REVIEW: ‘Invasion’ Season 3 Episode 1 — “The Ones We Leave Behind”

Apple TV+ has become my number one streaming service for science fiction. From Silo and Severance to Foundation and Murderbot, the streamer has been investing in genre storytelling like no other. And with Invasion, one of the early releases on the platform, we have your traditional alien, well, invasion story told across different vignettes, and in the Invasion Season 2 finale, they all converged. Now, in Invasion Season 3 Episode 1, “The Ones We Leave Behind,” the series has some ground to make up with characters that have been out into even more extreme circumstances than where they began their journey. 

Suppose you’re just jumping into the series created by Simon Kinberg and David Weil. In that case, Invasion is a sweeping, character-driven science fiction drama series that follows an alien invasion through different perspectives around the world. Set across multiple continents, the points have now, for the most part, converged, or at the very least, the threads each character is attached to have begun to tie together.  

At the end of last season, Trevante Cole (Shamier Anderson) was off into the great unknown, Mitsuki Yamato (Shioli Kutsuna) transferred to the alien consciousness, and Aneesha Malik (Golshifteh Farahani) and the Movement are now intimately connected to the military they once fought, and Caspar Marrow (Billy Barratt) may not be who we think. The stage was set for Invasion Season 3 Episode 1 to take the reins. To get all of these characters into their unique and harrowing positions, the series gave up a lot of emotional development to benefit plot development. 

Invasion Season 3 Episode 1 has a lot to catch the audience up on after a time skip.

Season three of Invasion is focused on the plot to infiltrate the alien mothership, save those who have been taken, and hopefully find a way back to humanity when it’s all said and done. Invasion Season 3 will also see the formation of new alliances as characters from different storylines unite for this common goal.

That alone is a reason to get excited, given how stagnant and siloed some of the stories have been. This season also stars returning cast members Golshifteh Farahani, Shioli Kutsuna, Shamier Anderson, India Brown, Shane Zaza, Enver Gjokaj, and Billy Barratt, and introduces new series regular Erika Alexander.

Invasion Season 3 Episode 1 opens with a time skip after the mothership falls to Earth. Two years after the crash, we’re in the home of a family when a child is playing with an astronaut action figure he calls Trevante and another figure he calls Caspar. As the child plays, the TV commemorates M-Day, the day that the alien mothership fell, which reveals that Trevante and Caspar are the men credited with saving the world.

Shamier Anderson as Trevante Cole is in the spotlight again in “The Ones We Leave Behind.”

As President Zhou celebrates the two men’s memories, he notes that since the mothership fell, there had been no further aggression or invasion. As the family dog Armstrong barks outside, any eagle-eyed viewer knows that he’s barking at something sinister in the night. As the cold open comes to a close, we know we’re right when the dog yelps (yes, the dog does die in Invasion Season 3 Episode 1, I’m sorry) and the man looking for him reveals a glowing orb. 

Not one for linear storytelling, Invasion Season 3 picks up at the end and asks the audience to buy into understanding how we got to this future. But, to throw a wrench into it all, men at a military base find Trevante Cole, still alive, and in his space suit. For the better part of the episode, the audience is just as confused as the people who pulled him from the Atlantic portal, and Trevante is wondering how he got back to Earth. 

When Invasion Season 3 Episode 1 resumes after the credits, it’s time to play catch-up with what everyone has been doing for the two years and change since we last left them. The first person we meet is Jamila Huston (India Brown), who goes by “Gemma,” who has a boyfriend and is still living in what is now Former England. She is still processing everything that happened with Caspar, which is revealed when she leaves an art exhibit after she sees his face in one of the portraits. 

Invasion Season 3 Episode 1 has a lot to say about heroes and even more to say about martyrs.

Jamila is struggling when confronted with the past, but she doesn’t want to. As her boyfriend encourages her to attend Trevante’s speech in the Americas, she refuses, claiming to have moved on, but India Brown’s line delivery lets us know that Jamila is still in pain.

