Aneesha tries to push down her feelings of betrayal for the sake of the children amidst the chaos, although Manny seems set on not making this easy. New characters Trevante and Caspar get their respective introductions as their own parts of the world are impacted. Mitsuki is devastated when she learns the news of the shuttle’s fate.

I’m still not really clear on exactly what it is that Invasion wants to do. On one hand, it seems to remain absolutely committed to examining the minutiae of the lives of various members of its ensemble cast of characters against the backdrop of this big global event, but it feels too often like it’s doing that at the expense of telling the actual story of that event. Add in that much of it feels very well-worn and familiar, and it becomes difficult to see what the show actually brings to the table.

At any rate, picking up where we left them last time, Manny and Aneesha try to keep their children calm and make sense of what the hell is going on. Manny ups the stakes in being the most instantly unlikeable character several times over the course of these scenes, and an incident wherein the neighbours get to do a bit of a racism when they realise that the Maliks’ house seems to be the only one untouched by whatever has happened does nothing to redeem him (if that was the intent). Also, and I’m sorry to have to say this, Hollywood Scriptwriters, but 9/11 was literally two decades ago – many globally impactful events have occurred since then, can we please maybe have characters in shows like this reference anything else?

Then the show jumps to introduce us to Trevante, a US army officer in Afghanistan, who seems to have some sort of hinted at backstory as a hero/lucky charm for his unit. After hinting at the fact he has some sort of domestic issues (but not why) his unit is sent to investigate the disappearance of another. Cue many, many uncomfortable scenes of adrenaline-soaked US soldiers confronting scared locals with their guns and voices raised as the subtitles just repeat ‘Shouts in Pashto’ over and over in lieu of giving the viewer any idea as to what the non-English speakers in the scenes might have to say. Seriously. Two decades guys. Anything else.

Over in Japan, Mitsuki is given the news of the shuttle’s disappearance from all sensors and rushes to mission control to find that (shock) she’s the only one who can establish any kind of live feed with it. Having done so, it becomes clear that the shuttle is irreparably damaged, that the crew are dead, and that somehow the comms had been inactive for several hours. Cue convenient blaming of the woman and a little spiral she goes on involving sex and hallucinations and alcohol, all of which suggests to me that the character’s sexuality is not only essentially token but also grossly misunderstood by the writers. That she gets to have a drearily predictable confrontation with her mother just re-emphasises that last part – gay people exist and are out there and could easily be asked to contribute or even just write stuff like this if you really want to do it?

And then we get to the episode’s other new introduction, Caspar. A UK schoolboy with some sort of disorder which requires drugs and an endearing habit of listening to ‘old’ music on his portable cassette player who has friends but is also the target of some vicious bullying. Again, all of this feels very run of the mill in how it’s presented, not to mention portraying English schoolkids as some sort of cartoon written by someone who’s definitely never met any. Caspar and his fellow pupils are off on a camping trip. No prizes for guessing what might happen.

As the episode closes, it goes back to Trevante and his unit, and just as you’re thinking ‘Wow, it might be nice if something actually happened in this show’, something does, but just in case that’s too much for the audience, the credits immediately roll, leaving you time to recover before starting the next instalment.

Verdict: Getting slower, duller and more obvious by the minute, as well as showing some really late 90s/early 2000s sensibilities in many of its tics and tropes. I feel myself rooting for whatever the invaders turn out to be, at this point. 5/10

Greg D. Smith