of the whole.
Possibly fair enough given the stakes at hand and the fact that the aliens look like they aren’t down for the count – were they ever? Of course not – and Earth could be in renewed peril; or rather, the peril never went away and we’re only just twigging to an ongoing invasion plan that didn’t stop and simply went dormant.
Mitsuki, who feels things deeply, is back, like Travente, to sensing the aliens in a brain-explodingly intense way, and when she hacks into the super secure WDC database following one of her conscious-smashing alien headaches, they track her down and she’s back in the fight whether she likes it or not.
“The Message”, which keeps Invasion‘s love of long, slow, meditative build-ups intact, is a gem because it manages, without any of the strands cannibalising the other, to convey one singular person’s anguish and loss, their bold, desperate, inevitable determination to take up the fight again, and their link to the aliens which can’t be denied no matter how much they want it to be gone.
Presumably the aliens, for all their tech, still haven’t worked out how to jam the psychic connections they have to certain humans, all of whom are sensing the aliens stirring again, but it’s a good thing they haven’t, or perhaps they don’t think people are that much of a ship (although, you know, a downed mothership?) because it’s Mitsuki who works out that the aliens are saying something.
Something so profound that she girds her loins, reconnects with a man she hates, billionaire Nikhil (Shane Zaza), who is every bit as douchey as you remember him but also a little more vulnerable too (colour us surprised but hey it speaks to the quality of Invasion‘s uniformly goof writing) and sets out at episode’s end to … well, do things.
I’m guessing something the aliens will NOT like …
Invasion streams on AppleTV+
STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS season 3
(courtesy IMP Awards)
Episode 6: “The Sehlat Who Ate its Tail“
While ostensibly about a giant monster of a ship that roams the galaxy consuming civilisations and people with resource-gathering impunity and a complete lack of morality or care – it is the stuff of nightmares and has led to some seriously scary bogeyman stories among a number of races including the Klingons and yes, even the terrifying Gorn – “The Sehlat Who Ate its Tail” is really a way of setting the scene, of giving us a taste test of what will become Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS).
In this two-ships-in-peril story, the U.S.S. Farragut and the U.S.S. Enterprise find themselves at the mercy, for most of the episode anyway, of a ship that comes along as the former ship is surveying an unpopulated M-Class planet. One minute, First Officer James T Kirk (Paul Wesley) is giving some unsolicited, arrogance-laced feedback to his captain; the next, the planet is exploding, Farragut is crippled and only saved by Enterprise swopping in to save them.
It’s a LOT but it’s brilliantly, captivatingly done, serving up some supremely epic spectacle that sees a captured Enterprise, led by Captain Pike (Anson Mount), First Officer Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) and Security Officer La’an (Chrintina Chong) fighting to stop itself from becoming scrap metal, and worse, and the Farragut, temporarily captained by Kirk after his captain is injured, seeking to both survive and help get the Enterprise free.
Helping Kirk are the people who will become some of the nucleus of the TOS bridge crew – Spock (Ethan Peck), Uhura (Celia Gooding), Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush) and Scotty (Martin Quinn) – with each assuming the roles, in nascent form anyway, that they will play when TOS becomes a thing.
It’s a rip roaring adventure throughout, and there are truly arrestingly big and devastatingly emotionally intimate moments (especially at the end where we see a blustery Kirk display his heart-on-sleeve self) but what is really a treat to watch in this classic Starfleet fights back against an evil threat storyline and prevails – not a spoiler; of course they do – is how Kirk and his team start becoming Kirk and his team.
It’s an absolute treat to watch and while you are absolutely carried along by the action and immersively lose yourself in 50 or so taut and terrific moments, you emerge from this episode with Kirk taking one step closer to his famous captaincy and the rest of the crew getting ready to go right along with him.
And honestly, that is more than worth the price of admission …
Episode 7: “What is Starfleet?”
A show within a show can often be a highly effective way to get inside the soul of a TV show and into the heart of its characters who have parts of who they are revealed episode-by-episode but who, in, say an interview setting for an in-universe documentary spill their guts in arresting and revelatory ways. Case in point is MASH’s “The Interview” episode from 1976 which, as you might suspect, features interviews with all the main characters, throwing back the curtain on life in the 4077th in a way that not even its expertly written narrative-heavy episodes could manage.
