Just finished binging Invasion Season 2.
Generally speaking, I liked some of the actors, the world is interesting, but I found the story got slower and slower as the show progressed. Each episodes A plot could be summarized in a sentence, and the B plot just dragged on forever.
I think the show leaned more toward mysterybox story telling, while dolling out universe plot points over each episode in a frustratingly slow fashion.
Season 2 - Episode 3 I kinda gave up, and wanted to find the episode guide and just read the plot synopsis for the rest of the season… but nobody (wikipedia, imdb, anyone) actually had a writeup of the plot itself! I managed to finish the show by playing at 2x speed, and skipping about 85% of the episodes filler with 10s jumps. I watched 7 episodes of season 2 in about a hour of real time in this fashion.
Discussion of the plot, and spoilers ahead.
Plot Discussion
psychic aliens visit earth in invisible space ships, and set some level 1 remote controlled mooks to start spreading chaos and depopulating some parts of earth while spreading black goo.
Nothing can kill the Aliens, except fire, yet none of the militaries equip their soldiers with fire based weapons over the next two years (some rebels use flame throwers, but never a organized military).
The aliens leave a mcguffin that can kill aliens as debris on the ground, which is discovered by a psychic sensitive child. This McGuffin is never used, or studied, until the last episode of season 2.
Aliens psychic abilities have no delay and go faster than light. If a Alien ship is downed the mooks under its control deactivate for awhile.
A researcher slowly experiments with a Alien Thing ™, finds a way to decloak some of their ships, a bunch are downed, and in response all the alien level 1 mooks get a OTA update and are now level 2 fireproof mooks - now nothing except mcguffin can even slow them down.
Alien Thing turns out to be a instant teleporter portal (why do they need ships?) connecting to a network other portals spread throughout the world, and assumably the alien ships.
Season 2 Ends with Psychic Humans opening a portal so Doom Slayer Type Soldier can take McGuffin into the portal network.
That is my best summary of the A plot. After watching 20 episodes I have some foundational questions still
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Why are the Aliens here?
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What do they want?
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Why has it taken them over 2 years, and they still haven’t done much - at all.
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Terraforming - There are strong suggestions the planet is being terraformed, if thats the goal why leave humans to interfere?
What do you think the big season 3 plot will be?
I kinda think the show runners are making it up as they go along season by season. I think terraforming is too obvious, and the actions of aliens don’t make sense of that was their only goal.
I could see some huge pivot where the aliens are trying to collect the minds and consciousness of some humans, for a space zoo maybe?, before terraforming the earth.
The Alien mooks/dogs don’t make sense to me, they could have the same effect without any of those things on the ground, they don’t seem to be actually accomplishing a goal. The aliens are basically untouchable without the mooks.
The pessimist in me thinks season 3 would see the mooks level up again, and level 3 mooks would be even more untouchable. The Doomslayer will have some Arrival type of revelation that somehow the Aliens are trying to save humanity, for some weird definition of save. The mysterbox will never be explained
I just want to tell the President to get fucking bent with all her ordering people around. Try getting off your ass and doing something yourself!