AppleTV+’s science fiction drama series, Invasion, had arguably started off with an interesting prospect—to look at an alien invasion from a more dramatic perspective, stressing more on the changing dynamics of human relations in such trying times. But by the end of season 3, it is just an underwhelming mess, unable to fully grasp either the human drama or the science fiction elements. Invasion season 3 episode 10 deals with the WDC unit finally reaching the downed alien mothership to destroy it once and for all, while Aneesha and some of the soldiers stay back to fight off the only obstacle in their way—Verna and her Infinitas militants.
Spoiler Alert
Does Verna betray her own people?
Invasion season 3 episode 10 begins with Aneesha leading the WDC soldiers through the forest inside the Dead Zone, while the others have left on their mission to enter the mothership. Although the soldiers just want to ensure the safety of the whole unit, Aneesha is sure that the only way to do so would be to get to Verna and her militants and kill them first. The militants in question have their own problems, though, as their long journey through the Dead Zone has started to take a toll on their health because of the toxic and inhospitable air they have been breathing. Therefore, there is naturally a fight to secure whatever little oxygen they have in their tanks, and the militant group is clearly falling apart. Their leader, Verna, now steps in and orders her soldiers to not fight against the conditions but to accept them and adapt to them.
Her message is clear—the aliens are gods who are here only to help us, and therefore the toxic air around their crashed mothership is a blessing that all humans must gladly accept. Verna throws away the last oxygen tank and orders her followers to simply breathe in the toxic air and give in to the pain and the burning sensation that they are being unsettled by. The fact that they are breathing poison is evident from the blood in their veins turning black and them being visible on their bodies, but Verna successfully convinces them that this is just how things are supposed to be. Just like before, the Infinitas members ultimately accept whatever their leader is saying, as their whole mission is based on her claims of the aliens being benevolent creatures who have come to save humans.
In fact, it was only Verna who had supposedly heard her dead sister talk through the alien portal, which had made her believe the aliens were the connection between humans and their dead loved ones. None of the others had had such an experience and had joined her rebel group simply because of her claims. Therefore, it is no wonder that the militants do not now question her belief of the toxic air actually being beneficial, and neither do they hesitate to follow her orders with regard to the next step of the plan. One of the scouts spots Mitsuki alone in the forest, accompanied only by a gardener alien, and this is enough for Verna to make up her mind about what to do next. She tells the militants to surround Mitsuki and essentially keep the WDC soldiers away from her, but does not tell them that she plans to approach Mitsuki with a different kind of proposal.
Verna places her militants at such a position in the forest that they will surely have to battle it out against the WDC soldiers, who are slightly better prepared for the battle. Meanwhile, she approaches Mitsuki and shows her the blood on her sleeves, claiming that she had been attacked by the WDC unit. In reality, Verna had used the deep wound of one of her militants to get the blood on her sleeve so that she could convince Mitsuki they were on the same side. Because of Mitsuki being alone in the forest, Verna had figured out that she no longer believed in the WDC unit’s vision and that she was conflicted about the aliens’ true intentions. Therefore, the Infinitas leader asks Mitsuki to join her in going to the mothership and save the aliens. However, it is very evident that Verna only cares about her own desire to reunite with her dead sister, and she does not care about the others who had accompanied her so far. She leaves her militants to die at the hands of the WDC, making her way towards Mitsuki instead, and then obviously abandons Mitsuki as well, as she desperately makes her way to the mothership.
What happens inside the alien mothership?
Meanwhile, Trevante, Jamila, and Nikhil head into the alien mothership and search for the ‘blind corridor,’ where the aliens cannot sense their presence. The air is already very tense because of Trevante’s extreme nervousness at being inside the mothership, where he had had to spend two long years hiding from the aliens. Also, this was where he had last seen Caspar Morrow, and had lost him as well, apparently because of his own fault, and so it is as traumatic for him as it is tense. Jamila encourages him to muster up the courage and get the job done, while Nikhil takes a look at the place and realizes that his plan of destroying the neural connections between the aliens and the mothership will indeed work.
When Caspar had struck the core of the ship with the metal shard and been thrown back by its pulse, he had managed to pierce the wall of the spaceship with the shard in his hand. It was this action that had cut off the neural connection of the corridor, turning it ‘blind’ to the aliens, and so they were unable to sense any human presence there. By this same logic, Nikhil concludes, the much more powerful bomb, made with the shard material, will definitely be able to destroy all the neural connections when it explodes, essentially turning the whole mothership ‘blind’ and leaving all the aliens on Earth completely clueless, since they are all driven by the same hivemind.
However, the trio run into a very real problem before they can go ahead with their plan, as the supernatural effect of the mothership gets to their head. The mothership, and maybe the more advanced alien beings as well, truly has the ability to make humans relive their strongest memories, ones that have had a lasting impact throughout their lives. It can be assumed that Verna had misunderstood this ability of the aliens as them wanting to reunite humans with their loved ones. It seems like the experience she had of talking with her dead sister was actually rooted in the dazed state that all humans enter when in the presence of an alien, simply because they relive certain memories and believe them to be very real.
Both Nikhil and Trevante suddenly stop inside the blind corridor and enter this sort of trance, as they both relive some of their core memories, which had shaped their respective lives to a great extent. Trevante sees himself as a US soldier when he was posted overseas and when he had been unable to protect his unit from the invading aliens. He remembers how his best friend, a fellow soldier in his unit, had died from the injuries sustained from the alien attack. As the effect of the mothership on his mind grows more intense, Trevante also remembers the day when the doctors had first informed him that there was no way to save his son’s life, as the boy suffered from cancer. This had completely changed the trajectory of his life, as his son’s death had resulted in his divorce, which in turn had led to him going overseas to serve in the military, where he suffered the second heartbreak of losing his best friend right in front of his eyes.
