There’s always a bigger alien to give a fresh sci-fi twist to an old adage. And so it is with the third season of Apple TV+’s Invasion, the international sci-fi drama created by Academy Award-winning producer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg (Deadpool, X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Martian) and David Weil (Citadel, Hunters).
This slow-burn series returns with the first episode of season 3 beginning on August 22, 2025 (episodes will be released weekly) with evolved sentient extraterrestrial creatures lurking in the mothership that crashed to Earth at the end of season 2.
Starring Shamier Anderson, Shioli Kutsuna, Golshifteh Farahani, India Brown, Shane Zaza, and Enver Gjokaj, Invasion examines the lives and losses of a heroic group of global survivors experiencing a frightening alien attack.
In season 3, those disparate stories all converge as the ultimate apex predators make their presence known and these strangers must unite to try and infiltrate the downed mothership to rescue humankind from annihilation.
Invasion is Hollywood veteran Simon Kinberg’s ode to classic science fiction and the types of must-see event films of his youth. Here, he ups the stakes as the evolving saga unfolds revealing monstrous new threats.
“The first couple of seasons all of our characters were on different tracks," Kinberg tells TechRadar. "They were parallel stories being told all over the world, really little interaction if any with each other. And this is the first season in which we take all of those main characters and we smash them together. So it's kind of like our low-key Avengers season where they get to actually team up. The combinations and collisions of the characters is something I’ve been looking forward to really since conceiving them however many years ago.”
For fans, it just wouldn’t be a true sci-fi invasion series without the unveiling of an as-yet-unseen advanced species of alien that poses even greater dangers to our heroes and the planet.
“We show the prime aliens, the sentient aliens who are responsible for this invasion,” he adds. “And the behavior of them, the plot they have, and the look of them is unlike anything else we’ve done in the show to date. So I think that combo of the character story and the alien story hitting a new gear I’m really excited about.”
Music plays a major role in setting the proper tone for Invasion and here Max Richter’s haunting main theme and composer Bobby Krlic’s killer score again amplifies the visuals in myriad ways.
“I’m a huge movie score nerd,” Kindred admits. “I write everything to scores. I listen to scores when I’m on a plane or moving through the world. I absolutely fanboy over composers. That’s how I got Max Richter on the first season. I emailed him and emailed him and went to his concert in Los Angeles and cornered him and finally got him to say yes. And Bobby is somebody I was a huge fan of as well. He's a composer but he also has a whole other side as a rock guy. Music is such a huge part of storytelling for television and movies and I think it’s a part that doesn’t really get enough acknowledgement. Music, sound, and picture are equally important. We've been really lucky to have atmospheric scores that can also be emotional. Both Bobby and Max have been skilled at weaving the two things together.”
Invasion’s stellar diverse cast also aids in setting and maintaining a certain tone of extreme realism, and Kinberg is proud of their superb work in establishing the series’ growing audience.
“Each season has gotten progressively a little more propulsive,” he explains. “But it was meant to be a character show set against a huge alien invasion and that requires a certain amount of patience, certainly in the first season, then less so in the second, and this season has the most drive to it.
"The tone for me is things like Arrival or Children of Men. Not 2001 because that’s too patient. These science fiction north stars that feel like there’s a sophistication to them, there’s a real world-ness to them. And the real world doesn’t always move as fast as an action movie, until it’s required to. What keeps us going, and has from the very beginning, are these incredible actors in these role that provide so much to the show. They all bring something very different but they all feel really grounded and real and I think the tone drafts off of their performances.”
Kinberg agrees that this is a fantastic time in general for sci-fi in movies and television and that Apple TV+ has been a welcoming partner for his ambitious creative endeavors in the genre.
“There’s tons of science fiction on television and then there’s movies like Dune and even Fantastic Four and Superman to some extent, they’re sophisticated,” he notes. “There’s a level of sophistication to Andor and For All Mankind and Foundation and Silo and Severance in its own science fiction way, that we were missing for a moment, where things got a little too bombastic, almost silly. Now it’s come back to being super grown-up.
"Like Mad Max and when I made The Martian. And Apple has really done an amazing job of creating a home for high-end, high-level, cinematic science fiction. They’re really generous and supportive about telling big cinematic stories and they like big ideas. When you think about the DNA of Apple, going back to Steve Jobs and his whole ethos, he was a big idea person. And I think the best science fiction tends to ask big philosophical questions, so it might just be in the fabric of the company itself.”
Invasion season 3 lands on Apple TV+ for a 10-episode run launching August 22.
