Summary
Invasion‘s Season 3 premiere upholds an old tradition of barely moving the plot forward at all. Some clunky expositional dialogue bogs things down, but there’s sufficient mystery to hold our interest — for now.
The most apt description of any episode of Invasion generally begins with, “Not much happened, but…”. This holds true in the Season 3 premiere, “The Ones We Leave Behind”, which has the unenviable task of setting up a new status quo after the Season 2 finale. The problems include the way it chooses to do this, which is largely through clunky expositional dialogue, and a narrow focus on Trevante and Jamila that hems things in a bit. For a show that is ostensibly about a global alien invasion, it feels pretty limited in scope here, though crucially not uninteresting, even if it’s glacially paced.
I’ll give you a brief summary of that new status quo. Following the heroic sacrifices of Trevante and Caspar, the alien mothership crash-landed and fell dormant. Two years later, the event is known as M-Day, and the kids have cool Trevante action figures to honour his efforts. He and Caspar are both appropriately revered, and humanity is generally pretty chipper about things. All of the hunter-killers retreated inside the “Dead Zone”, the toxic radius around the mothership crash site, and there has been no extraterrestrial activity in the ship or any of the twelve portals, all of which have remained closed.
It’s obvious to the audience that all of this is a temporary state of affairs — there’s an alien murder in the cold open to make the point clear — but governments are peddling the idea of peace pretty heavily. It’s important to understand this since it informs some of the questionable decision-making we see later, since the new world order is threatened by the sudden re-emergence of Trevante, who bubbles up through Portal 11 in the Atlantic Ocean.
Needless to say, Trevante’s return in Invasion Season 3, Episode 1, causes a lot of problems, since it threatens the official party line. There’s also the small matter of him potentially being an extraterrestrial spy, so he’s cautiously monitored and interrogated by Jack Hollander, who is adamant about writing Trevante’s claims off as PTSD since he has a history of being the sole survivor in calamities that suspiciously kill everyone around him.
But Trevante’s claims are pretty important. He can’t recall how the mothership came down, but the last thing he remembers is something inside the ship’s walls, and he keeps having visions of it that convince him the alien threat hasn’t diminished and another invasion is on the horizon. It irritated me how reluctant everyone is to believe this, given the circumstances, but it’s easy enough to write off that behaviour as extremely wishful thinking. The government has repeatedly made a point of telling everyone that there are no more aliens to worry about; Trevante’s claims run directly contrary to that idea.
Thus, PR spin. Trevante is reluctantly wheeled out to give a prepared public speech that absolutely doesn’t mention impending invasions at all, but he’s distracted by constant visions and headaches and, eventually, the sight of Jamila shouting things out from the crowd. Jamila is still heavily grieving Caspar and lacks a few answers that she believes are rattling around inside of Trevante’s head. She’s probably right, but given that everyone around him tends to end up dead in one way or another, he’s reluctant to help her explore the possibilities of what might have happened to Caspar, or might still be going on aboard the alien mothership.
However, Caspar’s EEG readout at the time of his death, which Jamila is clenching in her hand, gives Trevante a sudden vision with a bit more clarity. This time, he sees what was aboard the mothership — a new kind of alien. He also hears the same sound he heard when he lost his unit overseas; the sound that heralds a pending invasion. There’s another one coming, he’s sure of it, but nobody seems interested in hearing about it, writing his claims off as PTSD and telling him, essentially, to shut up.
It’s inevitable that Trevante is going to go rogue, which he does, knocking out a couple of soldiers on the way. But it’s his team-up with Jamila that makes this late development more interesting, since she decides to tag along in the hopes of getting her own answers. Maybe she will, maybe she won’t — we’ll have to wait and see. But since Invasion is up to its old tricks already in Season 3, it’ll probably be quite a while before we find out anything meaningful either way.
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