Summary
Invasion hasn’t been in a hurry in Season 3, but it finally feels like it’s going somewhere in “Infinitas”, with a keener sense of mystery and a cliffhanger that pulls the trigger on the threat of another invasion.
Generally speaking, I don’t like Invasion very much. Never have, really. And the first two episodes of Season 3 have largely been really good examples of why. The Trevante-focused premiere felt too expositional and inert, and the second chapter, which caught up with Mitsuki, had too much Nikhil, who’s awful. By that logic, Episode 3, “Infinitas”, which feels in many ways like a mix of the two, should have been insufferable for me, but on the contrary, it’s where I think everything is starting to click. There’s a more coherent sense of mystery, some actual forward progression, and a last-minute cliffhanger that makes good on the promise of the show’s title. Sure, Nikhil is still around, but his screentime is minimal, and now that the stakes have been raised, we can only hope he gets killed off sooner rather than later.
The smartest play here is reintroducing Aneesha, who’s living out an idyllic suburban existence with Clark and the kids, and then instead of devoting an entire episode to her slowly worrying about the aliens, has Trevante and Jamila land on her doorstep pretty much immediately. They’re there to ask Luke some questions about Caspar’s brain activity right before his death, showing him the EEG printout that depicts a curious spike that Aneesha, a nurse, can’t make sense of. The official WDC line is that Caspar had a Tonic-Clonic seizure, but even Jamila knows that’s likely bogus. Luke lies, though, claiming not to have heard anything from the aliens since the mothership crashed.
This, again, is dealt with quickly — that night, Luke tells Aneesha that he actually heard them when Trevante returned, and drew the same waveform seen in Caspar’s EEG, and the next morning, Aneesha is at Trevante’s motel. It’s as easy as that. But far from feeling rushed, the subtle storytelling in this early portion effectively lays out why Aneesha would make this decision. Ryder is trying to rush through her life so that she can become qualified as a doctor and begin helping people. Clark is semi-obsessively checking conspiracy forums about alien activity. The legacy of the previous invasion still looms over everyone in myriad ways, and Aneesha needs to know if there’s another one coming.
It’s Clark’s browsing history that gives Trevante his next target. A mysterious anonymous source called “Infinitas” has been consistently leaking alien-related data, a lot of it classified, to give the public a fair and fighting chance of understanding what’s going on. One of the leaks shows a frequency that emanated from all of the alien portals three minutes and four seconds before Trevante’s return; the waveform exactly matches Caspar’s EEG and Luke’s drawings. Trevante and Aneesha head to the nearest Infinitas meeting, which is in Baker City, with the former locking Jamila in the motel room, ostensibly for her own safety. Trevante’s struggling much more than he’s letting on, and his scattershot visions and furniture-destroying mood swings are making him unstable.
Golshifteh Farahani and Shamier Anderson in Invasion Season 3 | Image via Apple TV+
The Infinitas meeting is like an MRA and NRA baby raised by a rural militia. It’s all guns and suggestions of locking alien-sensitive children up and handing out conspiratorial pamphlets. It probably qualifies as topical if you squint a bit, but that’s a beehive I’m not interested in sticking my arm in. Needless to say, Trevante doesn’t exactly blend in, and after about five minutes, he’s identified, accused of being a species traitor, and has to fight his way out. He didn’t manage to acquire any information during that time, but luckily, Aneesha asked someone about Infinitas, so she receives a text message arranging a meeting.
A white suburban soccer mom named Debbie serves as the chauffeur to this meeting, which is held in a well-appointed house in a nice neighborhood full of at least one young man from the Baker City meeting and several others, including two women who’re clearly in charge. Their job is to work out if Trevante and Aneesha have anything of value to offer, in which case they’ll be taken somewhere else, presumably to meet with Infinitas “himself”. When asked about the frequency, these ladies reveal that the last time it was heard was right when the hunter-killers showed up, being piped from a DSN station (part of NASA’s Deep Space Network). When Trevante hears the frequency, it causes intense ringing in his ears and gives him a vision of his time on the mothership, reaching for a growling alien through a gooey wall. It seems pretty easy to make sense of his claim that the surviving aliens are hiding in the walls of the crashed mothership, but the FBI burst in and raid the place, arresting everyone present.
At this point, I should mention Mitsuki and Nikhil, who Invasion Season 3, Episode 3 also checks in with. They’re infiltrating Portal Base 11 in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in the hopes of secretly scraping some data from the servers, but just as the FBI jumps Trevante and co., WDC soldiers burst into the control room of Portal 11, holding Mitsuki and Nikhil at gunpoint.
Like Trevante, Mitsuki also hears the intense ringing in her ears and starts screaming. The lights go out and the portal starts rumbling. Suddenly, alien tentacles burst through it, killing all of the soldiers, but Nikhil is able to drag an unconscious Mitsuki to safety, finally making himself useful.
Back at Aneesha and Clark’s house, TV news reports attacks at all the portal sites. A second invasion is underway, and Aneesha is still missing. Jamila turns up looking for Trevante, revealing that he was with Aneesha, and neither ever returned to the motel.
RELATED:
