Shocked by the President’s speech and realisation of the scale of events, Aneesha rushes back to her family, only to find their save haven has suddenly become very much less so.

It’s an odd change of format in more ways than one for the sixth instalment of Invasion. At 33 minutes it’s the shortest of the series to date, and it chooses to focus entirely on Aneesha and her family rather than the usual globe-trotting between various protagonists seen so far. It also plays very differently.

Until now, Invasion has been a sort of focused human drama playing out against the vague backdrop of the titular invasion. We’ve learned far more about Aneesha and Ahmed’s marital issues, Casper’s troubled home life and Mitsuki’s messy love life than we have about whatever it is that’s causing all the ruckus. Here, the focus, tone and even pacing shifts, as the show becomes – for this 33 minutes at least – a kind of tense survival horror.

Having overheard the President’s broadcast and then tales of various casualties, Aneesha suddenly snaps out of whatever fugue she was in and determines to head back to her family. But by the time she reaches the little home in which they’ve taken shelter, things have taken a darker turn. The invaders have arrived in a very real, personal sense. Suddenly, the threats that must be navigated aren’t racist white folks, suspicious authorities or unfaithful husbands – there’s a creature out there which is all teeth and spikes and hatred, and it wants to kill anything it can find.

The changing dynamic also brings a shift in the people impacted. The sweet, caring family who took Aneesha and Ahmed’s son in and offered them all shelter are suddenly transformed by circumstance into very different people – it’s actually an interesting observance of the way that human behaviour can shift in pressured situations, and the sort of thing the show might have benefited from hammering on more earlier on.

But as welcome as these changes are, it also can’t help but feel a little silly and more than a little predictable. We’ve all seen a slasher film at some point involving some creature or other, so we know all the basic beats – terrified crawling in the dark, hushed conversations, heavy breathing, scary noises and a whole lot of smashed stuff and broken glass. In amongst it all, Ahmed continues to be The Absolute Worst, but by now that’s hardly surprising. What is surprising is just how many times Aneesha seems able to forgive him.

Verdict: Comes out of nowhere and transforms the sedate, weirdly sprawling yawnfest we’ve seen so far into a focused, tight slasher, albeit quite a silly one. Still, at least something happened at last. 7/10

Greg D. Smith