Mitsuki takes desperate measures in her search for the truth. Aneesha and Manny try to keep moving in a world quickly going mad. Caspar finds himself in deeper trouble than he had realised.

Into my third hour of Invasion, and I know several things. First, Ahmed ‘Manny’ Malik may seriously be a candidate for the World’s Biggest Dickhead Character in Genre award. Last week, he literally tried to abandon his wife and kids to their Islamophobic neighbourhood so he could go get his mistress (after calling her when pretending he was trying to call 911) and this time he continues to just be the absolute worst. Aneesha, for her part, is starting to grate because for all that I am sure the writers think they are giving us a badass woman who won’t quit, what she actually comes off as is vastly odd. She can’t bring herself to just tell her husband to go, no matter how awful he is, but she is capable of doing dangerous and even quite nasty things elsewhere. Bizarre.

Mitsuki recovers from her brief sojourn of booze, casual sex and arguing with her mother to return to being the brilliant engineer and walks back into her place of work to find it full of government officials and police getting ready to undertake their own investigation into what went wrong (and presumably why it’s Mitsuki’s fault, seeing as her boss doesn’t seem big on personal responsibility, or at least not when it involves him). Taking a particularly drastic measure, she searches not just for the truth of what happened, but for the final moments of her lost love. Both will prove dramatic.

In the U.K., Caspar and his fellow pupils grapple with the reality of being stranded after the crash. Of course, Monty is being as predictably awful as ever, although credit to the writers for pulling off one minor surprise along the way with the character. Even the way that’s done though, serves to make the character more cartoonish and odd. It does at least help to reveal more about Caspar’s background, though we still have no real idea what his actual affliction is (I kinda suspect the writers don’t either to be honest – given the broad brush strokes used elsewhere it’s difficult to believe that Caspar’s condition won’t eventually be revealed to simply be some sort of loosely defined ‘mental illness’.)

Over in Afghanistan it’s more angry US soldiers pointing guns at people they can’t understand, regardless of whether those people might be trying to help. I can see how perhaps an argument can possible be made for keeping the speech of the native Afghans mysterious so the viewer feels as isolated as the characters whose viewpoint we are seeing things from. Shame then that they rob themselves of the opportunity to use that excuse by suddenly giving us subtitles so we can see how pointlessly at odds a ‘conversation’ between tow characters who don’t speak one another’s languages is.

As for this episode’s moment of drama – well it’s less explosive than the ones which ended episodes 1 and 2, and it does link into something we’ve already seen. But it doesn’t really give us much to go on. Then again, that seems in keeping for the show so far.

Verdict: There’s slow burn and then there’s just something which feels like it’s drowning under the weight of a misguided core idea it doesn’t know what to do with. This is the latter. 4/10

Greg D. Smith