Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Invasion S2E1, “Something’s Changed” (written by Simon Kinberg and directed by Alik Sakharov)
Editor’s Note: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Invasion Season 2 picks up about four months after the events of Season 1. We’re told it’s Day 121 of the invasion, but since the series premiere was called “Last Day” and the Season 1 finale was called “First Day,” I’m not entirely sure where we started counting.
Regardless, we’re quickly informed that the aliens are making significant progress at terraforming the planet (I’ll forego quibbling over the word choice), and the military powers of Earth have united to fight against them. But, it’s not going well, in contrast to the public messaging, of course.
We pick up with Mitsuki (Shioli Kutsuna) fighting against koosh ball aliens in Japan. Fire seems to work against them pretty well, which is noteworthy. So too is the fact that Mitsuki’s hair is black now. I don’t think it would have grown out enough over four months for this result, so we’ll have to presume that she had been using some kind of temporary dye, or just not think about it too much (which is probably what the showrunners would prefer).
She’s swooped up by some men in a helicopter because the powers that be have been looking for her. They don’t care about the people left on the ground, or the fact that Mitsuki wants to stay and fight for their lives. Given her history with the aliens, they think she represents humanity’s best hope in the war in general.
It turns out that the alien structure in the Amazon that we saw in the Season 1 finale is the ship that was nuked in S1E9. Probably a lot of viewers put that together, even if I personally didn’t at the time. Regardless, this is where Mitsuki is whisked off to.
Research into the ship is being led by a smarmy fellow named Fakhil (Shane Zaza). We can gather that he’s some kind of tech billionaire in the world of Invasion. He says things like that the only rule he believes in following is to always make sure you’re breaking one. I do not like him.
Mitsuki is made to submit to a psychological evaluation, which Dr. Maya Castillo (Olivia-Mai Barrett) reports she fails, but Fakhil insists they proceed with their plan anyway, which is for Mitsuki to enter the ship. Apparently this has not gone well for previous scientists, who have suffered memory loss and untold neurological damage, but when Mitsuki enters, the alien blob acts in a way Fakhi and Maya haven’t seen before and seems almost friendly.
We get a reprise of Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” which it would seem Mitsuki plays for the alien blob, and we’re again led to wonder what happened to Hinata (Rinko Kikuchi). My money is on her having been absorbed by the alien hivemind in a way that’s had a significant impact, but we also have to think about how to put this together with what we see of the ongoing invasion elsewhere.
It seems to me that there are two main possibilities: either the downing of this ship severed it from the collective alien consciousness, or there are actually two different and competing alien factions in this story (and humanity stupidly nuked the friendly one). Of course something else could be going on, but it’s worth keeping an eye on this question as Season 2 of Invasion proceeds.
Meanwhile, Aneesha (Golshifteh Farahani), Luke (Azhy Robertson) and Sarah (Tara Moayedi) have been living perpetually on the run. They get caught by the military when Luke makes an ill-advised attempt to steal gas from them, and end up in a convoy with a man named Clark (Enver Gjokaj). He’s in handcuffs but assures them that not everything is as it seems before the convoy is attacked by his militia group.
This is the second time the Maliks have been in a military convoy that has been attacked, so we really have to wonder how common this is. Clark’s group is known as The Movement, and they’ve clearly undertaken an elaborate ruse to rob the military. For what it’s worth, this group seems to be completely different from the group that attacked the convoy the Maliks were in previously, though I suppose we don’t know that for sure. At least, the vehicles in S1E9 did not have Ms painted on them, as we see here.
Nonetheless, Aneesha’s hesitance to be taken in by The Movement does make more sense if we recall that earlier event. Those people killed her husband Ahmed (Firas Nassar) and seemed hell bent on getting the shard thing that Luke has had since the beginning of the series. In contrast, Clark et al. don’t seem to know anything about this artifact, or at least they didn’t until the end of the episode.
Something’s Changed
Invasion S2E1 proceeds almost entirely through only two of the four perspectives we were given throughout Season 1. Trevante (Shamier Anderson) is absent. The last we saw him, he was on a beach as a huge spacecraft appeared on the horizon. I’m sure we’ll pick up with him down the line.
Caspar (Billy Barratt), on the other hand, was in a coma or perhaps technically dead, though he featured in an intriguing dream/vision involving Ikuro (Togo Igawa) in the Season 1 finale. And we cut to him as the Season 2 premiere comes to a close, as something has changed in his brain activity.
This would seem to correspond to what’s going on in the Amazon, as the blob reaches out towards Mitsuki, and the same event would seem to cause Luke’s shard to begin to vibrate. I’ll remind you that we still don’t know where that shard came from, and also that Luke seemed to be the only kid at his school that didn’t get a nosebleed all the way back in the series premiere.
We really don’t know what’s going on, but the stage is thus set for Season 2. I hope the lapsed Buddhist monk who likes beer shows up at some point.
See you next week.
