Summary
Invasion provides some backstory to Infinitas in “Marilyn”, but it’s a slow-paced, maudlin chapter that raises some interesting questions but doesn’t deliver any answers.
Invasion Season 3’s clear turning point was the reveal that Infinitas weren’t just some anti-government hacker collective, but an alien-worshipping death cult. Episode 6, “Marilyn”, makes the mistake of thinking that we need to know the precise nature of how this came about and spend forty-five minutes on it in the middle of the season. I would disagree. Infinitas’s true motives were a fun twist, but the demystifying of it here arguably dulls the impact a little, even if it raises a curious question about the true extent of the aliens’ powers and intentions.
This is all a bit like those inevitable episodes in zombie shows and spin-offs that take us back to the start of the apocalypse when nobody knew what was going on. It’s always frustrating for the viewer since you have to put up with people acting like idiots and figuring out things that we’ve already known for ages, but to be fair, “Marilyn” keeps this to a minimum. Most of it is set two years earlier, at the very beginning of the invasion, but outside of one panicky, protracted alien sequence that claims the life of Joel’s mother, leaving him in Verna’s care, the action is mostly very intimate and character-driven.
It’s just difficult to care. We’re approaching this with the knowledge of where these characters ultimately end up, which doesn’t help, but truth be told, Verna and Joel aren’t really that interesting. What is interesting, I suppose, is the idea of how the aliens’ attempts to communicate can be received radically differently depending on the personal circumstances of the receiver. Verna’s in the grip of grief when she has her encounter, and on some level, she needs to believe in the idea of the invasion as a kind of salvation, and the invaders as omnipotent deities who can reunite her with her sister, despite her sister’s passing.
There’s a zombie apocalypse feel to the framing of Invasion Season 3, Episode 6, too, with the idea of a bunch of survivors bundled up in a claustrophobic location, trying to work out how to proceed while various personalities become dominant (or the opposite). The episode’s weak here too, though, since the characters are very thinly sketched, and there’s nowhere near enough time spent with any of them to get a real sense of their relationships or personalities. You’ve got the flinty one, the meek one, and the utterly useless pastor who isn’t remotely fit for purpose and takes his own life at the first sign of trouble.
This allows Verna to assume leadership rather organically, mostly just by being level-headed in the face of crisis. The idea of her being some kind of extraterrestrial messiah comes later. She’s confronted by another, different type of alien, like a swirling portal of many voices, one of which belongs to Verna’s dead sister, Angie. Curiously, the voice shares information that only Angie could have known, but I suspect that might be explained away as the aliens downloading the knowledge and experiences of the humans they kill and folding it into their “network”. But Verna doesn’t see it like that.
The fact that all the survivors are clustering in a church is probably just a coincidence, but they do seem unusually accepting of the idea that the aliens might be their salvation instead of their end. Verna’s arc is decently well-handled as we see her consolidate more power and become more militant in her beliefs, co-opting a lot of typical religious rhetoric for the purpose of proselytising on the aliens’ behalf. But when we finally jump back to the present day in the aftermath of Infinitas taking out Hollander and Joel jumping aboard the transport chopper, it’s an enormous leap. She’s so radicalised that she’s almost a different character, and there’s a sense of tonal whiplash there that feels a little contrary to the episode’s purpose of trying to humanise her.
I just can’t shake the feeling that we didn’t really need to know much — or any — of this. Verna’s belief that the Dead Zone is a kind of “new Eden” doesn’t hold a great deal of water since we’ve already seen how the aliens treat people who venture into it, and her sudden shift in demeanour is hard to take. We’d have been better focusing on the period of time between the destruction of the mothership and the present day, where her belief clearly became much stronger and more extreme. But if nothing else, we have a bit of a clearer picture of who the “heroes” of this show really have to worry about.
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