(courtesy YouTube (c) AppleTV+)
What a way to finish a season!
While some series which start with brooding, slow-building portent and doom, and Invasion has had that in slowly nuanced spades throughout its first season and the second, fumble things going into the big dramatic narrative payoff, this exquisitely well-delivered show holds its nerves, delivering up some huge moments, which while really hitting home, retain that all-enveloping sense of ruminative humanity that has served it well from the start.
In the final five episodes of season two, humanity is being forced into smaller and smaller parts of its home planet as the aliens, now bigger, tougher and spikier and powered by a hive mind the exact nature of which continues to defy easy understanding, take more of Earth for themselves.
The fightback continues apace but it’s all promise and no delivery as Mitsuki Yamato (Shioli Kutsuna) struggles to commune with the invaders, ex-Navy Seal Trevante Cole (Shamier Anderson) puts the pieces together with the help of Rose (Nedra Marie Taylor) but can’t get a winning ambit into play, Jamila (India Brown) finds Caspar (Billy Barratt) who seems not quite himself and Aneesha (Golshifteh Farahani), who’s give up so much to keep her family safe, finds it flying apart in ways she can no longer control.
So does all that mean that the final five episodes of a stellar second season are all about things go horribly, or at the very least, disappointingly wrong?
Not quite; while there are setbacks aplenty and heartaches without number, and people pushed far beyond anything they can cope with (though they find a way thanks to inner tenacity and those around them), there are advances of such a profoundly important nature that by season’s end ———- SPOILERS AHEAD ———- Cole steps into a gelatinous, migraine-aura resembling portal and finds himself aboard the alien mothership where he meets old friend Caspar, with the two setting off in the final scene to cause the invaders some real and lasting harm.
We haven’t won the war yet, and there’s no guarantee we necessarily will, but after some stricken moments in the back half of the season where it looked like our key characters, all brought together now in ways physical and psychic, were not going to make it, they have and spectacularly so, with humanity poised to do some real damage and hopefully bring the war to an end. (Whether we will get the continuation of the story hasn’t been confirmed yet by AppleTV+ but the show’s creators remain hopeful.)
While the vast and thoughtfully rendered narrative sweep is beguilingly good and compellingly watchable, what really continues to make Invasion special, apart from its mesmerisingly nuanced delivery, is how it keeps its focus firmly on the humans in the story.
Yes, it’s hard to miss the massive spaceships hanging in our slowly terraformed skies and those “hunter-killers” wolf-like aliens are hard to look away from in all their terrifying, faceless monstrousness, but what really seizes your attention every step of the carefully-realised way is how each strand of the story, all knit together by season’s end, feels very human and grounded.
That’s quite an impressive feat of focused storytelling especially when many alien invasion stories, or indeed any big blockbusytery sci-fil tales, tend to get lost in the spectacle and action-oriented grandeur of the moment, leaving the characters as mere cardboard cutouts do the storyline’s big, loud, overblown bidding.
That has never happened as any point in Invasion, and it doesn’t come to pass in these final five season two episodes either, and so while the clock is ticking down and BIG things are in play, the kind that could mean we win the unwinnable war, we stay intimately in touch with each of our characters, all of whom are given time to really live and breathe and emerge as fully-formed and affecting people.
At its heart then Invasion is a human drama set against quite an extraordinary and stressful story of survival writ large, and the reason all the epic moments really strike true is because we are invested to a fairly intensely involving degree with the the welfare of the main characters.
We don’t just want humanity to succeed, we want THEM to succeed, and so when ———- SPOILERS AHEAD ———- Mitusiki collapses in the final episode after expending hugely self-sacrificial effort to bend the alien mind to her will or Cole hugs Rose goodbye and steps across the threshold into a place from which he might not return, we are INVESTED.
Massively, irrevocably invested and while we need to Earth to be free again, and all those many millions of humans still somehow left alive to get their lives and homes back, we want these amazingly brave and complex people to get their happy ending too.
It’s a marvellously patient and well thought-out approach that has made Invasion a meditatively intense treat that walks the line between big and blockbustery actiony and affectingly intense human drama, marking it out as something special in the alien invasion genre and almost sending us to our knees to pray to whatever deity we believe in that we get to continue this story, for as long as the streaming gods allow, of extraordinarily ordinary people doing amazingly thrilling and world-changing enthralling things.
Invasion streams on AppleTV+