No matter how much she says that she isn’t, she misses Caspar, and Trevante is a reminder of her grief. Where Trevante was presumed dead, Caspar was found with no vitals. And Jamila is carrying that grief still. But she’s a small part of this two-character episode. The real focus is on Trevante.

Shamier Anderson’s performance as Trevante remains a highlight of the series. As Trevante undergoes questioning, the agent behind the glass refuses to believe that he isn’t a threat. But he can’t find answers, only flashbacks to the ship, the electric crackling walls in the hallways, and he wants it to make sense. 

While everyone but his unnamed interrogator sees Trevante as a hero. No, actually, they see him as a martyr. And when the martyr becomes real, the threat he destroyed comes with it. As Trevante pleads to highlight what he just survived, everyone around him (other than the overly aggressive interrogator) ignores it. The General he meets asserts that the aliens are quiet, the dead zone around the mothership’s crash radius has had no movement, and humanity has won. 

Trevante’s past informs his path in “The Ones We Leave Behind” and not for the better.

Trevante has depth this season, and it’s only Episode 1. We see guilt and fear, but we also see his need for answers, even if it puts him into immediate opposition to the government that fished him from the last open portal. But the pain ringing in his head, the pain resembles Caspar’s migraines, connects him to the past, when his unit died in Afghanistan, and he heard the noise he heard behind the walls of the mothership.

Something worse is coming on the horizon, and while he holds it together, accepting his medal of honor, speaking to a crowd, he can’t lie to himself. When Jamila reveals herself in the crowd, the pretense is over, and it’s just his grief and his need for answers that remain. 

Invasion Season 3 Episode 1 is about the way that people crave heroes, and the burden it puts on the people they ask to carry their hopes and their success. Trevante is a man who is lost, and now on the run from the government, he’s not the hero they all see. He doesn’t know how the mothership was taken down, and he couldn’t save yet another child. 

We don’t get all of the answers we needed in the Invasion Season 3 premiere, but we do get an excellent performance. 

As Trevante begins to experience the fear and unsettling pain that comes with being connected to the mothership, he is left with little choice. He can hope and he can run toward answers, but he is doing so without support from people in power. Travante isn’t just the hero of the world, but he is the truth that they aren’t saved. With such a large cast expected to come into play in later episodes, Trevante has taken the focal point for the season. 

He’s connected to the alien invasion, but he has to be believed. Moreso, it’s clear that the people in the government do believe him, they don’t want to acknowledge him, lest it ruin their peace. If this season of Invasion is saying anything, it’s that being a hero means more to people than bringing the truth. 

This is an episode about creating more questions than answers. Invasion Season 3 Episode 1 mostly leaves a lot of gaps in the story, which would be fine if the second season of Invasion hadn’t ended in a speed run of character movement instead of development. Instead, we’re having to read between the lines for a bit, and fit in the pieces we can find as Jamila and Trevante take off on the run from the military. 

The future looks stark in Invasion Season 3 Episode 1, and there is something mean on the horizon.

But this is just the beginning, and Invasion Season 3 follows a similar pattern to the last; the dots will start getting connected toward the midpoint. But the question remains, is that enough? As for now, Shamier Anderson’s expanded role as Trevante is a welcome surprise and much needed. 

With the national lines seemingly held together despite the “former” at the start of each title, I can’t help but wonder about The Movement. What have they done? What can they do? Where is Aneesha? But that’s typical for this series. Two characters at a time, one episode at a time, and hopefully we’ll find answers. 

Still, to right the ship, Invasion Season 3 Episode 1 needed to come in with the intent of understanding its audience, but more importantly, caring for each of the characters we have grown to understand, fear for, and root for. And for the most part, “The Ones We Leave Behind” succeeds more than it fails. But that’s just what I’ve come to expect with this series now. More success than failure, but ultimately only scratching the surface enough to keep me invested, but not enough to champion the show. 

Invasion Season 3 Episode 1 is streaming now on Apple TV+ with new episodes every Friday in August and into October, 2025.

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