Apple TV+ Cannot Make Good Shows

 Before you accuse me of click baiting you, I want to make it clear right out of the gate: THIS IS NOT ABOUT A MUSICAL. Now, I have talked about non-musicals on this blog before, but they were usually music adjacent. Meanwhile, this has nothing to do with anything, it's just a small preview to another article about a musical that is coming soon I promise. Um okay by soon it could mean anywhere from today to in 10 weeks, so we'll see how that goes. 

I love talking about shows that I adore on this blog, and today we're going to be talking about a TV show that I adore, but not for the same reasons as everything else I've covered here. That is, 'Invasion', a science fiction show created by Simon Kinberg and David Weil. It's an Apple TV+ original that follows an alien invasion through the perspectives of ordinary people across different continents. 

Now, this sounds like any old show, and I'm sure you're wondering, what made it so good that it sticks out amongst the various science fiction shows made about aliens? Well dear reader, the answer I have for you today is quite simple. It's because the show sucks. 

Never in my life have I seen a show so abhorrently bad, so genuinely terrible that it makes me wonder if the writers are trolling us. As every new season unfolds, I keep asking myself... HOW IS IT GETTING WORSE? And yet, despite being so godawful, it has truly captured my attention. Me and my father regularly quote lines from the show, obsessively break down character arcs, and watch new episodes immediately upon their release. 

I can't talk about what makes this show so good without first talking about what makes it so terrible. Because I have so many thoughts about this, I have done my best to organize my thoughts into a numbered list. 

1. The characters are annoying: I wish I had a better way to put this, but I mean it. The characters are truly so irritating. One of our main characters is a woman named Aneesha, and she is the WORST offender. She constantly makes terrible decisions that endanger herself and her family, and blames everyone but herself for making them. Every scene with her made me want to throw myself off a cliff and take her with me. 

2. The showrunners don't watch their own show: While I can hardly blame them, the number of plot holes and continuity errors astound me and lead me to the logical conclusion that they're either using the world's worst generative AI tool to create the script, or simply aren't rewatching old seasons in the time gap between releases. One main example of this is the aliens, that appear differently in every season. In the first season they're spiky black creatures that led me to wonder if the show was a metaphor for the pandemic, given the similarity between the aliens and the corona virus. By season 3 however, the aliens are white, holographic creatures, taller than they are wide. Naturally, this huge change in appearance is never discussed, because why would it be? After all, that would require doing work. Another example of this is the character Aneesha, who in season 1 was described as a med student who had to drop out midway because her husband wanted her to become a homemaker. It's a tragic story for a woman clearly very interested and capable in the field of medicine, and it does sympathize Aneesha to the audience, which is desperately needed given all other aspects of her characterization being terrible. However, by season 3, the show just forgets that they established this, and lists that she has a doctorate with a sub specialization in neuroscience. Huh? When did this happen, surely not when you were running away from aliens over the past 2 seasons. Moreover, the word 'Wajo' is something that the fandom memes a lot nowadays, but in season two, it was a key part of the plot. It was a hint of the aliens language, and came up again and again. Naturally, we never see it again in season three. 

3. Characters are insanely flat: While invasion has great representation of many types of characters, they have such a large cast that it becomes physically impossible to care about all of them. One character, a black soldier whose entire personality in season 1 is cussing out random strangers has a very good arc. We see him beginning to care for another one of our main characters, a British child, and learn of his backstory and tragic past. This would be a beautiful arc, were it not for the fact that the story just returns him to where he started whenever convenient. Characters are all flat, they're more plot points than people. So, whenever the plot demands for them to start acting the way it needs them to, even if it's totally opposing the growth they just underwent, they regress back into their initial characterization. Take Nikhil, a character I quite enjoyed seeing, it's always nice to see a fellow Indian, and I loved hearing and understanding Hindi in his flashbacks. Nikhil is an billionaire, modelled after Elon Musk and Bill Gates. Initially, he acted solely in self-interest, but after forming a protective, potentially romantic relationship with Mitsuki, an astronaut, he starts acting empathetically. However, every time the plot needs an easy way to have Mitsuki get upset or rebel, Nikhil regresses back into his season two characterization and betrays her in some way. It makes no sense, why have them develop at all if the plan was always to keep using them for their intended purpose? 

4. WHO CARES: Again, not my greatest title, but my main issue with this show comes from how slow burn it is. In season one, I feel pretty comfortable saying that at least 80% of the runtime features no aliens. Every character is going through the worst possible time, and all the issues could make for their own show. Mitsuki works at a space center, and her girlfriend went up to space and never came down. Aneesha's husband is cheating on her. Caspar is being bullied and his father left him. Trevante is stranded in a foreign country, his entire fleet has died, his wife won't talk to him and his son is dead. Despite just creating shows about these people that could surely stand alone, Invasion insists on forcing all these storylines together, creating such a tangled mess. I'm sorry, but when there are ALIENS on the loose, why was half the runtime of season two dedicated to setting up the love triangle between three British teenagers. I'm sorry, but when I have just seen Aneesha stab an alien in the heart with a piece of plastic, I'm naturally going to be underwhelmed when I flash to a scene where a kid named Monty scrunches up a piece of paper because he's upset setting Caspar kiss his crush. In season three, there's a subplot where a group is crashing out in a local church to seek shelter from the aliens. We see one of our new main characters, Marylin going into the storeroom of the church. She randomly announces that she's "crunching the numbers" and then rattles off some garbage plan about how to save food. It's such a stupid scene, and placed in the middle of actual action. Moreover, the next day all the food is stolen, so none of it mattered anyways. Why did we waste so much time in an episode when we could've been spending time with the characters we do have?

5. The Answer: Now that we've revealed all the symptoms of the problem, let's talk about  why they exist. I mean, I just kept coming back to this same question... why?

Why are we introducing new characters when there are still so many open storylines?

Why did Wajo get so much importance if it was just going to be forgotten?

Why didn't Aneesha just drive home when she had a car and a golden opportunity?

Why am I watching this?

Well, my answer can be summarized in one word. Wajo. Okay sorry that was a terrible joke, the real word is laziness. 

I truly believe that most of the issues that plague invasion are born out of laziness. The issues in the script come from an unwillingness to read past scripts or to ideate ahead of time. The introduction of new characters happen because developing old ones require a lot of writing. The fact that ideas are introduced and just dropped is likely a byproduct of this laziness. Whenever it appears an idea may need to be fleshed out, and may take a lot of work to flesh out, it is just dumped and never heard of again. 

With all that being said, I LOVE THIS SHOW. I hope there is a season four, I hope there is a season twenty honestly. It's such fun to trash every single aspect of every episode with my dad and to go on reddit and laugh at all the terrible reviews after each episode. I can honestly say that r/AppleTVInvasion is the only reason I got through season three, and I laughed harder at the jokes there than I ever did at anything in the show. 

I don't know how to conclude this, so I'll leave you with some words of wisdom. 

Wajo. That is all.