‘Invasion’ Season 3 Ending Explained – Well, That Was Kinda Dumb, Right?

I think it’s over? You can never quite tell with Invasion, but “The End of the Line” definitely feels like an ending. And thank goodness for that, since if Season 3 of this show has proved anything, it’s that nobody seemed to have any idea how to continue this story beyond its first season, let alone conclude it in the third. I’m not entirely sure what happened. What I do know is that a lot of the finale is dumb and unintentionally comical, and most of it leaves us with more questions than answers.

I, for one, don’t particularly care what the answers to those lingering questions might be, since I’m certain Invasion doesn’t know either, and I’d rather have no payoff at all than one invented on the fly to justify another run of episodes. This climax isn’t entirely satisfying, but it provides enough payoff to justify leaving the story alone. Whatever the point was, it has long since been made.

To the Mothership

Picking up where we left things, Aneesha is furious about Clark’s death and is tirelessly pursuing Verna and the remnants of Infinitas. It’s a wonder that Verna has made any progress at all, since she keeps stopping every two minutes to force her followers to breathe the noxious air and rant about their extraterrestrial deliverance. I wouldn’t mind this, since the show has spent ages making the point that all these people are blinded by grief, but breathing the air literally makes their veins turn black. At least one of them would have noticed that Verna is lacking a lot of evidence for her grandiose claims.

Meanwhile, Trevante, Jamila, and Nikhil are preparing to enter the mothership, while Mitsuki is still trying to tentatively communicate with the aliens through the pulsing tendrils all over the Dead Zone. It just so happens that she’s doing so feet away from where Verna happens to be, so she’s able to go over and distract Mitsuki with the Infinitas pitch in the hopes of being led to the Mothership so she can prevent the deployment of the bomb.

The WDC, now led by Aneesha for seemingly no other reason than she’s really angry, are ambushed by Infinitas in the woods, leading to a brief firefight. Once Aneesha learns that Verna has Mitsuki and is heading for the mothership, she sets off to catch her. All roads must converge and all that.

It Was All A Dream

Inside the mothership, Nikhil and Trevante are both immobilized by crippling memories of their darkest hours; Nikhil recalls the death of his mother in a situation that was his fault, and Trev the loss of his son. Jamila tries to talk them both out of it, but she’s interrupted by the arrival of Caspar. It takes her an annoyingly long time to figure out that she’s also trapped in a vision and he’s the projection of her deepest trauma, but she gets there eventually.

Side note: Why on earth is the alien mothership shaped like a literal maze? It just doesn’t make any sense. I get it as a kind of brain-like network of neural pathways, all the better to facilitate the Hivemind, but logistically it’s just absurd. There’s a bit here where the aliens all get a signal to attack Trev, Nikhil, and Jamila, but the layout of the maze means that it takes them ages to respond to the threat. There’s no tension in watching them slowly navigate the twisting corridors. Half the episode takes place while they’re on the way, and when they get there, they immediately turn back anyway.

We’ve got Mitsuki to thank for that last bit. Eventually, Aneesha catches up with Verna, who briefly holds Mitsuki hostage before fleeing and letting her go. Aneesha tries to compel Mitsuki to accompany her to the mothership, but she instead stays behind to commune with the tendrils. In so doing, she’s able to see a vision of Nikhil trying to save her when she was being experimented on, and this allows her to communicate with him. She rushes to the mothership to save him, passing Aneesha and Verna on the way, who’re fighting outside. This is supposed to be a very dramatic scene, but for some reason, Mitsuki runs like someone who has heard of running as a concept but doesn’t quite know how to operate their limbs to make it happen. She looks like Bigfoot in the Patterson footage.

Golshifteh Farahani in Invasion Season 3 | Image via Apple TV+

Bombs Away

Mitsuki is able to get inside the mothership, plant both hands on one of the maze walls, and scream at the entire Hivemind, which is somehow clearly interpreted as her pulling all the aliens away from the others and towards her. It also knocks Trevante and Nikhil out of their memory prisons, so they plant the bomb.

This is dumb, too. Before Nikhil sets the bomb, he makes a big deal about not leaving Mitsuki behind, but he sets the timer so short that it goes off before they’ve even gotten a safe distance away, and nothing happens to any of them. The entire Hivemind is shut down, as planned, and aside from hurting everyone’s ears, it seems to have no adverse effects whatsoever. He doesn’t manage to save Mitsuki, though, because she’s inexplicably beamed up into the sky and winked out of existence in a flurry of her own nicest memories, despite the bomb having shut the ship down.

It’s weird, this. Mitsuki’s connection to the aliens was never really explained, so it’s probably not a coincidence that she was compelled by her best memories instead of her worst ones, as Trevante, Nikhil, and Jamila were. But it happens so suddenly and is so ill-explained that it’s barely worth speculating about. Outside, Verna, traumatized by the sudden death of the aliens, makes one last lunge at Aneesha, who shoots her dead.

They Think It’s All Over

I think the ending of Invasion Season 3 is the end of the show overall. Outside of Mitsuki’s unexplained abduction, it certainly feels that way, since we get a brief montage of the characters moving on. Humans start turning the tide against the remaining Hunter Killers who have been disconnected from the network. Jamila starts painting again. Trev gets a promotion. Nikhil is spending all of his time obsessively looking for Mitsuki, and Aneesha returns home to tell the kids that Clark is dead.

I will admit to being concerned by Aneesha’s dialogue in this scene, which deliberately implies the story might not be over, but I think it’s included more for the nice “we’re all in this together” family sentiment than an outright fourth-season tease. And this seems to be confirmed by the title card that climactically pops up, reading, “Earth — Day 1 Post-Invasion”. That’s a good sign.

It might seem like I’m being a bit too harsh here, but there’s just nothing in this finale to get excited about. All the revelations were reiterations of things we already knew. Caspar’s big “return” was an illusion. Mitsuki’s fate was weird and unexplained. And the basic construction of certain sequences, thanks to the silly design of the mothership and the too-busy visual effects, felt lacking. But all of this is just about right for a show that has been truly meandering ever since the first season, which itself wasn’t very good. If the end of the line has finally been reached, as the episode’s title implies, well… it feels long overdue.