Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Invasion S3E3, “Infinitas” (written by Aditi Brennan Kapil and directed by Sylvain White)
Invasion S3E3 opens with the Maliks enjoying a block party. Aneesha (Golshifteh Farahani) has made some delicious dip, and Luke (Azhy Robertson) plays bass now. Even better, Aneesha and Clark (Enver Gjokaj) are an item and have merged their families to where Luke and Sarah (Tara Moayedi) call Clark “dad” and Ryder (Olivia-Mai Barrett) calls Aneesha “mom.” It’s great.
Then, Trevante (Shamier Anderson) and Jamila (India Brown) arrive at the door of the Malik-Evans residence, which totally kills the vibe. Trev wants to show Luke the readout of Caspar’s (Billy Barratt) brain activity before he died, and I appreciate that Aneesha lets this be Luke’s decision. He says he doesn’t recognize the image and hasn’t heard anything since the mothership crashed, so Aneesha shuffles him off to whatever activity he had planned for the evening.
With Luke gone, Clark wants to show Trev something, so everyone goes to a computer to look at message boards related to Infinitas, which feels a bit like QAnon, but maybe we shouldn’t be too harsh given that we’re in a world where an alien invasion has occurred. Regardless, no one knows who Infinitas is, if it’s one person or many, and so on and so forth. But, one of the posts is of the same frequency readout as Caspar’s EEG, and it’s supposedly taken from an emanation that occurred three minutes and four seconds before Trevante appeared in the WDC portal.
There’s a meeting the next day that’s fairly close by, so Trevante plans to go. He and Jamila go to their motel, where they fight in the middle of the night because Trev is trashing his room. Meanwhile, Aneesha finds Luke awake at the kitchen table looking at a notebook where he drew the alien frequency multiple times after he heard it just before Trev reappeared. He lied earlier.
So, Aneesha goes to Trev’s motel in the morning to accompany him to the meeting in Baker City. Trev doesn’t think it will be safe enough for Jamila to come, so he tricks Jamila and barricades her in a bathroom in order to leave her behind. Not cool, Trev.
However, when Trev and Aneesha get to their destination, it is pretty sketchy. There are lots of guys with guns, and the vibe is very much that of a militia. Further, it’s not directly an Infinitas meeting, insofar as everyone pretends they don’t know what the word means. Aneesha finds a sympathetic ear, but then a guy you could definitely mistake for a white supremacist recognizes Trevante, and he has to fight off a group of similarly looking fellows before he and Aneesha manage to get away.
In the car, Trev tells Aneesha she should just take care of her family and stay as far away from his mess as possible, but she receives a text message about going to a parking garage if they want to meet Infinitas, so they go there together. A woman who calls herself Debbie pulls up in a van to take them the rest of the way, telling them to leave their phones behind. And in classic TV fashion, Clark tries to call Aneesha immediately.
Debbie takes our friends to a house, where they are greeted by a group that feels much friendlier than those at the meeting. Still, they’re going to have to prove their trustworthiness in order to be taken to meet Infinitas, given that Trev worked for the WDC, whom they very much don’t trust. I guess the part where Trev was being held prisoner until right before he went to the alien mothership isn’t really public knowledge.
Trev and Aneesha ask about the frequency and are played the noise, which causes Trev to grab his head and have visions of his time on the alien ship. The biggest revelation remains what he’s said before: there was another kind of alien in the gooey walls.
Unfortunately, we don’t get further before the FBI arrives and arrests everyone. I think that’s plausible, but it would have been more interesting if Trev and Aneesha had been able to actually meet with Infinitas and we’d gotten more information through that meeting. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if Invasion is prolonging a mystery or just has nothing beneath the surface. I’m still wondering about the significance of wajo, for instance, but it almost feels like the show wants us to forget about that. We’ll see.
Mitsuki (Shioli Kutsuna) gets Nikhil (Shane Zaza) to sneak her into a portal site in the middle of the ocean, where she begins to download a bunch of data, ranging from two weeks before Trev’s reappearance to the present. They aren’t allowed to be there, or to do this, so of course before they finish a bunch of soldiers arrive to stop them. Little do they know that some huge tentacled alien is about to burst through the portal!
Nikhil is able to drag Mitsuki out of the room, which I’m tempted to read as meaning they got away, and we cut to the Malik-Evans household where the kids are watching a news report about the new alien threat. You’d think the WDC would be trying to keep that secret, but they haven’t shown themselves to be the most competent group when it comes down to it, and we’ve already seen the news of Trev’s return leaked when they didn’t want it to.
Of course, the kids are worried about their mom, and Clark is too since he doesn’t know where she is, when the doorbell rings and it’s Jamila. She asks if they’ve seen Trev, and informs them that she saw Aneesha take off with him that morning. Now everyone is really worried!
I appreciate that Invasion picked up the pace in S3E3 and involved all of the major characters. In an alternate universe, I could have seen the show deciding to spend a full hour with Aneesha concerned about Luke’s headaches, or something like that. Aneesha and Trev ending up in government custody is not, in my opinion, an ideal narrative development (I don’t particularly crave more scenes where Trev tries to persuade muckety-mucks to listen to him), but the undeniable reemergence of the aliens makes me more confident that the action will keep plugging along.
See you next week.
