Jamila is experiencing intensely vivid dreams about Caspar, and isn’t entirely sure they are just dreams. In America, Trevante is still struggling to fit back into civilian life, haunted by what he experienced and the pictures in Caspar’s sketchbook. Both are determined to find answers, whatever the risk.

So, another episode and another decision to zoom in on two particular characters, in this case Jamila and Trevante. So is Invasion going to pick this instalment to really light that fuse and get cracking on some full on alien-occupation action?

Well, no.

In the UK, Jamila is living with her family, doing their best along with others to keep ticking over in a world that’s, if not quite stopped, definitely much slowed down. But Jamila’s nights are haunted by incredibly vivid dreams where Caspar is talking to her. Convinced he may still be alive, and determined to help him, she makes a series of reckless decisions.

This is one of the points where the episode gets perilously close to having things happen. Jamila’s illicit travels across the city don’t go unnoticed, and she spends a good two or three minutes running away from pursuers who… don’t end up being all that determined. Reuniting with some old friends, she ends up with more help than she had imagined or anticipated, not all of it necessarily welcome, though all of it arguably necessary. I can’t decide whether it’s the additional details that undermine a character’s previous arc from last season or the simple fact of them conveniently supplying a very precise answer to a very specific need just by happenstance which annoyed me more. Possibly equal, to be honest.

Across the pond, Trevante is once again separated from his wife and staying with his sister, who seems set on pretending that all is well, having a barbecue in her garden for friends and family while the giant alien mothership looms over them, dominating the sky. An incident at the party causes some ructions, and serves to illustrate, as if it wasn’t clear, that Trevante is Not OK. Shock.

His sister then takes the most caring decision possible and *ahem* ‘suggests’ that he return to ‘his war’. Cool. Your hero brother who clearly has at least mild PTSD and has nobody else to apparently turn to needs turfing out? Awesome.

And so Trevante, in between visits to oddly limited internet cafes, hatches a daft pla– sorry, a daring scheme of his own. What he’s actually trying to achieve? Unclear. What he wanders into the middle of on the way? Opaque. But he’s definitely landed himself in more bother by the time the episode ends, and no mistake.

And so it continues, meandering on with glacial slowness, going to great lengths to re-tell us things we already knew from the end of the previous season and taking massive, but somehow entirely unexciting and completely pointless liberties with the basic setup of its characters. At risk of spoilers, I’ll say that aside from a glimpse at that big ship in the sky, and some blasted corpses, we don’t see a single sign of the aliens in this entire episode. Perhaps Simon Kinberg and co’s intent is some deep commentary on the human condition, set against the context of a world-ending threat against which the only chance is to unite, in defiance of basic human nature (or at least Kinberg’s estimation of it), but instead what we get is a slow, dark, grey grind set against the backdrop of the most pedestrian version of an alien invasion ever committed to the screen.

Verdict: Are we there yet? No? Eight more episodes you say? Oh, good… 3/10

Greg D. Smith