Invasion Episode 4: Story Recap “The King Is Dead” Spoilers Ahead | Apple Tv+ Originals
Representing an alien Invasion from the varied perspective of ordinary people around the world is not the worst idea I have ever heard. The vanity of detailing how the preliminary little quirks of such a thing would inevitably cause all kinds of worldly trouble and diversion for these people isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But the problem with Invasion that crystallizes here with “The King Is Dead” is that he’s way so happy with himself on the idea. He thinks so much about his global cosmopolitan ensemble and his patient pace that he forgets to include any real and meaningful drama. And that’s forgetting to include an invasion.
Invasion Season 1 Episode 4 Recap
Again, it’s not the worst thing in the world. There aren’t any rules that genre TV has to go a certain way and include certain things at particular points in the narrative, but it’s usually a good idea not to ignore the guidelines entirely, especially when your program has been explicitly marketed in a particular way. Invasion feels like an exercise in fooling an audience, baiting them with a thing, and then running them through hours of numb character drama just to get it. Are we even going to get it? Good question. I have screens from every episode and I couldn’t bring myself to look at them, so am I not interested in the current form of the series.
Chances are it will all end up going moot, that Invasion will develop in such an interesting and exciting new direction that all those early reviews will seem silly, but if I were a gambler I wouldn’t put in any money. on that. You can break most of what happens in “The King Is Dead” down into a few points – Casper takes charge, Ahmed talks about it, and so on. – which is disappointing for a full hour of television. All the Lord of the Flies style chordwith Casper and the children returns to come out of a hole and discover the debris of the Russian satellite. Of course, there’s also the fact that Casper has a connection to aliens and drew some creepy prognoses in his sketchbook based on his visions, but that’s pretty standard genre stuff.
Everything about Aneesha – she finds out that Ahmed has impregnated his lover, Amanda, and the resulting argument causes friction for everyone – and Ward – he tries to track down Chavez based on his location beacon d urgency – feels pretty unnecessary, in all fairness. There’s at least a little more meat on the bones of Mitsuki’s subplot. She visits Murai’s father, Ikuro, a former radio engineer at JASA who had not spoken to his daughter for several years. Mitsuki’s assumption that this was due to Murai’s sexuality is perfectly reversed when it turns out that Ikuro just wanted her to live her truth openly. This all ties into the larger plot, as the recording of Murai’s last moments, when it is tuned to a particular frequency, has a tangible effect. The bigger the speakers, the greater the potential effect, so there is some movement in the right direction when it comes to actually dealing with the alien invasion aspect of this alien invasion show.
But will anyone be around long enough for this to matter? What proportion of the main Invasion audience tolerated two weeks and four hours of dragging their feet? Hard to say. We’ll have to wait and see how it all unfolds. You can stream Invasion season 1, episode 4, “The King is Dead,” exclusively on Apple TV+.
