Mitsuki commandeers a satellite station in her search for answers. Trevante encounters a family as lost as he is. Caspar and his fellow travelling companions finally meet someone on the road.

After the stripped back, laser focus of the previous episode, Invasion resumes normal service, with an episode that jumps around the world from one set of people to the next, watching as they continue to try to cope in a world that no longer makes any sense.

For Mitsuki, that involves taking the equipment she was allowed to ‘steal’ and commandeering a massive radio telescope to try to make more sense of the weird signals that she and JASA seem to have detected from orbit. She’s still convinced that somewhere up there, her love is alive and reaching out to her, if she can only reach her…

Over in Afghanistan, Trevante runs across some more natives, one of whom – fortunately for him – speaks English. They’re headed for evacuation from Kabul airport, and it makes sense for Trevante to join them, given how much luck he’s had so far in trying to hook up with the military. What follows are uncomfortable scenes, given the real-world events in this very place not all that long ago, as a harassed military tries its best to evacuate who it can in the midst of scenes of utter chaos.

Caspar, Monty and the others who went with them hit a village which is deserted, but finally manage to meet another human being who can help them get back home. But how much will be left of London when they get there, and what exactly are they going to do next?

And Aneesha and her family continue to make their way slowly along. Manny continues to place his foot firmly in his mouth, asking a question of his wife at one point which gets the obvious and brutal answer it deserves.

After the previous episode, it can’t help but feel like the show shifts back down a gear here. Even though the stakes do seem to have been raised, in terms of the global invasion being clear and a source of real concern, the pacing of the show feels relatively relaxed as it takes time to paint all these little vignettes of the minutiae of the lives of a handful of people caught up in events. That’s not necessarily bad – many are compelling characters – but it still feels like an odd juxtaposition, as if the show is somehow sacrificing looking at the big thing that’s happening to focus on a number of smaller things, which are unrelated to one another.

Verdict: Back to being difficult to see where it’s going, ultimately. 6/10

Greg D. Smith