Summary
Invasion flips the Season 3 script in “Life in the Dead Zone”, showing a whole new side to the aliens and suggesting that the real bad guys are ourselves. The only problem is that it does so using the most played-out and obvious storytelling techniques imaginable.
If you want to build sympathy for anything in film and TV, you make it resemble an animal. It doesn’t have to look like one, obviously, but you know what I mean. As long as it mimics the essential traits of something cute and cuddly, the loyalty and the innocence and sort of… purity, I suppose, it’ll have the intended effect, even for a spindly, translucent alien monstrosity that is polluting the very air. Invasion, for all its many faults, hasn’t really taken this approach, not in Season 3 or any of the others, but in Episode 8, “Life in the Dead Zone”, there’s definitely a whiff of it. And I don’t like it.
This was the big reveal of the previous episode, if you recall. Mitsuki encountered a new species of alien, a see-through bug-like thing that she observes at the start of this one as it chitters around doing a light bit of gardening (it’s later explicitly referred to, albeit colloquially, as a “gardener”, so that’s what we’ll call it.) Witnessing this behaviour joins a few dots for Mitsuki, who has always been relatively sympathetic to the alien cause, or at least more willing to have a chat with them about it. She recalls a previous conversation from Season 2 where the concept of “invasion” was seemingly lost on her interlocutor. The gardener, conceptually, is an outgrowth of that obliviousness. It’s just planting seeds, creating sustenance for its kin. The aliens aren’t invading. They’re terraforming, trying to scrape out a space to live peacefully on Earth, potentially alongside humans, or at least alongside ones that don’t creep into the Dead Zone with guns.
This dovetails pretty obviously with the depiction of humans as more savage and unfeeling and dopey than ever, especially the Infinitas dorks, the recent introduction of an alien-worshipping death cult still chafing rather awkwardly against the rest of the narrative. These guys are seen to be aggressive and idiotic – going so far as mercilessly killing each other for perceived failings, like letting Mitsuki escape from their captivity – just as the aliens are seen to be all understanding and gentle. It’s too obvious. And Mitsuki’s unique power of being able to vaguely communicate with them makes it worse, because she consistently interprets every vocalisation and gesture as the most sympathetic thing possible, trying to do all the audience’s emotional work for them.
“Life in the Dead Zone” also quickly becomes a kind of buddy adventure, with Mitsuki following the Gardener around as it leads her back to what she presumes is the Mothership. Remember, the central arc of this season is that humanity has crafted a bomb to destroy the Mothership, and Mitsuki is trying to deliver it, but that feels lost in her immediate discovery that the aliens are well-meaning and peaceful and just want to be left alone. Predictably, the Gardener gets badly wounded during a contrived misunderstanding in an unstable cave, so Mitsuki has to help it escape, and it, in turn, helps her.
The wildcard element of Invasion Season 3, Episode 8 is that the aliens’ terraforming project is making Earth’s atmosphere toxic for humans. The air in the Dead Zone is fatal, given enough exposure, and humans need to constantly huff oxygen to survive in it. This is clarified during Mitsuki’s brief imprisonment at the hands of the Infinitas group, who initially try to kill her by throwing her into a pit with a couple of tetchy hunter-killers, but neither of them touches her. This all mostly exists to facilitate a bit of jeopardy and an action sequence to clarify Mitsuki’s badass bona fides, but there were some details I liked. Carmichael, using his position as the group’s “spiritual leader” to hoard all the oxygen, is very typical of classic religious cult behaviour, and the fact that he’s a grieving father first and foremost echoes the recruitment strategy established in Marilyn’s flashback episode. Infinitas is comprised of people whose grief and desperation have made them susceptible to manipulation and to Marilyn’s seemingly bogus claim that the aliens can reunite true believers with their lost loved ones.
But you never know. “Life in the Dead Zone” makes it pretty clear that the Gardeners, if not necessarily the hunter-killers, are pretty cool. Mitsuki encourages the dying one she’s following to keep going so that it can make it back “home”, and when it does so, several others of its kind, these ones tellingly not translucent, come to its aid. They gather around it and heal it with what seems like their own life force, leaving them all similarly see-through, but alive. All for one and one for all, I suppose. That’s a mentality that humankind would do well to embrace, especially these days, and the fact that the Gardeners rounding on an injured Mitsuki doesn’t feel remotely threatening suggests Invasion has made its point about who the good guys and bad guys really are here. It’s just a shame it doesn’t have a better, more sophisticated way of doing it.
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