The Earth remains under the bootheel of the aliens as a hastily assembled coalition world government desperately tries to form a response. Could Mitsuki hold the key to unlocking the way to defeat the enemy?

Ok, so inspired by the characteristic positivity of my colleague Alasdair and his recent recap of the first season of Invasion, I’ve decided to try to approach this new season with a more optimistic frame of mind, and see if it can do anything to persuade me that I was wrong when I said that the ‘closing shot before the credits was more interesting than the ten hours of drama which preceded it.’

Well.

Opening scenes before the credits roll bring us up to speed on the World Coalition Government and aliens spreading across and slowly poisoning the planet stuff, before treating us to shots of a panicky crowd in Japan desperately fleeing the aliens and Mitsuki fighting them off with… fire. Just fire. I seem to recall that the aliens were really, really difficult to kill in the previous season but now apparently lobbing a Molotov cocktail at them does the trick. OK…

Anyways, she’s interrupted in this… activity and whisked off somewhere else being as how she’s the Only One Who Has Communicated With The Aliens and therefore may be very useful in advancing the plo… I mean in determining any weakness that the aliens may have so that the fightback can continue. This leads her to encounter one of your standard heartless billionaire geniuses and his neuropsychologist assistant, the latter of whom Mitsuki takes a fairly instant dislike to. Can this plucky gang and an army of relatively faceless fellow scientists, engineers and one cheerful practical guy who just screams ‘I may well die very soon’ utilise their collective smarts and experience to pry open the secrets they need to take on the invaders? I’m hoping we’ll find out sooner rather than later.

Elsewhere, Aneesha and her children have become somewhat more practised at the whole fugitives on the run schtick, but Luke, older and more stroppy now, isn’t happy just doing what he’s told as they run from place to place. Predictably, his hot headedness leads them into the path of danger as they attract the interest of the last people they wanted to, and then… well stuff happens. I won’t spoil it here other than to say it’s all very predictable and not half the surprise the writers might like to think.

And that’s fairly much the pattern for the episode, bouncing between these two groups of people as we discover just how bad things are (oddly, slightly less bad than I recall them being when we left). We meet new characters who may or may not be ones we will end up rooting for and generally, the things feels stuck in the same problem it had before, where it wants to focus on the small picture of various personal relationships against the backdrop of an oddly underwhelming intergalactic invasion force. Nevertheless, that invasion feels like it takes up a disproportionate amount of time, and because the show leaves me so much time for my mind to wander, I still can’t help but think things like ‘Why are the aliens now really easily destroyed by fire? And if they are, why is it so hard to defeat them? How was a fugitive Mitsuki found so precisely in the middle of a stampeding populace during an invasion? Why are analogue portable televisions still working? How come gas stations still exist to steal gas from when (presumably) the world’s economy has, at best, massively destabilised?’

I tried. I really did. But Invasion’s second season opener just doesn’t give me any reason to think that it’s changed. The same issues I recall before keep cropping up, making that one hour run time feel considerably longer. It’s stylishly shot, has a great cast and isn’t devoid of good ideas. But it’s also glacially paced, self-contradictory and silly. Oh well, only nine more episodes to go…

Verdict: Not a great start to a show that had – for me – a poor first season overall. 4/10

Greg D. Smith