On the other side, Nikhil has a singular memory that haunts him and leaves him catatonic inside the blind corridor, as he recalls a day from his childhood when he and his family used to live in a shady apartment complex with neighbors who were involved in various criminal activities. Young Nikhil, driven by the thought of helping his financially struggling family by earning money by himself, had started his own gambling den, much to the wrath of the man who already had a monopoly on that business. The young boy was costing him money, and so the criminal came to their apartment one day and killed Nikhil’s mother when she tried to force them out. This incident had not only made young Nikhil go through the terrible grief of losing his mother, but his father had also blamed him for getting her killed because of his greed for money. Just like Trevante, Nikhil is also taken over by the feelings associated with this memory of his, all of which is part of the aliens’ ploy to keep them away from the mothership’s core.
How does Jamila fight back?
Jamila tries her best to wake Trevante and Nikhil from their trance and get them back to the mission at hand, which is to move forward and bomb the mothership core. As she is unable to do so by herself, an old friend unexpectedly appears to help her out. This friend is Caspar Morrow himself, for whom Jamila had left her settled life in London behind, just to know how her best friend and lover (for a short stint) had died. She is naturally very surprised to see Caspar, who reveals that he has been able to appear in front of her only because they always shared a very strong and special bond, which had not broken down even after his death. Caspar states that he had always tried to reach out to Jamila spiritually, even when his mortal body was dying, and this was the reason for the unusual spike and graph on the EEG report from right when he died.
However, Jamila gradually realizes the situation she is actually in—her mind too has been taken over by the alien mothership, and the Caspar she is seeing is only a projection of her memory. Unlike the two men, Jamila does not get overwhelmed by her memories, but rather by a hallucinatory reunion with her beloved Caspar. She also soon realizes that the aliens basically make use of any information they can find in the humans’ minds with regard to matters that they have not been able to accept or move on from and trigger the memories associated with it. Trevante and Nikhil are taken over by their memories because they had not been able to get over the grief of having lost their son and mother, respectively.
Similarly, Jamila sees Caspar because she has not yet been able to accept his death. Once this realization hits her, Jamila figures out what she needs to do, not only to free herself from the literal and metaphorical burden of grief, but also to help the others get back to their senses and defeat the aliens. Thus, she decides to bid Caspar a final goodbye and directly confronts the image in front of her by stating that it is not real, which instantly makes Caspar disappear, and she is brought back to the blind corridor. But she is still not able to get Trevante and Nikhil back to their senses until Mitsuki comes to their rescue.
Are the aliens defeated?
After being ditched by Verna and realizing that Aneesha is right in asking her to help defeat the aliens, Mitsuki runs to one of the alien vines and taps into the hivemind, using it to communicate with Nikhil. She manages to stop the gardeners before they can harm the trio inside, and then she runs into the mothership to further help them with their plan. Mitsuki also gets rid of her neural dampener, risking her own health and life in order to help her friends and also save humanity from the invaders. This helps her finally completely tap into the hivemind and use it to send an intense shockwave across the mothership, essentially to distract the aliens towards her.
This is the kind of teamwork that the WDC unit had needed all along, and once Trevante and Nikhil are back to their senses, they and Jamila run towards the heart of the mothership, armed with the bomb they have been carrying all along. Invasion season 3 episode 10 confirms that the aliens do not have any intentions to help humans and rather want to attack us, as Mitsuki learns by decoding the message sent by the mothership. Therefore, after a tussle between two perspectives almost throughout the season, the humans ultimately blow up the heart of the mothership and defeat the aliens, at least for now.
The shard bomb essentially cuts off all power to the mothership, meaning that its neural connections are lost as well, and so the alien beings like the gardeners and the hunter-killers are left stranded as well. It is reported that the hunter-killers that had remained on Earth are now completely on their own, which makes them very easy to kill. The mothership is now truly dead, and the stream of power that seemingly connected it to some other craft or realm above is cut off as well. But it is not a completely joyous victory, especially for Nikhil, as there is a strange rift in the sky inside the mothership, and a beam of light flashes out of it, which seemingly abducts Mitsuki and either takes her away from Earth or at least separates her from the group.
Did Aneesha take her revenge?
At the beginning of the episode, Aneesha is like a wounded tigress, desperate to take her revenge for Verna having killed her husband, Clark. Not only had Clark been a great husband to her through all their tough times, but he had also been a perfect father to her children. Aneesha wants to find and kill Verna all by herself, if required, and she has to be stopped by the soldiers, who clearly fear that she might die in the process. She gradually calms down and even assumes her role as a doctor and a life-saver at certain crucial moments, but Aneesha ultimately realizes that she must stop Verna at all costs, at least to help Trevante and the others, if not to seek her revenge.
Thus, when Verna runs towards the mothership, totally prepared to stop the WDC unit from bombing the place, Aneesha catches up to her and slams her onto the ground, giving Mitsuki enough time to tap into the hivemind and then go to the mothership herself. Ultimately, Verna is too late, and she has to hear the loud explosion from the distance, which signals that she has lost the battle. It is only Aneesha who understands how Verna had been acting out of extreme grief and inability to accept her sister’s death, and she even offers her some sympathy, at least temporarily.
However, at the end of Invasion season 3 episode 10, Verna makes one last attempt to attack, and this is when Aneesha shoots her dead. Thus, at the end of season 3, Aneesha is successful in avenging Clark’s death, although she had not technically wanted to do so. Much more importantly, she is able to return home and reunite with her children, giving them the note that Clark had written for them. As news programs all over the world officially announce that the aliens have been defeated and the invasion is over, Aneesha admits to Luke that she is not sure whether the aliens will not be back in the future, but at least a few years’ peace can definitely be expected after this whole fiasco.
