Summary
“Contact” is another bland, torpid episode of Invasion that gives us impressively little to get excited about.
This recap of Invasion season 1, episode 8, “Contact”, contains spoilers.
Another week, another bland, crawling episode of Invasion graces our screens. Don’t let the title fool you. While “Contact” implies some actual face-to-face meetings between the show’s vaguely-defined alien menace and the various uninterested characters we’re following through their visit to Earth, it really only amounts to a very last-minute bit of back-and-forth online chatter. The rest is, predictably but no less disappointingly, as bland and torpid as ever.
Invasion season 1, episode 8 recap
For what it’s worth, though, “Contact” does admittedly bring at least two subplots together. Trevante, after escaping Afghanistan, finds himself in London, where he’s unable to secure a flight back to the U.S. and is incredibly rude to the Air Force personnel about it for no real reason. After that, he makes a long-distance call home to his wife for some teary-eyed blather about being unable to stop loving “him” — the shot of Trevante in the iconic-looking red phonebox while the skyline burns and smokes in the background is the best of the episode — and then goes to an empty pub to drown his sorrows. This is where he meets Casper.
Casper isn’t having a particularly good day either. He goes home to find his mum dead, a gooey victim of the aliens, and then decides that he’s going to wage war against them. Luckily, thanks to his seizures, he believes he can communicate with them. However, that’d require him to have a seizure be induced and then sustained, which would require medical intervention, thus he needs to get to a hospital. Trevante seems as good of a bodyguard for the journey as anyone, but he needs some convincing. When he sees Casper’s sketchbook, though, full of scribbles that depict his unit’s insignia among other odd things, he agrees to take him to a hospital (and also instantly sobers up.)
That leaves the women of Invasion, and neither is doing anything all that interesting. Aneesha is now deeply entrenched in a love triangle between Ahmed and the rather conveniently divorced Dr. Barton, but who cares? The more interesting side of things here is Luke and another kid named Jack exploring a “scary” part of the university that the soldiers apparently don’t want anyone to see, and Aneesha catches him in there holding that space shank up to one of the corpses — it’s a makeshift morgue — and causing some kind of reaction between it and the alien goo-type stuff. Potentially interesting, at least.
It’s the same with Mitsuki, who strongarms her way into running the communication team trying to establish contact with that weird signal, and manages to broach a subject by sending a load of video files of Hinata so that the extra-terrestrials can “see us”, and hopefully understand us on some level given how, even with the right technology, there’s no real avenue of understandable communication. “Contact” concludes with Mitsuki getting a phone call that she answers with a desperate, “Hinata?”, so maybe she’s onto something. Either way, it seems too little too late.
You can stream Invasion season 1, episode 8, “Contact”, exclusively on Apple TV+.
