The aliens have changed – and so have the heroes in Invasion Season 3

Admit it, you haven’t been keeping up with Invasion, have you? The latest high-budget sci-fi drama from Apple TV+ is one of the streaming service’s buzziest new shows of the last few years, but in all honesty, it’s likely been lost amid the fire-fueled eye candy of Silo and the cerebral might of Foundation. It’s garnered a dedicated, if small, following that has included voices who have even gone as far as to admit to a sort of love/hate relationship with the series at different points.

Don’t get us wrong, Invasion has been good so far. The cinematography is lovely, for one, and conceptually, the showrunners have mostly shot for ambitious and intriguing, if not always so consistently successful, science fiction that’s got larger themes to say. But now, Apple TV+ has dropped the official trailer for season 3, and it looks like the Invasion series may finally be ready to stop flirting with greatness and embrace the edge-of-your-seat science fiction storytelling in earnest.

Created by Hunters‘ David Weil and X-Men film veteran Simon Kinberg, whose other genre work saw him nominated for several Oscars for producing and writing The Martian, Invasion had a simple but seductive hook for audiences. If you have any inkling as to what people think about alien invasion stories, then it was easy to see how Invasion would at least turn some heads. It’s one of those alien invasion stories, but the interesting twist was that the aliens would only make up a part of the story, if that. The focus would be on a wide array of civilians, each from different walks of life and in different corners of the world, many of whom would speak English, Japanese, and Pashto.

Season 1 spent a lot of time with these characters even before the titular alien invasion became impossible to ignore, so those who expected a show that would be mostly about the experience of what it might be like to be a hero in the biggest war humanity will likely ever see were initially disappointed. It was understandable: the story had its heart in the right place, telling a quiet and emotional story about the personal dramas in the build-up to one of the most high-stakes science fiction concepts there is. But in reality, it was just a slow burn leading to the events of season 2.

Season 2 was bolder, and as a result, the creative team seemed to have found the rhythm of the show they were setting out to create in the first place. The change in approach had to do with the reality that there was no going back: the alien invasion had happened, and it had drastically shifted how and where the characters lived. They were survivors of the initial stages of the invasion, which had relegated humanity to small, highly protected safe zones. For many characters, the status quo of the new, wild world meant making sacrifices, and the payoffs in terms of how the character dynamics of Invasion would develop from there were ultimately higher than before. It remains to be seen if season 3 has the same arc in store, but the clues we have so far, like this new trailer, seem to point to the end of the divide that split the characters across countries in previous seasons.

Season 3 Will Bring the Cast Together for a Battle for Survival

Invasion season 3 picks up two years after the events of the last season, and the threats are new and scary. In the official release about the new season, the character arcs that seemed so individual in the last two seasons are now on a collision course for the first time. While some of the characters have been planted in different parts of the world and haven’t been able to directly work together to this point in the show, the third season of Invasion brings them together to take on the biggest threat to Earth’s final survivors in what has been described as a high-stakes mission to the alien mothership.

Conceptually, season 3 is the result of the series embracing a major turning point for a narrative that has, until this point, been almost defined by separation between the characters. The aliens themselves, described by the release as the result of evolution reaching its “apex,” have developed a new, deadly part in the form of tendrils. But this time, the status quo has been directly threatened by the alien activity, as these tendrils grow from smaller sizes into mass coverage of land, water, and space.

The ramifications are obvious: for humanity to have any hope of surviving in the new normal and beyond, it will take all the knowledge, experience, and resilience these characters have gathered over the seasons. In this new, collaborative chapter, new friends will be found and old ones may be tested beyond their breaking points.

The Invasion season 3 trailer features several returning faces from the previous seasons, including: Golshifteh Farahani as Aneesha Malik; Shioli Kutsuna as Mitsuko Yamato; Shamier Anderson as Trevante Cole; India Brown as Jamila Hudson; Shane Zaza as controversial tech entrepreneur Nikhil Kapur; and Enver Gjokaj as Clark Evans. The new addition to the series regulars is Erika Alexander, who will also be a series regular as a new character.