Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Invasion S3E6, “Marilyn” (written by Vivian Barnes and directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer)
Invasion S3E6 focuses on giving us Verna’s (Erika Alexander) backstory to elucidate the motivation for her actions at the end of last week’s episode. It turns out that her name is actually Marilyn (as we’d seen previously on an FBI printout), and her nephew’s name is actually Langston (Ashton Sanders). While it makes sense that they’d change their names as they became wanted by the feds, Invasion doesn’t show them making that decision, so it’s mostly just confusing to see subtitles crediting them as Verna and Joel as everyone calls them Marilyn and Langston. But, I digress.
We open just before the alien invasion started, with Marilyn working as a diligent secretary for a putz of a boss (Jonathan Watton). Her sister, Angie (Karimah Westbrook), grills Marilyn on the phone about her recent date, and we see Angie bugging Langston about college applications. Shortly thereafter, the power goes out in Marilyn’s office, a window explodes, and the alien invasion has begun.
She rushes home (after telling everyone in the office to do the same) and learns that the best way to evacuate seems to be by bus. So, Marilyn, Angie, and Langston head to the buses, only to be attacked by hunter-killers. Marilyn and Langston get onto a bus to escape, but Angie’s hand slips out of Langston’s as the bus starts to roll, and she’s killed by an alien.
Down the line, Marilyn wakes up in an empty bus to discover that it’s run out of gas. A group is headed out to try to find some, but she joins the other group that wants to explore the nearby town. Here, they find a church and are ultimately taken in. Marilyn wants to be useful, so she begins helping with food rationing plans and the like. Some time passes.
One day, the group discovers they suddenly have internet access, and they learn about the global alien invasion. Marilyn urges Pastor Allen (Aaron Stanford) to offer a prayer, but the man has lost his faith.
The next morning, the group has been robbed of their provisions, and the pastor has killed himself. In despair, Marilyn wanders out into a nearby field, where she encounters an alien portal and hears Angie talking to her. When Langston joins her, she convinces him that it was really Angie by mentioning a house on Magnolia Avenue that Langston and Angie had never told Marilyn about. Then, a truck crashes near them that’s full of MREs.
Thus, Infinitas is born. Marilyn believes that the aliens are actually saviors of humanity who can and will reunite us with our lost loved ones. She convinces the group of this, and they begin recruiting. They despair when the mothership is downed, but Marilyn rallies them by contending that it is a test of faith.
As Invasion cuts to the present, we can fill in the intervening year and a half for ourselves. This group has been searching for signs of alien activity, not out of fear, but out of hope. Along the way, they’ve become more than willing to kill for their pseudo-religion.
All of this plays on an aspect of the aliens that has been present in Invasion since the beginning. It’s been most prominently explored through Mitsuki (Shioli Kutsuna), and her experiences have at times led me to wonder if there is some important difference between the beautiful portal aliens and the Koosh ball-looking aliens the show ultimately labeled as hunter-killers. But it’s become clear that they are all the same, at least in terms of what side they’re on.
If we take seriously the idea that it really is Angie talking to Marilyn in this episode, and that it really was Hinata (Rinko Kikuchi) communicating with Mitsuki in previous episodes, we’d have to conclude that the aliens can take the consciousness of a human being up into their hivemind, while that person retains at least some level of individuality. That might seem somewhat appealing, but also they are going to kill you first in order to do this.
I think this is where Invasion is going, playing a bit with notions of the afterlife and asking if it’s what we really want. That’s intriguing, even if I’m not sure I trust this show to do it well. I guess we’ll find out.
See you next week.
