Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Invasion S3E2, “The Message” (written by Dan Dietz and directed by Alik Sakharov)
Invasion S3E2 focuses on Mitsuki (Shioli Kutsuna), which isn’t surprising given her absence from last week’s season premiere. When we last saw her in Season 2, our friend seemed to be losing herself within the alien hivemind, so I’ve been worried about her.
“The Message” picks up with Mitsuki two years after that (in line with S3E1), so we’re left to fill in the gap based on some dialogue and the events of the episode. The WDC took her, cut open her head, and did whatever experiments, but somehow she ultimately got away from them and has been hiding in the woods of Former Japan.
Recently, she’s started to experience a ringing in her head reminiscent of her encounter with the alien consciousness in the Amazon, so she gets out her laptop and learns that Trevante (Shamier Anderson) has reappeared. Mitsuki wants to know precisely when this occurred, and apparently the only way to find out is to hack the WDC. This leads her to discover that Trev appeared in the portal at the precise moment of her first ringing attack/fainting spell.
Unfortunately, Mitsuki doesn’t get out of the WDC’s system in time. They get an intruder alert that somehow also informs them that the intruder was Mitsuki Yamato. Thus, they recruit Nikhil Kapur (Shane Zaza) to try to bring Mitsuki in for a chat, even though she totally hates that guy.
Kapur has always been an intriguing figure within the world of Invasion. On the one hand, he’s a smug, rich prick who dismisses the advice of experts in pursuit of profit. On the other, he seems to have some genuine interest in “the cosmic ocean.” I have pretty much no sympathy for the guy, to be clear, but he does manage to function within the narrative of the series in a way that allows Mitsuki to get the kind of access she needs.
In their first meeting of the hour, however, Mitsuki rebuffs Nikhil, though their interaction leads him to refuse to help the WDC in any further attempts to bring Mitsuki in. This leads Hollander (Eric Lange) to dispatch Kaede (June Fukumura) and her team for the mission. Ultimately, this does not go well for them.
Mitsuki becomes convinced that she needs to find an alien in order to understand the ringing in her head, so she tricks the WDC, sneaks into their room, and uses their computer to find the location of an alien.
She breaks into the site easily, but as she goes down a ladder, Kaede and team arrive in pursuit. Then, Mitsuki hears the noise, faints, and falls off the ladder. When she awakes, Kaede and the others are a bloody mess around her. A big scary alien approaches, but it doesn’t harm Mitsuki. Instead, she gets a message.
It’s noteworthy that we don’t see Kaede and her team being killed in this episode. I had been thinking that Mitsuki was tracking an alien the WDC was holding captive. Given what happens, though, it seems more likely that the WDC has the ability to track exobiological life signatures. But, then, has this monster been on the loose for a while in the city without anyone noticing? There’s a question here, even if there’s no guarantee Invasion will ever provide more of an answer.
Also noteworthy is that Mitsuki does not remember the significance of the glow-in-the-dark star that she’s been clinging to as a relic. This implies that she doesn’t remember Hinata (Rinko Kikuchi), which is very sad, but it does make sense given how the aliens were using the memory of Hinata to communicate with Mitsuki in Season 2. If the WDC somehow removed all of this stuff from her brain, perhaps this means that she’s lost her memories of Hinata as well.
After Mitsuki’s confrontation with the alien, we cut to a party in Former California, where she relays the message she received (“they arise”) to Nikhil, asking now for his help. Presumably, she wants to go to one of his sites to communicate with the alien consciousness like she has before, and presumably, he’ll agree to move the action forward.
I was a little surprised that we didn’t check in with Aneesha (Golshifteh Farahani) this week and instead spent the full episode with Mitsuki. This makes it likely that next week’s episode will focus solely on Aneesha, which might strain our patience a little. Invasion has always had this kind of structure, but with the way things were cooking at the end of Season 2, it’s a tad frustrating for the action to be slow and separated again to start Season 3. But, so it goes.
See you next week.
