Small town sheriff John Bell Tyson’s last day on the job before his retirement is about to get very weird, as strange events unfold both in his own town and around the globe.

One thing becomes clear about Invasion right out of the gate, and that’s that it will be a slow-burner of a show whose focus will be as much on the minutiae of the lives of its various global characters as it will on the titular invasion itself. To this end, we see barely anything of the invaders as we set up those characters in terms of their personal lives.

The issue for me was, there’s really nothing here that we haven’t seen before, which might be OK if it was being done in new and interesting ways. Truth be told though, this is very generic and tropey, and it’s crushingly easy to guess what’s going on way before it happens. Shioli Kutsuna’s Mitsuki Yamato is a slightly socially awkward but obviously talented member of ground control for a Japanese space mission, whose secret is so obvious it might as well be emblazoned in flashing lights over her head, but that doesn’t stop the show spoon feeding it to you as it leads up to what I imagine the writers thought a big reveal at the end of the episode. It doesn’t help either that it heavily echoes a sub plot from last year’s Away on Netflix, which is obviously coincidental given both shows were worked on at roughly the same time, but goes against Invasion by dint of Away getting there first.

The pattern repeats as the episode goes – Golshifteh Farahani’s Aneesha Malik is the devoted wife and mother who also happens to have given up a brilliant career in favour of doing those things but gets a rude awakening as to the perfection of her home life which is so by the numbers that I genuinely predicted actual dialogue that would spring from it twenty minutes before it happened.

Meanwhile, Sam Neill’s Sherriff Bell wanders around being all wise and slightly crotchety as he goes about his last day before he retires which also just happens to be the day that strange happenings start to kick off. His homespun, often bible-related wisdoms dispense with all the regularity and predictability the rest of the show tells us to expect, though in fairness it’s difficult to actively dislike the character because it’s Sam Neill.

All this said, the flip side of the show is that whereas the stuff it’s apparently intent on focusing on is all very run of the mill and safe, it takes some big decisions that are genuine surprises. There are significant casualties even in this opener, traumatic events from nowhere and a general sense that there will be further surprises along the way, but mainly these may relate to the meta narrative rather than the actual lives of the characters. I will give it this though – I am intrigued to see where it takes the plot thread of a family whose apparent idyll has just been irretrievably shattered, immediately having to cope with a global crisis event.

Verdict: For me, it’s an odd start – mostly very predictable with occasional surprises but not focused in the areas where the show is. Wait and see. 6/10

Greg D. Smith