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What's Is Up with the Confusing, Anticlimactic 'Invasion' Finale?

By Dustin Rowles | TV | December 10, 2021 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | December 10, 2021 |


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There were a number of things I was hoping the first season finale of Apple TV+’s Invasion would answer, but chief among them was this: Where did Sam Neill’s storyline go? Recall in the first episode that Neill plays a small-town Oklahoma sheriff on his last day of the job before retiring. Mysterious things happen in his town, two people go missing, a crop circle appears, and — after his retirement party — Neill’s character returns to the crop circle thinking it’s where the missing people are buried. While there, an alien something or another pricks him in the back of the neck and he dies.

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The series never returns to Oklahoma or to that story. What was the point? My best guess is that Invasion, which began filming before the pandemic but had to shut down for nearly a year, may have scratched that storyline when the series began shooting again due to, perhaps, scheduling conflicts? Either that or the $200 million series needed a recognizable face for the trailers and one episode of Sam Neill is all they could afford.

It was one of the more inscrutable elements of Invasion, but certainly not the only one. In last week’s episode, after spinning its wheels for much of the season, the series finally began to kick into gear. Things happened! A major character died! Still, the episode didn’t make a lot of sense. A character named Aneesha Malik and her family — who had discovered a black rock that could harm the aliens — are transported to the Pentagon. For reasons that are never explained, some militiamen we’d never met before attack their caravan in an effort to retrieve the black rock. Why? We have no idea! But Aneesha’s husband — who had a mistress pregnant with his child at the outset of the series — sacrificed himself to save his family. So, redemption, because that’s how redemption works! If you’re an asshole, all you have to do is sacrifice yourself to a vague militia group and voila! Redemption!

Meanwhile, in the UK, there’s a middle-school kid named Casper who, while in the throes of his epileptic seizures, can somehow telepathically connect with the aliens. He and Trevante — an American soldier just trying to get back home — go to a hospital and bully a doctor into triggering one of Casper’s seizures so he can talk to the aliens. She does so, and it allows Casper to mind-meld with the aliens and prevent them from killing Trevante. How does Casper mind-meld with the aliens? Why does he have a notebook full of drawings pre-Invasion that predict the invasion? Why does Casper die when the aliens die? Unfortunately, Invasion isn’t interested in answering those questions. It’s like a parent arguing with their child: “Just because, OK?” or “Because I said so!”

The series did, however, kill off the aliens. Sort of. We’ve been following the story of Mitsuki Yamato all season long. She’s a communications operative for JASA (the Japanese version of NASA). Her girlfriend is an astronaut. Mitsuki lost communication with her girlfriend during what appeared to be an alien attack on her ship while it was in space. Mitsuki spent the entire season trying to communicate with the aliens and figure out whether her girlfriend is still alive. Using her girlfriend’s voice, the aliens communicated with Mitsuki last week, but JASA determined that it wasn’t actually her girlfriend. The aliens had reproduced her voice. However, the location of the fake voice did give the American military a target. They sent all their nukes into space and killed the aliens (and Casper). Or so it seemed.

Last week’s episode felt like one of those false endings, like one of those movies where the hero stabs the bad guy to death and begins celebrating prematurely before the bad guy wakes up, reaches for a gun, and has to be killed by another character who shows up just in time. In last week’s episode, they killed the aliens, but there was still the season finale left, so surely it would present the last gasp of the aliens, answer some of the unresolved questions, and at least tell us what happened to Sam Neill’s Oklahoma town, right?

Not so much.

The finale is like an anti-climax on top of an anti-climax. It doubles as both a slow-moving hour-long epilogue and a confusing set-up for the second season of Invasion. When the episode picks up, the world is both reeling and celebrating the destruction of the aliens, but our four main characters are fairly ho-hum, or worse. Casper, for instance, is dead, and Trevante is devastated. Nevertheless, he returns to the States and reunites with his wife, promising her that he will quit his job and stay with her. Aneesha’s kids are ready to return to normal life, but Aneesha suggests that this may be the quiet before the storm. They mostly mill around in a stranger’s house and wait. For what? No idea. Mitsuki is heartbroken about the death of her girlfriend and roams the streets. She meets a Buddhist monk who brings her back to his temple and tells her the invasion was a test, a reminder to live in the present, which he does by drinking a lot of beer and smoking a lot of weed.

That is how the first season of the series wraps up. Mostly. Somewhere along the way, we also discover that before they were destroyed, the aliens were attempting to terraform Earth.

The final scenes set up the second season. Aneesha’s son Luke goes outside of the house they are staying in and looks at the Northern Lights quizzically. Later, while they’re sleeping, Aneesha wakes up and stares straight ahead with a look that is both astonished and quizzical. In Mitsuki’s final scenes, she’s on her laptop in the temple and decides to reconnect to the satellite she used to communicate with the aliens. She looks at her laptop quizzically, and then she looks out the window quizzically. Casper, who is dead and lying on a morgue table, wakes up in a dreamscape, where he meets the father of Mitsuki’s girlfriend. He gives Casper a compass. The compass needle goes haywire and Casper — still in his dreamscape — looks at it quizzically.

Finally, Trevante visits the beach with his wife. There, he opens up Casper’s notebook and spots a symbol that says “Star.” He looks at it quizzically. Then, he looks up in the skylike and sees a huge alien ship in the distance. He and his wife look at it quizzically.

That’s it. End Credits. What does it all mean? That there will be a second season, and that’s about it. There is nothing “epic” about the finale, however.