Invasion : Season 1, Episodes 1–4
Might contain spoilers.
It starts out very well, setting the stage for something major and dramatic. The eminently watchable Golshifteh Farahani anchors the show in a rather thankless role. Sam Neill skillfully conveys his sense of seeking something more as Jim Bell Tyson. The tone is eerie and unsettling, especially as he searches the field, and the scene of the alien appendage striking is well executed.
That’s it for the good stuff, though. I grew tired of waiting for answers. Mystery piled upon mystery. Any minor revelations were quickly followed by ten times as many questions. The storylines are almost all clichés, only made at all interesting by the aliens; the most directly informative of them, centering on Yamato, is lackluster in every other way.[1] I found it hard to stomach one of the protagonists being a member of the American occupation of Afghanistan while the Afghans themselves are barely even background characters. The orange and teal grading is boring and unappealing.
I ran out of patience by the middle of the fourth episode. Aneesha being the only character I cared about, I would have been happy for her husband Manny to die or at least leave right off the bat, but instead the story wastes entires scenes on showing their conflict. Meanwhile, Sam Neill hasn’t reappeared, and we barely know any more than before, having spent hours watching ordinary people being cruel in ordinary ways amidst extraordinary circumstances.
For all that it pointedly avoids anything explicit, the show is a little too happy to put women’s bodies on display.
- Her mother sure is awful, though.↩