Spoilers for "Invasion" Season 3 ahead! You've been warned!
Optimism reigns supreme with Academy Award-nominated Hollywood producer, screenwriter, and filmmaker Simon Kinberg ("The Martian," "X-Men movies") as demolished mothership dust settles following "Invasion's" explosive season 3 finale that found one of its key characters eerily abducted.
With much more story to tell, and genuine hopes for a fourth and final chapter currently hanging in the balance, the "Invasion" co-creator, executive producer, and writer reflects back on this past season’s triumphs and teases where he’d like to next take the narrative for Apple TV's sci-fi saga should it score a Season 4.
"I was overwhelmed and extraordinarily happy with the way that our fans stuck with us, and somehow we found this whole new audience for the show," Kinberg tells Space.com.
"I think to some extent Apple has grown in its subscriber base and our hardcore fans are really vocal online and once the word spread it sort of caught on. It was really cool to find a new audience that obviously caught up with the show. And because they could binge it, they could get real fast into the heavier alien stuff in Season 2 and 3."
As a true sci-fi fan himself, Kinberg believes that "Invasion's" interest was given a boost by the fact that during its past Season 3 run that ended on Oct. 24, there was a bit of a lull in sci-fi programming on our screens, and his involving series filled a particular temporary need.
"We were out of the wake of big summer tentpole movies and there weren't any big sci-fi shows that were totally overlapping. And I do think that Apple has established a general audience for their high quality science fiction library. 'Severance' fans, 'Foundation' fans, 'For All Mankind' fans, and 'Silo' fans are all congregating around Apple and we sort of had that corridor, to a large extent, to ourselves. They commit hard to their shows, both conceptually and financially, so you really feel like you've got cinematic scale and some really bold original-feeling shows, and that's a rare thing in movies television these days."
Last month's season finale with Shioli Kutsuna's Mitsuki zapped up into the alien's fold leaves her fate uncertain, yet several characters' arcs seem fulfilled.
"Infinitas is not just disbanded and Verna and Marilyn are no more, but their mission is over and maybe it's been disproven so that cult is down," he adds regarding the end. "And the mothership being destroyed, and not just the outer shell, but its hivemind infrastructure. Our president says it at the very end that 'It's a fair fight now.' It's the idea that without a hivemind to control all these different hunter-killer aliens around the world, that humanity will likely take the upper hand. We don't end it like it’s the end of the war and all the aliens die. But we do end it with the understanding that the superiority they had is over. A lot of our characters get to go home like Jamila and Aneesha and Nikhil, not Mitsuki.
One of the main themes Kinberg hoped to explore in this season, and something touched upon last season, is that the scariest thing to lose is not your life, but your memories.
"And for Mitsuki's character, she really is losing more and more of her memories and identity. That's something that Trevante is struggling with over the span of the season. At the very end, though she's taken to a portal and into who knows where, she's given her memories back. She gets to remember the love of her life, Hinata, and other memories of her life. I thought the poetry of that could feel emotional while giving the aliens some measure of a win in all this too."
Apple TV has not greenlit an "Invasion" Season 4 yet, but Kinberg admits that no matter what, this project has enriched his life as an artist and as a human being.
"We have a lot of ideas for it and it was really cool to have our audience broaden out this season," Kinberg notes. "In many ways this was our 'The Guns of Navarone' season and they completed their mission. Future stories would be the calm after the storm, but the sense that things had returned to some semblance of normalcy. But then of course something would have to happen because you couldn't have the aftermath happen for ten episodes. It's interesting to explore what a post-war world looks like.
"I spent the first 25 years of my career working almost entirely in features. Even when I'm working in 'The X-Men,' where I got to tell three or four or five of those stories, that's still not even a single season of television. So to tell almost 30 hours of storytelling around these characters has been an extraordinary experience. To be able to shoot all over the world, in Japan and Morocco and London, has been one of the most amazing experiences of my life.”
If you're going to be out of the country and still need your daily recommended dose of sci-fi, you can still watch it on your streaming service of choice using a VPN. You'll be able to connect to the service you've paid for, no matter where you are (on Earth, it won't work in space, sorry).
There are many great VPN services out there, but if you're wanting a recommendation, NordVPN is our top pick.
