Aneesha struggles to trust the Movement, despite needing their help. Mitsuki makes a breakthrough which could change the course of the war. Trevante tries to reason his way out of a jail cell.

If there’s one thing that the writers of Invasion have never been it’s subtle, and that theme continues here with the title of the episode being not only almost literal but also having the metaphor forcefully rammed home by dialogue from one of the show’s least subtle characters.

Still, I’ll give the show this – things actually happen this time out. Like, actual progress is made by various characters and discoveries are made which spell genuine hope for humanity.

Mitsuki, still working with her new-found colleagues to try to find anything at all out about the crashed alien ship, ends up making an accidental discovery just when it seems like they’re all doomed to sit repeating the same experiments with no results forever. Of course, because Mitsuki is one of the show’s literal walking deus ex machinas, not only is this accidental discovery significant, but she’s able to parse that significance and turn it into a potential weapon so quickly you almost won’t notice how much… homage the writers are paying to a certain nineties Hollywood blockbuster also about Alien Invasion with it. Neat…

Meanwhile, Aneesha continues to be very grumpy at the Movement, a bunch of polite, helpful people who rescued her and her kids from soldiers, didn’t kill or even harm said soldiers, and are doing everything they can to get her and her family to safety. I’d say ‘Maybe she should start trusting people’ but that might get in the way of her son Luke continuously whining at her that she should trust people, not that she’s listening anyway. I’ve got even money on her eventually falling head over heels with the leader of the Movement before the show ends, but this is Invasion so I imagine it’ll take until the dying minutes of Episode 10 for her to admit she might not hate him.

As for Trevante, he’s still stuck in a jail cell, trying to persuade a random stranger that he isn’t crazy by… telling her that if she just fetches him his notebook of drawings he might be able to solve the mysteries of the entire town. I’d be less irritated by this if they didn’t have said character list off a whole bunch of crazies who have already passed through town and their various insanities, but if subtlety is not even passingly familiar to the writers, then basic narrative consistency is thoroughly alien to them (pun absolutely intended).

Still, amidst all its usual failings, this is actually a stronger episode. It’s good to see something finally happening, and to see a sort of fightback rather than just endless grinding misery. But given this is only the third episode, my guess is that either this is just the start of a bigger fight, or it’ll go down the BBC War of the Worlds 2019 road of spending entirely too much time on the aftermath and boring the audience right to sleep. At this stage, honestly, all bets are off.

Verdict: It’s not a high bar to rate this as the best episode of the season so far but with this show I’ll take my wins where I can find them. 6/10

Greg D. Smith