No doubt this is what the producers of “What is Starfleet?” were aiming for when they decided to mix together a documentary created by Beto Ortegas (Mynor Lüken), the brother of Enterprise helmsman, Erica (Melissa Navia), for the centenary celebration of the United Federations of Planets, and a classic Star Trek storyline where Starfleet steps into a war-like setting between two neighbouring planets, and contrary to the mission, all hell breaks loose.
On the surface, there’s some genius in showing what Starfleet does while exploring why it does it; in theory at least it’s the “what” and “why” siting revealingly cheek-by-jowl, a fitting way to mark a major anniversary for an organisation that unremittingly seeks itself as one of the good guys.
Unfortunately, while you have to admire the idea behind the episode, the actual execution leaves a great deal to be desired.
Beto’s whole approach to the documentary’s creation, and the facile, provocative questions he asks such as whether the Federation is an empire or a genuine partner, land with a great big thud, and while the crew of the Enterprise do their best to deliver thoughtful answers, even they come across as shallow and more than a little self-serving.
It’s not, as revelatory documentaries go, all that satisfying and it’d tidied up at the end with observations as surface-deep as the exploration that leads to the end point; frankly if I was Starfleet top brass, I’d fire all copies of the doco into the nearest sun and watch it burn up with welcome flammability.
Not only does the doco itself not work, but the story it’s paired with, with the Federation rendering aid to a beleaguered people under attack from their neighbour only to find out the victims are conducting some truly actions of their own which infringe on sentient life, gets shortchanged because it’s simply not given enough room to breathe.
Kudos as always to Strange New Worlds for going boldly where no Star Trek show has gone before, but sadly “What is Starfleet?” does not even remotely stick the landing, its two warring halves consuming and decimating the other and leaving you with a so-so episode that entertains certainly in its own half-done way but which serves as a reminder that not all bold ideas are good ones.
Episode 8: “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans”
Much as I adore Strange New Worlds’ willingness to throw all kinds of genres into its stylistic melting pot, and honestly its willingness to not take itself too seriously while also still taking the galaxy very seriously is a welcome breath of fresh air in a franchise which also embraced the thoughtful hilarity of Lower Decks (RIP sob), sometimes it begins to feel a little like there’s a little too much silliness entering the narrative fray.
Take “Four-and-a-Half-Vulcans” which sees Captain Pike (Anson Mount), Security Officer La’an (Chrintina Chong), Uhura (Celia Gooding), and Nurse Christine Chapel (Jess Bush) turned into actual Vulcans to help repair an ageing piece of planet-sustaining machinery the Vulcans gifted to a pre-warp culture (what? Prime Directive much?! Shhhh, there’s a slightly convoluted piece of narrative convenience to explain it all).
That piece of the narrative puzzle is almost an irrelevance to an episode that’s less concerned with the repairs and far more interested in what being Vulcan does to the four members of the crew when the serum to revert them back to being human doesn’t work, one of whom is possibly dating the “half-a-Vulcan” of the title aka Spock (Ethan Peck) and the other an ex of the Enterprise’s Science Officer who becomes, rather nastily, the butt of their newly-acquired Vulcan arrogance.
To put it bluntly, being turned into genetic Vulcans makes four otherwise quite lovely people into arrogant a***holes, or “jerks” which it is generally agreed, even by the half-a-Vulcan is often how Vulcans come across to just about everybody.
Getting in touch with their hitherto unknown Vulcan side gives the writers of the show a great excuse to explore some relational dilemmas for all four people, which it does to varying degrees of success, largely because there are four people’s stories competing for very limited narrative real estate.
While the episode is still a lot of fun to watch, thanks in part to the humour injected by First Officer Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) meeting up again with her ex, a Vulcan named Doug (Patton Oswalt) with whom she shares a magnetically embarrassing attraction – and his name? Well, his dad researches humans and loves the culture hence the very non-Vulcan name – it could have benefited from leaving just one of the crew to not be able to change back and making the story go heavy on their story.
My pick would be La’an who’s story is by far the strongest and who has more than enough angst and childhood PTSD to sustain a full-episode deep dive into what being taken out of your usual self can do for you.
Still, that quibble aside, “Four-and-a-Half-Vulcans” largely works thanks to its sitcom levels of comedy, some inventive exposure of various characters and its willingness to tackle some negative perceptions of one of the Federation’s founding races.
It’s could’ve been stronger however, and you could only hope that the final two episodes in the third season come home with some deadly serious drama because that would be a great way to finish a batch of episodes that have had their fair share of comedy and no needed some sombre sci-fi to wrap things up.
Strange New Worlds streams on Paramount+