Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Invasion S2E6, “Pressure Points” (written by Donald Joh & Uzoamaka Maduka and directed by Brad Anderson).
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 S2E6 picks up with Aneesha (Golshifteh Farahani), Luke (Azhy Robertson), Clark (Enver Gjokaj) and the others headed in a convoy towards Camp Pierce, where they think Sarah (Tara Moayedi) has been taken. Even though it was clearly stated last week that there were aliens in between where they were and where they’re going, they still seem surprised to see them.
Passing a giant crater in the road, Luke begins clutching his head as he’s hearing voices again, then the aliens attack. This hunter-killer variety is definitely cooler and more intimidating than the previous version, and they are able knock some cars off the road and kill a few people before they pull back for reasons that aren’t clear.
Clark spins off the road and gets a nasty cut on his leg, which Aneesha tends to, and ultimately they reunite with the other surviving members of The Movement and flee the area.
Presumably they are continuing on their way to Camp Pierce, and besides some tense action sequences, there isn’t a lot that happens in this storyline this week. The most important thing is when Luke gets an attacking hunter-killer to stand down by getting inside of its head. He’s clearly had some kind of psychic connection with the aliens from the beginning, though we still don’t know the nature of it or the circumstances under which he found the shard relic. He does tell Ryder (Olivia-Mai Barrett) in this episode that he immediately felt like it was his when he did. Regardless, we’re finally getting some forward movement on the Luke front, which is nice even if I don’t particularly like the character.
Jamila (India Brown), Alfie (Cache Vanderpuye), Monty (Paddy Holland), and Penny (Ruby Siddle) arrive in Paris and are greeted by a recorded announcement in the air telling everyone to evacuate. They don’t do that, of course, and end up spending a night at Monty and Penny’s parents’ apartment.
Monty learns that his dad has been having an affair and gets upset about it, though he seems to keep Penny from learning this information. I do wonder what’s going on with their parents. They could be dead, and probably are, but we don’t know that.
Jamila has another dream but this time Caspar (Billy Barratt) isn’t there on the other end. When the kids search the hospital they do ultimately find Caspar, awake and scrawling on a wall, even though everyone else in the hospital is dead. The soldiers who were protecting Caspar were apparently killed by aliens, so Monty is right to wonder how Caspar hid from them. But he says he doesn’t remember.
So that’s a mystery, but it seems to me the bigger mystery is how Caspar woke up. He’d been in a coma for months, having seizures over and over again. It was in that state that he was able to reach out to Jamila somehow. And he also appeared to Mitsuki (Shioli Kutsuna) when she communed with the blob alien in “A Voice from the Other Side.” Perhaps there is a link between what Mitsuki and the others do in the Amazon here in S2E6 and the fact that Caspar has awoken.
Mitsuki is clearly shaken from her encounter with the alien in S2E5, but she wants to go back in. In another iteration of what has been running dynamic in Season 2, Nikhil (Shane Zaza) is enthusiastic about the idea while Maya (Naian González Norvind) is concerned about Mitsuki’s well-being. But, once again, Mitsuki is dismissive of Maya’s attempts to protect her and back in she goes.
The alien, which insists it is Hinata (Rinko Kikuchi), gets Mitsuki to remove her helmet and then blobs into her head, psychically taking her to a beach where a young Hinata is flying a kite for the first time. She wants Mitsuki to join her, which makes me wonder if the other scientists, who’ve lost their minds, took the alien up on a similar deal. Regardless, Mitsuki keeps her wits enough to make Morse code with her hand to tell the team to hit the alien with a magnet.
She’s released from the alien’s hold, and as she recovers from the ordeal, Maya informs her that it let out sounds they hadn’t heard before. Mitsuki is convinced that this is the alien’s language, and that she can learn it to communicate with the being and find its pressure points. I’m not sure that makes a ton of sense, to be honest, since she has already been communicating with the alien, but we’ll see where this all goes.
“Pressure Points” ends with Jamila asking Caspar what to do next, and he’s so out of sorts it’s kind of funny to think about all of the hopes that have been pinned on him. He doesn’t muster a response here before the credits roll, but I expect we’ll get to learn what he’s thinking next week.
Trevante’s (Shamier Anderson) storyline is absent from Invasion S2E6, but where we last left him he was tracking down clues from Caspar’s notebook in Oklahoma. It seems pretty clear that the psychic stuff with Caspar (and with Luke) is going to be central to where this series is headed.
See you next week.
