Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Invasion S3E9, “Homecoming” (written by Vivian Barnes & Glenise Mullins and directed by Brad Anderson)
Invasion S3E9 opens with Nikhil (Shane Zaza) and some soldiers searching for Mitsuki (Shioli Kutsuna). They locate her using the dampener device on her neck as a tracker, but she isn’t where we last saw her in S3E8. Rather, Mitsuki is lying on a rock at an elevation where the air is breathable. Further, the wound on her side has been healed.
Once she’s back at the camp and returns to consciousness, Mitsuki quickly draws the obvious conclusion: the aliens healed her and took her to a location where she’d survive. As the soldiers begin to squabble in light of this revelation, Mitsuki decides that humanity doesn’t have a chance. Even in the face of an existential threat, people can’t stop fighting. The aliens, on the other hand, are one. Still, she agrees to provide the others with a map to the mothership’s entrance, where they’ll also find the bomb.
Trevante (Shamier Anderson) falls in the woods and happens upon a big alien vine, at which point he flashes back to his time on the mothership with Caspar (Billy Barratt). In the flashback, Trev is trying to stab the core of the ship with the shard, with Caspar egging him on, when Caspar experiences ringing in his head and starts to attack Trevante. Ultimately, Trev stabs Caspar with the shard.
Trevante tells Jamila (India Brown) and the others that he killed Caspar. It seems like he doesn’t remember the part where Caspar tried to stab him, but it’s possible that he feels like this is unimportant due to his guilt. Regardless, Trev tells Jamila that, because of how Caspar damaged the aliens’ hivemind, he was able to hide from them until he stumbled upon the new kind that had been in stasis in the walls and was thrown back through the portal.
Per the narrative of Invasion, Trevante was gone for two years, and he seems to believe that he was on the mothership for two years, even though his memory is spotty. I’m not sure that makes sense—some kind of temporal weirdness would feel more plausible than a man living on an alien ship for two years without food—but we’ll see if it’s something the show wants us to question, or to accept.
Having found the bomb and the entrance to the ship, the WDC group plans to proceed with their Hail Mary plan to destroy the aliens, but there’s another problem—Infinitas.
Verna/Marilyn (Erika Alexander) leads her group to meet up with Konrad (Conphidance) and his group, who have been in the Dead Zone for far longer. Thomas (Aaron Brooks) asks for some oxygen, and when Konrad says he hasn’t earned it yet, Thomas protests, saying that he was told he was coming to Eden, but the air is toxic. So Konrad shoots him dead, and Verna approves, saying that Thomas lacked faith.
He was a doubting Thomas, get it?
Anyway, Invasion S3E9 pretty much cements the notion that Infinitas is evil, where I had hoped for a little more ambiguity. They find the WDC habitat and proceed to attack it in order to protect the mothership. But, Clark (Enver Gjokaj) saw this coming. He, Aneesha (Golshifteh Farahani), and a bunch of soldiers have vacated the camp with the plan to draw Infinitas in and ambush them.
This works relatively well, though there are deaths on both sides. Getting frustrated, Sergeant Tucker (Aria Shahghasemi) grabs Joel/Langston (Ashton Sanders), puts a gun to his head, and drags him out into the open, demanding that Infinitas surrender. Instead, Verna shoots through her nephew in order to hit Tucker (like I said, evil).
Apparently, Aneesha cares way more about Tucker than I ever have as a viewer, as she runs to tend to him despite the fact that this puts her in great danger. This sets Clark into a kind of beast mode where he kills a bunch of Infinitas members, most notably Konrad. Verna decides it’s time to retreat, and Tucker dies. RIP, guy I never felt was worth mentioning by name in previous recaps.
From the WDC’s perspective, the point of all of this was to buy time for Nikhil’s group to get to the alien mothership, and that seems to have worked. However, as Clark expresses his hopes about this to the group, Verna sneaks up behind a tree and shoots him in the head. So, RIP Clark, and I mean that one. I’ve been a fan of Enver Gjokaj since Dollhouse, and I think he’s done a great job in this series.
If anything, Clark’s death feels a little cheap, but it drives home who the bad guys are. “Verna,” Aneesha snarls as the episode ends, with all the vitriol of Jerry Seinfeld saying, “Newman.”
See you next week.
