For several years now, Apple TV+ has been the streaming service for science-fiction fans, as it produced a number of big-budget genre shows from original entry For All Mankind to latest effort Murderbot. Debuting in 2021 and co-created by Simon Kinberg and David Weil, Invasion was one of the streamer’s earlier major sci-fi titles. A War of the Worlds-inspired alien invasion drama, it followed a diverse group of people – some ordinary, some extraordinary – scattered all over the world, as they first uncovered and then attempted to survive a hostile extraterrestrial takeover of Earth. The show drew on the professional history of both its creators to blend human drama with slick sci-fi spectacle – Weil had created Amazon’s Nazi-hunting mystery show Hunters, while the prolific Kinberg wrote and produced most of Fox’s X-Men movies and won an Oscar for producing Ridley Scott’s The Martian.

Invasion introduced us to a cast that includes American Navy SEAL Trevante Cole (Shamier Anderson), the sole survivor of a mysterious attack that wipes out his whole unit in Kandahar; British youth Caspar Morrow (Billy Barratt), a young boy with a surprising psychic connection to the aliens, whose class finds themselves stuck out in the wilderness when their school bus is attacked; Mitsuki Yamato (Shioli Kutsuna), a Japanese communications expert whose astronaut lover is killed aboard the ISS when its destroyed by the invaders; and Aneesha Malik (Golshifteh Farahani), a dedicated family-woman who finds her personal world ending due to an unfaithful husband, right as the actual world is ending, forcing her to set out on her own with her kids.

Over the previous two seasons these people and more have travelled across the globe as they unearthed the capabilities of the alien menace and slowly started to fight back. 2023’s season two ended with the most decisive victory for humanity as Trevante – with telepathic guidance from Caspar – managed to make his way aboard the alien mothership via one of the aliens’ portals that Mitsuki – with her own telepathic gifts – had successfully pried open. There he was able to take down the mothership from the inside and send its forces scrambling… somehow.

As season three opens, it dips right into mystery territory as nobody knows what Caspar and Trevante did to end the alien threat, Caspar having died on the hospital bed he was strapped to, while Trevante was never found on the crashed mothership. But their sacrifices had won peace for humanity. Two years of peace, to be exact, which is where we pick up the story as the world has seemingly returned to a state of relative stability.

I was lucky enough to get early access to season three and be able to speak to Kinberg last week and asked the writer/producer if the third season time jump was just a clever way to get around some of the younger members of the cast having noticeably aged as two years have passed in real time as well.

Simon Kinberg: [Laughs] It certainly helped us. Doing the two-year time jump certainly helped explain why these kids shot up the way that kids do. But it actually wasn’t always part of the plan. But it became an idea that I got really excited about because I liked the idea of seeing our characters try to settle back into some form of normalcy.

Kinberg continued, explaining how this gap specifically impacted the lives of some of the characters that become more prominent in season two, such as Caspar’s classmate and crush Jamila (India Brown), and Aneesha’s resistance-fighter-turned-beau Clark (Enver Gjokaj).

SK: It allowed us to make some jumps in terms of Clark and Aneesha’s relationship and to see Jamilla in college, and I just was interested in allowing them to evolve outside of the invasion, and then shattering that, obviously. 

Said shattering happens when [MINOR SPOILER ALERT IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE TRAILER] Trevante suddenly reappears with no memory of where he’s been for the last two years. What he does have though is the instinctive knowledge that the aliens have actually been playing possum and that the threat is far from over. In fact, it’s really just picking up steam now. Kinberg had previously described the whole of Invasion’s story as being split into four acts, meaning that this season takes us pass the halfway mark and starts setting up the conclusion. As Kinberg described it, “this season, as last season, continues to tip more and more into having a drive and propulsion to the storytelling”.

That would be welcome news to the show’s biggest critics who have sometimes skewered its slower pacing as it focused on smaller character beats instead of rapidly moving the overarching invasion story ahead. There’s still a lot of character moments this season, especially with the introduction of a new human faction in the clandestine Infinitas, a group with their own motivations, who do not trust the story being fed to the remaining human population by the world’s government. Infinitas and its mysterious leader (whose identity I won’t spoil here) introduce some new moral quandaries for the characters, while also kicking off a lot of the season’s action beats. And serving both those ends is a balancing act that Kinberg himself describes as “really difficult”.

SK: Growing up, my favorite movies struck a kind of perfect balance between being intimate and being epic. I think about the early Steven Spielberg movies like E.T. and Jaws and Close Encounters, and even the Star Wars movies, especially Empire Strikes Back, and Blade Runner, and I grew up with like the sort of Terminator movies, the greatest science fiction era of film [to me]. And they always had a balance of those things. And so, yeah, going into this show – because I didn’t have much experience in television, most of my experience was in movies – I wanted to take the time to go deep on the characters. And I think with each season, what has happened naturally is, as we’ve gotten to the characters better, it allowed the plot to move a little faster. So, there’s a little more propulsion in the second season over the first season and this season because all the characters come together and they’re all on a singular driven mission. There’s just a lot more propulsion and drive to this season, and that wasn’t necessarily by design. It was just that once you’ve spent enough time going deep with the characters, then you can thrust them into situations as you’ve gotten to know them already.

And to those critics who have been voicing these concerns online (sometimes very loudly), Kinberg wants you to know that he has heard you.

SK: Yeah, I listen. I listen to the audience. I did it when I made X-Men movies from movie to movie. I want to have the audience be one of the voices in the process of creating this stuff, because that’s who we make our shows and movies for. 

And for those audience members who have been paying attention to these things, season three finally addresses one of the show’s little oddities: Trevante and Mitsuki have somehow never met on-screen. Thanks to the resurging alien threat, the pair finally get to team up. As they are the only two principal cast members to not share a scene before now, I asked Kinberg if this was a big occasion for actors Shamier Anderson and Shioli Kutsuna.

SK: Yeah, it’s interesting because the way we shoot in the past, the first couple of seasons, a lot of the time the actors get to know each other because we’re all shooting sometimes at the same time. And they already know each other as people, but they’ve not gotten to meet as characters. And so, I know specifically, Shamier and Shioli were excited to get to work together. And their characters are so different, [even though] they’re both really emotionally wounded, and sort of fragile characters who are also very strong. So, I think that the interplay between them was really interesting because they both have moments of incredible strength where they’re impressed with each other and rely on each other. They both have moments of real emotional fragility, where they need help too, and so that there was a push and pull between the characters that that Shamier and Shioli really enjoyed.

As you may have noticed, making this show seems to take a really long time, with a two-year gap between each season thus far. This wasn’t quite the fault of Kinberg and co as events outside of their control added delays, despite Apple renewing the show for a second and then third season relatively quickly. We haven’t heard anything yet about a renewal for a fourth season – which would presumably be the show’s last season given Kinberg’s confirmation that they’re still sticking to a four-act structure – but that didn’t stop them previously. They reportedly wrote quite a chunk of season three while season two was still in post-production. Have they done the same this time as they wait for the official nod from Apple once the new season debuts?

SK: We started talking about it. And what’s nice is that we’ve now built a little family of writers who have been with us for multiple seasons, and that really helps because it accelerates everything. So yeah, we’ve been talking about it. 

Hopefully, those talks turn into scripts soon and we get to finally see how this whole thing gets resolved. For now, we can look forward to the ten-episode season three, which kicks off on Apple TV+ this coming Friday, 22 August 2025.

You can watch the full unedited interview with Simon Kinberg below.