Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Invasion S2E9, “Breakthrough” (written by Tatiana Suarez-Pico and directed by Mathias Herndl).
Editor’s Note: This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn’t exist.
As Invasion S2E9 comes to a close, Mitsuki (Shioli Kutsuna) and Caspar (Billy Barratt) meet “on the other side” and mutually come to the conclusion that what they’re connecting to is the alien mothership. This is where Caspar has gone in his mind all along, and what Mitsuki had been in touch with through the portal/alien she destroyed last week.
It remains unclear whether, or to what extent, they can interact physically with this location, but Caspar thinks the aliens see him as a threat when he approaches the light, which I guess might be the nexus of the alien hivemind.
In the other direction, though, it seems clear that this place represents a psychic threat to Mitsuki, Caspar, and whomever else might enter it, insofar as we can infer that it has previously absorbed Hinata’s (Rinko Kikuchi) consciousness, and scrambled the minds of the other scientists in the Amazon who tried to study it.
There isn’t a lot that happens in either Mitsuki or Caspar’s storyline in S2E8 in the lead up to their connection at the end of the hour, though some interpersonal dynamics may be worth noting.
Jamila (India Brown), worried that Caspar might lose himself, wants to go with him to keep him grounded, but Monty (Paddy Holland) is having none of the idea. Caspar calls him out for crushing on Jamila and later apologizes, but the more important development may be in how Monty convinces him that he should let Jamila go.
Caspar takes that to heart and basically breaks up with Jamila, if we can put it that way. What I really want to note here is that he shuts down her agency twice over the course of this, first by speaking for her in saying she doesn’t love Monty, and then in not respecting her choice to make helping him (Caspar) the most important thing in the world.
She left her family to seek him out and went through a lot to find him, which makes Caspar’s line that he didn’t ask her to almost abusive. It’s certainly, at least, paternalistic, and a failure to acknowledge that without Jamila, he’d probably have scrawled on the walls of the hospital in Paris until he starved to death.
As far as Mitsuki goes, we get another chapter in the story of Maya (Naian González Norvind) trying to protect her from herself (more paternalism!). At least, I got the distinct impression that when Maya was talking to the President (Moshidi Motshegwa) at the beginning of S2E9, she was dissembling about Mitsuki not being available.
She tells Mitsuki afterwards that they won’t be granted access to the government’s data, but I don’t think Maya really tried to get it. She’s insisting that Mitsuki rest—which may indeed be good advice for her in terms of her well-being—but she’s definitely not doing that. She just wanders out into the Amazon and somehow connects to the aliens by grabbing some roots.
It’s worth noting that the global seismic activity that occurred in S2E8 happened in what the government had thought to be alien-free zones. They land on the hypothesis that the aliens may be able to cloak themselves like they can their ships, which could well be the case, but I can’t shake the speculative idea that maybe there are two competing groups of aliens at play and maybe the group that Mitsuki and Caspar are connected to are weirdly trying to help.
The other children in France have all been hearing the voice of another, and I’ve been presuming that this would be Luke (Azhy Robertson). That still might be the case, but his connection has been with the attacking aliens on the ground more than the kind of blob entity Mitsuki has been dealing with, and the end of S2E9 makes me wonder if there’s a chance the kids were hearing Mitsuki.
Regardless, the Maliks and The Movement arrive to Idabel, where Sarah (Tara Moayedi) is indeed being held, and I feel compelled to note again, briefly, that it makes sense for the military to want to study the shard. I don’t know if simply going along with that would have made things better for Aneesha (Golshifteh Farahani) and her kids, but I also don’t know that Invasion has made a persuasive case that it wouldn’t have.
If you want to just jump to identifying with our protagonists, this maybe isn’t a problem, but the decision to invade the military compound through deception and violence continues to strike me as a little undermotivated.
Aneesha and Clark (Enver Gjokaj) find Trev (Shamier Anderson) and Rose (Nedra Marie Taylor) and release them from their cells. Then Aneesha manages to get Sarah, but as they run out of the building they’re accosted by soldiers. So, at the end of the day, I think all of our friends are in the custody of the military in Idabel. It remains to be seen just how bad of a thing that is.
Oh, and Rose finds Billy.
There’s one episode left in Season 2 of Invasion, but it’s worth noting that further seasons are planned. As such, I don’t expect the season finale to rush things to a conclusion. I do expect, or hope, that it will provide some meaningful revelation to intrigue us about where the story may go next. Perhaps we might finally learn why people keep saying “wajo” or something about the shard relic…
Probably not.
See you next week.
