Summary
Invasion Season 3 finally ups the ante in Episode 9 with some action, a key revelation, and the death of a major character.
Invasion Season 3 has been all over the place, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since the first two seasons weren’t exactly coherent either. But with Episode 9, “Homecoming”, straining to be a proper penultimate episode that gets all the pieces into place for a big finale — a finale that, let’s be frank, is absolutely not going to be able to conclude this story, meaning we’ll have another season to sit through — you can really feel how inert the whole thing has been. A key revelation, a bit of action, and the death of a major character finally inject some life into the show’s suffering veins. But is it too little too late?
It’s probably telling that most of the episode, up until the final ten minutes or so, isn’t particularly engaging, but it at least benefits from having all of the main characters in the same place and with a unified objective. Not that everyone can necessarily agree on the objective. By tracking the neural dampener in her neck, Nikhil is able to find Mitsuki unconscious on a hill and take her back to the WDC camp (everyone is wearing the urban camo uniforms in “Homecoming”, which makes them oddly difficult to tell apart). When she wakes up, she has been miraculously healed of her gunshot wound, proving that the Gardeners who rounded on her were saving her life, but this has the knock-on effect of making her a bit too respectful of the aliens and their “perfect” — she uses that word a couple of times — hivemind union.
This is very explicitly suggesting that humans, who can’t stop bickering in the best case and killing each other in the worst, are the bad guys here. And it’s not a worthless theme, but it’s difficult to take in this show since the idea of the Gardeners and alien pacifism is pretty new. Thus far, we’ve only really seen the Hunter-Killers, and they’ve been killing everyone pretty indiscriminately. I’m just not sure the idea really fits.
Trevante, meanwhile, has his own kind of awakening. After taking a spill in the woods while looking for the mothership, he suddenly gets his memories back, and they don’t reveal anything positive. The most alarming development is that he was the one who killed Caspar. Now, it was admittedly in self-defense, since the aliens mind-controlled him — again, not very pacifistic — into attacking Trev with the shard, and Trev was forced to defend himself. But for some reason, Trevante doesn’t mention this bit to anyone else and just wallows in his guilt while Jamila gets all weepy.
Trevante also recalls hiding in a blind tunnel where the aliens couldn’t see him. After Caspar damaged the core, the shard ripped through the walls of the ship, and a piece of it went dark — “like neural synapses being cut”, Aneesha helpfully offers. This is a double dose of important info, since it gives the team a way in, a place to hide, and reassurance that the shard bomb can destroy the mothership from within. It’s just a case of getting in and setting it off, which is easier said than done.
It’d be difficult under normal circumstances, but the presence of Infinitas makes the task a whole lot harder. This is another element of Invasion Season 3, Episode 9 that I’m just not buying. Verna leads her group through the Dead Zone to link up with the group that is now being led by Konrad after he took his chance to murder Carmichael, and they all seem suspiciously well-versed in military weapons and tactics, given that most of them met while sheltering in a church. The logistical realities of this group just don’t make any sense to me.
Their ideology isn’t especially clear either. It has been established that Verna has targeted grieving people by peddling the idea that worshipping the aliens can reunite them with their lost loved ones, but it’s really obvious that there are some holes in her thinking. There’s no proof of any of her claims, and when one of the followers points out that the Dead Zone — which they have to keep huffing oxygen to even survive in — doesn’t really resemble the Eden-like paradise that Verna has been describing, Konrad shoots him dead. Verna is ruling by fear.
As it turns out, though, for all their scouts and weapons and unswerving belief in extraterrestrial salvation, Infinitas aren’t as clever as they think. When they raid the WDC camp, they find the place empty except for some mines rigged into a convenient booby trap. Some soldiers, including Aneesha and Clark, are waiting in ambush. They detonate the trap and open fire on Infinitas, wiping most of them out.
This is a pretty good set-piece, putting aside the fact that it repeatedly asks us to care about random WDC soldiers who were thin archetypes to begin with. But it reiterates just how crazy Verna is. When the fighting gets a little overwhelming, Tucker grabs Joel as a hostage and drags him out into the open to use as a bargaining chip, and Verna shoots him dead rather than surrender. Joel knows it’s coming, too. That’s a bleak, albeit predictable moment, and also gets Tucker killed. Aneesha breaks cover to drag him away, meaning that Clark has to rush to her rescue, killing several Infinitas goons and Konrad in the process.
But, sadly, it’s not to be for Aneesha and Clark. In the very next scene, Verna, who is virtually on her own at this point, shoots him dead, leaving Aneesha screaming and crying over his corpse. With Trevante, Mitsuki, Nikhil, and Jamila on their way to the mothership, and this new revenge angle in play, the stage is set for a half-decent finale. But I, for one, don’t trust this show to stick the landing.
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