Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Invasion S3E8, “Life in the Dead Zone” (written by Dan Dietz and directed by Alik Sakharov)
Invasion S3E8 picks up with Mitsuki (Shioli Kutsuna) observing the alien she stumbled upon at the end of last week’s episode. As she watches it tend to the fruit of the alien spores, Mitsuki flashes back to an interaction she had with the alien hivemind in Season 2, wherein the aliens said they didn’t understand why humans were in conflict with them. She grasps that they aren’t trying to destroy the world so much as transform it, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re making it uninhabitable for human beings.
The realization clearly doesn’t change Mitsuki’s mind about her mission. She has the new bomb in her backpack and follows the gardener alien, seeking a way into the mothership, which she intends to detonate.
I don’t know if it was wise to follow the alien into a cave, but Mitsuki does, and the alien tries its mind-scrambling move on her. That doesn’t work—because Mitsuki has no memories anymore, I guess—but it does cause the cave to collapse. The alien is hurt and can’t make its way out. Mitsuki can apparently understand its chittering, though, and it can apparently understand her (at least when she speaks in Japanese). So, they help each other out.
Mitsuki stumbles upon a downed plane and finds the pilot dead, hanging from a tree. It wasn’t the crash that killed her, though; it was the air. As Mitsuki takes provisions from the pilot’s backpack and offers thanks, she is accosted by Konrad (Conphidance) and has a bag thrown over her head. She is taken to the Dead Zone base of Infinitas.
Carmichael (Fran Kranz) is the leader of this group. He takes oxygen constantly, while the others are forced to ration. Carmichael tells Mitsuki that if she provides the location of the WDC group, he’ll kill her quickly, but when she refuses, he has her thrown into a pit with a couple of agitated hunter-killer aliens. They don’t hurt Mitsuki, though. Instead, they calm down immediately in her presence.
Carmichael has Mitsuki taken to his cabin for a private chat and asks her what she knows about the aliens. She doesn’t tell him much, though, and instead presses him on his Monica tattoo. It turns out Monica is Carmichael’s daughter, but his memories are slipping away. Mitsuki tries to get him on her side against the aliens, but Carmichael stays fast in his faith that these beings are the redeemers of humanity. So, when Mitsuki slips out of the ropes used to tie her up, she hangs Carmichael from a hook in the cabin.
It’s worth noting that when Konrad enters the cabin, Carmichael is still alive, but Konrad doesn’t save him. Instead, he heads out after Mitsuki, with other members of Infinitas in tow.
Mitsuki encounters a cliff and has to climb down in order to escape capture. She’s fired upon from a distance and takes a shot to her side, but she is able to get away. A member of Infinitas collapses because he can’t breathe, but rather than give him oxygen, Konrad kills him and tells the others to take his stuff.
Mitsuki stitches herself up and proceeds to find her alien friend again, who is also hurt. She won’t let the thing lay down and die just because it can see “home” (the mothership)—she eggs it on to take them both there.
When they arrive, several aliens come out to surround Mitsuki’s friend, and she slinks away to hide behind a rock. From here, she observes the aliens healing their fallen comrade, but then she falls herself, collapsing from her wound, lack of oxygen, or both.
When Mitsuki collapsed earlier in the episode, her alien friend revived her by giving her juice from the spore fruit, which helped her breathe. That’s worth noting in itself, but it also makes me think that the group of aliens that approach Mitsuki at the end of S3E8 intend to help her.
I noted last week that Mitsuki was primed to be the character with ambiguous feelings about the aliens, and “ Life in the Dead Zone” does significant work to move us in that direction. The contrast between the human beings in Infinitas, who let each other die, and the aliens, who help each other out, is palpable.
It remains the case that the aliens are transforming the planet’s climate in a way that will make it inhospitable to human beings, which is something Mitsuki cannot accept, but I wouldn’t be surprised at this point if she facilitates some kind of détente.
That would be easier to accept, along with some notion that the aliens have been misunderstood, if it weren’t for the fact that they also sent a bunch of hunter-killers to slaughter people. Maybe the aliens view themselves in a way that resembles how Infinitas views them, and think that absorbing our minds absolves them from any immorality in killing us, but that’s not right. It fails to recognize the value of our individuality.
Invasion S3E8 is devoted entirely to Mitsuki, and it seems like the others we last saw at Outpost 17 don’t even follow her. That doesn’t feel like what they would do, so I look forward to picking up with them next week.
See you then.
