Invasion’s big season 2 alien needed to be both blobby and emotionally grounded

polygon.com:

The world as we know it is on the brink of collapse in Invasion season 2 — but fortunately for humanity, Mitsuki Yamato (Shioli Kutsuna) isn’t going down without a fight.

The Japanese space engineer has taken center stage in Invasion’s second season, repeatedly going head-to-head with a hive-mind creature aboard the spaceship downed in season 1. These intense encounters between Mitsuki and the alien intelligence add a new, personal dimension to Invasion’s invasion (sorry), even as they dramatically expand the Apple TV Plus series’ existing lore.

With this in mind, Polygon caught up with director Alik Sakharov and VFX supervisor Erik Henry over Zoom to talk through how Mitsuki’s season 2 arc came together — and how the hive mind’s potential impact on Invasion’s wider narrative heading into season 3 might lead to previously unseen otherworldly life forms cropping up in the future.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for Invasion season 2.]

So why was now the right time in Mitsuki’s journey — not to mention the overarching Invasion story — to introduce an adversary capable of communicating with her via the voice and memories of her dead girlfriend, Hinata (Rinko Kikuchi)? According to Sakharov and Henry, Mitsuki confronting such a foe (which the cast and the crew dubbed “the Entity”) was simply a logical extension of where her story left off in season 1.

“We thought that Mitsuki was over her mourning for her partner, Hinata, but very early on in episode 1 we realize that she’s far from over [her],” Sakharov says. “She’s very much under the effect of that loss. And I think she’s carrying that personal agenda […] to find out what really happened. So, when she partially succeeds in getting into the ‘mind’ of the Entity,