Invasion Review: Going Home (Season 1 Episode 5)

Invasion Season 1 Episode 5, “Going Home,” marks the halfway point of the first season of this Apple TV+ alien invasion drama, and we technically still haven’t actually seen an extraterrestrial. Five whole hours of TV! WIthout aliens! On an alien-based show! 

(And here I thought I could possibly never encounter an Apple program that moved as slowly as The Mosquito Coast. The joke is truly on me.)

True, we see some sort of parasite/creature/thing that is probably an alien — or at least of alien origin — if only judging by how hard it fights to not be removed from a local accident victim by Aneesha, now in full-on doctor mode. And at least someone says the word “alien” — in fact, the President of the United States makes a global broadcast to tell the world that the freaky explosions and EMP attacks were probably not of this earth in origin. 

But, still. We’re five episodes into this thing, and I really cannot tell you what Invasion, as a series, is supposed to be about. 

Part of the reason for that is that there are simply too many characters and subplots happening at once to give any of them the time to properly breathe, let alone pique our interests. But it’s also because, five episodes in, these characters remain paper-thin ideas rather than people, and if/when an alien eats most of them, I won’t care.

At this point, I’ve simply accepted the fact that I’m never going to learn the names of the dozen or so Lord of the Flies kids who find themselves distracted and divided, Edmund in Narnia-style, over an abandoned truck full of chocolate.

I’m also not terribly interested in the seemingly broken home life of Trevante or whatever terrible thing clearly happened between him and his wife before he headed off to war. And though I’m very interested in watching Aneesha tell Ahmed about himself, she spends this entire episode on her own. 

Yet again, Mitsuki is not only Invasion’s most interesting character, she’s also one of the few whose subplot feels like it’s legitimately moving the show forward — even if it’s doing so in an infinitesimal way. 

Her determination to force someone in power at JASA to take her seriously is admirable, and the fact that she’s right, well. The idea that her girlfriend might have survived the explosion that destroyed the shuttle seems ludicrous at best, but at least she’s motivated and actually doing something unlike virtually everyone else on this show. 

To her credit, Aneesha is putting her medical degree to use again at last by helping some injured folks at a makeshift military hospital, which at least gives her something to do beyond fret about her husband’s infidelity. But I’m not entirely sure that I believe she wouldn’t already be fighting to get back to her kids?

One of the real problems with Invasion is the vague way it addresses how much time has passed in the show. Has it been a day or two since the explosions and power outages that started all this? Or are we supposed to assume it’s been longer than that? 

Maybe it’s just me but I have a hard time believing that so much of the world would have essentially become a deserted dystopian wasteland in the aftermath quite this quickly. Not only are the local shops looted down to the ground already, but everyone’s just… missing.

The streets are empty and full of abandoned vehicles. Are we meant to believe the military rounded up everyone that fast? Or were they all somehow taken by the aliens we’ve yet to meet? Are the people at JASA the only folks going to work? I almost always hate on-screen reminders of how long it’s been since/until an event, but I feel like we could really use some here. 

Stray Thoughts and Observations

• Since we still haven’t seen either hide or hair of Sam Neill’s Oklahoma sheriff, I have to assume at this point that he’s busy being body-snatched by aliens and will return as their meat puppet human mouthpiece to share all their extraterrestrial demands. You heard it here first.
• I truly could not believe how long that cold open of Trevante basically just wandering the desert was. (Though I did think his shock at discovering terrible things were also happening outside of the war hellhole he’s trapped in was perfect.)
• The best part of this episode was probably that Ahmed was only in it for thirty seconds. Even if I’m sure he spent the entire time Aneesha was gone trying to call his side chick.

What did you think of this episode of Invasion? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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New episodes of Invasion stream Fridays on AppleTV+. 

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