Two years ago, Caspar Morrow and Trevante Cole sacrificed their lives to save the world. The alien invasion is over. We won. And Trevante just came home…

Invasion’s first two seasons have infamously tried the patience of many of our best and brightest. The show has never failed to have fun ideas and it’s always atmospheric. Plus the large cast are full of excellent actors, and the concept is fun. But the show is paced the way liquid is glass and the end of season 2 compounded all this by being a cliffhanger.

One this season ignores, at first.

And it works.

The two-year time jump is just one of the changes. Instead of making time with every single one of the often-sprawling cast (many of whom are back this year) this episode focuses on Shamier Anderson’s Trevante and India Brown as Jamilah, Caspar’s not-quite girlfriend and Trevante’s not-quite surrogate daughter. It’s such a simple idea but sitting with just two characters gives the episode a focus the time jump builds on and a propulsive urgency the show has almost never had.

It also gives two of the best members of that cast a lot to do. Anderson is always great and he gets his teeth into Trevante’s new-found second level PTSD from the jump. You don’t doubt him for a moment, but he does, and that uncertainty is one of Trevante’s most interesting properties. Doubly so now he’s the most famous soldier in history. The show has some fun with that early on, including a brief scene with a child playing with action figures of Trevante and Casper and I’m looking forward to more of that sort of thing.

But this is Brown’s episode. Jamilah has rebuilt her life with the same fervour everyone has in the wake of the war and Brown gives her a determined, slightly tense air that speaks to how hard she’s working. There’s a great moment early on in particular where a friend’s art exhibition includes a near holy picture of Casper, suffering for the world, which devastates her without Brown having to say a word. It also explores the emotional ambiguity that the character has always blossomed in. She has no idea if she needs to be angry at Trevante. Neither does he. Their complex, fractious relationship looks set to be the driving force of the season here, as they go on the run because they know the aliens aren’t dead even as Trevante is being framed as a threat to the world he just saved.

Verdict: Invasion still has a lot of characters to fold back in, or not. It also has two full years of maddening, glacial pace to work off and a lot of answers it’s owed viewers since the jump. I have no idea if we’ll get any of that. But I know it’s off to the best start it’s ever had. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart