Summary
Invasion Season 3 gets moving in Episode 4, getting the gang back together and sending them out on intriguing individual missions.
There’s a feeling of getting the gang back together in Episode 4 of Invasion Season 3, which would be ideal if Nikhil weren’t a part of that gang. But, lo and behold, even he grows a bit of a spine in “The Mission”, which is perhaps just as well, since he’s probably going to need it. The titular mission – which we’ll get to – is extremely vague and goes badly wrong out of the gate, and it’s clear that whatever the new and improved aliens are up to, the two years humanity has spent invasion-free has made them complacent.
To be more accurate, I should say that “The Mission” puts two gangs together. Nikhil is in one of them, joined by Trevante and Mitsuki, for obvious, hive mind-adjacent reasons. The other comprises Aneesha and her family, along with Jamila and the woman who is identified as Infinitas, the clandestine conspiracist whistle-blower introduced last episode. It spreads the fight across two fronts, which seems smart, but also gives the show some more urgency and cohesion after introducing Season 3 in too-narrow slices.
And things aren’t going well. As teased last time out, the aliens are back, having breached the various portal sites with gigantic, growing tendrils that are expanding all over the place and engaging with humans in the vicinity of the portals. Hunter-Killers are flooding out and now, thanks to the tentacle things, they’re all hard-wired into the same network, making the neural darts, humanity’s only feasible way to fight back, ineffective.
This is explained to Nikhil by Jack Hollander, as part of the preamble for the briefing on the titular mission. After being arrested by the FBI with Aneesha, Trevante is taken to WDC headquarters along with Nikhil and Mitsuki, who were picked up at the Portal 11 base. The situation is pretty grave. The aliens, now mysteriously upgraded, are on the warpath. Trevante can’t remember any more information about their mother ship aside from the fleshy walls hiding even more terrifying creatures, even when subjected to the same mysterious frequency that triggered his previous visions, and the portals are immune to all earthly ordnance, including nuclear weapons. Hence, a new plan. And it’s not very thorough.
The new plan is to send a team of elite hand-picked soldiers on what is essentially a suicide mission through the Dead Zone and into the mothership, to blow up the core with a Shard Bomb. It sounds okay in theory, but this doesn’t address the fact that nobody who has entered the Dead Zone has survived, nobody knows where the core is or how to navigate the mothership, and there are countless hunter-killers in between who’re now invulnerable against the only previously effective weapon. Trevante volunteers immediately, but Mitsuki and especially Nikhil are less convinced.
Mitsuki’s reservations are largely down to various off-screen experiments between seasons that were evidently designed to help her communicate with the aliens, and that’s the justification for her involvement in this mission, but you can tell that Hollander is clutching at straws. Mitsuki might be able to communicate with them, and Trevante might be able to recall some stuff about how to navigate the mothership. But they might all just die, which seems rather likely at the end of Invasion Season 3, Episode 4, since the second their helicopter crosses into the Dead Zone, it’s immediately attacked by the alien tentacles. Oops.
Anyway, this is only half of “The Mission”. The rest belongs to Aneesha, who is being interrogated by the FBI at their field office in Boise under suspicion of conspiring with Infinitas. Luckily, she’s allowed a 60-second phone call that lets her alert Clark and Jamila to her predicament, and they both set off to rescue her. To be fair, Aneesha hasn’t done anything wrong, but that’s quite hard to explain when she was picked up in an Infinitas safehouse and her husband has been browsing the group’s message boards for a period of months.
Speaking of Infinitas, one of this episode’s big reveals is the fellow’s true identity, and it turns out to be the woman, Verna, who was asking Aneesha and Trevante questions in the previous episode. Her nephew arrives to bring her some supposedly life-saving medication, but it all turns out to be part of a slick escape attempt, with Verna deliberately sending herself into anaphylactic shock. Aneesha, none the wiser, tries to tend to her as a nurse, so she ends up entering the ambulance with Verna and her nephew. At the same time, Clark and Jamila arrive, having snuck in, so the entire family is reunited just in time to unwittingly be complicit in the operation of what is being classified as a domestic terrorist organisation. Everything is fine!
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