‘Invasion’ Recap: Season 1 Premiere Episode 1

Another Sci-Fi series on Apple TV+, Invasion is off on a great start. From the title (and the events of the episode), we can infer, that extra-terrestrial beings are visiting the earth. The question however is, why are they here?

The premiere episode of Invasion tries to lay the groundwork for what is to come. We start with a shot of a camel herder in the Arabian Desert. He notices a body crash through the atmosphere and land on the earth. It becomes clear that this body (whatever it is) isn’t an ordinary meteorite as it changes course and continues to move even after it lands. The object stops moving and the herder goes to touch it. As he is about to put his hand on it, it lets out a powerful explosive force pushing the man and everything around it away.

The story shifts focus to three different sets of characters in different parts of the world. 

The first is focused on Sheriff John Bell Tyson. He’s been sheriff of his small town in Oklahoma for many years. The mood with which he greets his final day on the job however is pensive like he isn’t ready to let go yet. He goes with his partner to answer a call from one of the local farmers who suspects that his deadbeat nephews have stolen his mother’s truck. 

The sheriff however finds the truck in the cornfield next to the barn. This isn’t the strangest thing that happens though. While he’s inspecting the truck and looking for evidence, a large swarm of locusts flies toward them. They lie on the ground to avoid getting hurt by the locusts. He follows the trail of clues that have been laid out in finding the farmer’s nephews, but they ultimately lead nowhere. 

When his partner questions him as to why he is so invested in the case, he tells her he believes that every man of the police force is chosen by God for a reason. He thought he had found his many years ago after he solved the case of a missing child. The child however was killed two days after he found her in a car accident. Since then, he’d been searching for his purpose and wasn’t satisfied with retirement because he hadn’t found it yet.

Later that evening, the townspeople hold a party for him and even name a day after him. The unsatisfied sheriff however leaves the party looking lost and confused. He goes back to the spot where the car was found and begins to yell at the sky, asking God for his purpose. He finally looks down and begins to dig into the ground. As he does this though, something stings his back. He falls to the ground dead or paralyzed (I’m honestly not sure) as some nearly invisible body floats over him.

The second POV character on the episode is Aneesha Malik. Aneesha is a Harvard-trained doctor who has left medicine to be a stay-at-home mom. We follow her as she goes through her morning routine which includes running on a treadmill, prepping lunch for her 2 children Sarah and Luke, and then waking them up for school. 

All seems well in the Malik household as her husband Manny is happy to see his wife and children. Something weird however happens while the children are at school. All the kids have nosebleeds except for Luke which is particularly weird. Aneesha rushes to the school to pick her kids up and takes them to the hospital. After some tests, a doctor tells her that the kids are ok, and she can take them home. While she’s dealing with all of this, she tries to contact her husband, but he isn’t available because she believes him to be at work. After they get home, Luke opens up the find my phone on an iPad and sees that his father isn’t in the city. He tells his mom this and she decides to go visit his current location. She arrives there to find him having sex with another woman.

She goes home distraught and somehow manages to find the woman’s Instagram page. When he gets home, she serves him a meal (the recipe of which she got from the woman’s Instagram) and then confronts him about his cheating. Before they can start arguing properly, they hear a loud sound and are forced to take their children into the basement of their house.

Somewhere in Japan, a woman wakes up and says, “I’ll miss the sunrise”. She seems sad as she takes a sticker that is shaped like a star and puts it on the ceiling of the room. There’s also someone in the bathroom taking a shower but we do not get to see who they are. Eventually, Invasion progresses, and we find out that her name is Hinata, and she is an astronaut who is about to lead one of the longest manned missions to the International Space Station. Before take-off, a communications engineer comes into the pod and helps calibrate the communications system. While the comms engineer denies knowing Hinata, you get the sense that there is some shared history between them.

The rocket takes off as planned and there are no hitches. The comms engineer who we get to know as Mitsuki goes home takes a shower and gets into bed. She looks up at the ceiling to see the sticker pasted there earlier by Hinata. From this, we can infer that they were lovers. In the spacecraft, which is on its way to the ISS, Hinata is doing some routine checks when suddenly, something collides with the hull of the ship ad she and the other astronauts are sucked into the cold void of space.

There isn’t a lot that happens particularly in this episode as it focuses more on the people involved than the characters. We also don’t get any glimpses of the aliens and there is no clue as to what their plan is. Perhaps the show will give us more context in the next episode.