Two season in and I still have no idea what Invasion on Apple TV+ is trying to be.

Apple TV+ has a show on it called Invasion. It has two seasons thus far, and it's about an alien invasion that occurs on Earth. The cast for the show plays their parts well, but they are all new faces. You've got a Japanese sound engineer pseudo scientist named Mitsuki who's girlfriend was a closeted Japanese astronaut that was killed by the aliens. There's also a medical doctor named Aneesha who has a chunk of some alien metal that instantly kills aliens she stabs with it. There's a white English twink named Caspar who seems to have a psychic connection to the aliens. A black girl who really likes the twink and goes by the name India (she reminds me a lot of the Zendaya/Tom Holland thing). There's Trevante, who's a military guy from Afghanistan that saw his whole troop get affected by the alien invasion. And then there's Monty played by actor Paddy Holland, who is the youngest (in real life) brother to Tom Holland. His whole purpose seems to be part of a weird pre-teen love triangle created by the black girl (India), the twink (Caspar), and Tom Holland's brother (Monty).

A lot has happened since the invasion started (it's basically lasted about four months thus far). And the humans have predictably had a difficult time dealing with the aliens and their technology. As far as the look of the aliens goes, I kinda think that they resemble Hefty trash bags with no trash in them (kind of black and plastic looking). They create pseudopods to walk which make them resemble a sea anemone. As far as the humans go, they are mostly stupid, but I at least appreciate that the aliens look really strange. At times, the show does seem to be drunk on itself almost like when you hear a band's song build and build to then...not ever rock out. As I watch, I see smatterings of Arrival in the sense that it is pretty much left up to the character of Mitsuki to learn to communicate with the aliens and to determine what it is that they want. The kids can kind of see into the mind of the aliens, but you never understand why this is. Other than...maybe...it's an attempt to make kids interesting by giving them powers.

The other character, Aneesha, is probably the most annoying character in the series. She isn't a person you can trust, and because of that, she isn't particularly likeable. Additionally, she's always losing her kids, if not the son...then the daughter. And the missing kid becomes the impetus for her entire storyline told in a backdrop of an alien invasion. I also don't understand why Aneesha is hiding the one really effective weapon against the invaders, trying to keep it away from the military who might, say...use it against the invaders?

I think my biggest gripe about Apple's Invasion at this point, is that it doesn't know what kind of show it wants to be. Because it is told through a "fog of war" lens, we only know as much about the aliens and what is happening as the characters who experience those things. We bounce around the world multiple times during an episode to check-in with Caspar, with Mitsuki, with Aneesha, with Trevante, and it goes round and round like that. Each time, we get a little more knowledge to fill in the blanks with, and there does seem to be some attempt to bring these characters together. But as for what kind of show it wants to be? Well, it could be anything based on these main characters. Is it a love story about two British kids? Is it a hero arc of a war-torn vet from Afghanistan? Is it "science wins the world" like Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day. Is it that somehow a family with a fragment of alien tech is going to save the world through a mother's love? To hell if I know what it is about at this point, and I'm two season in. However, at this point I'm going to keep watching no matter how many episodes come out. I feel like there's got to be some big payoff coming. But if you decide to follow me into this strange science fiction take on alien invasion, be warned that it can be a slow burn at times.

That's basically all I have to say about Invasion at this time. For Friday's post, I'm going to talk about Amazon's Reacher and how it's easily the best show I've watched in a long while. On Monday, I'll talk about Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and its first season (I loved it). On Wednesday, I'll discuss Lower Decks season four, and on Friday of next week, we'll talk about The Witcher season 3.

You can get Apple TV+ for three months free by purchasing it from Best Buy right now.

Go to this LINK and sign-up for Apple TV+ for free for three months via the Best Buy website. Foundation is definitely worth it, plus there are a few other shows I'd try out. You could also see the movie Finch which was worth the time, especially given that you pay nothing for it. See might also be worth bingeing. Anyway, this is a real deal, so I encourage you all to take advantage of it. It's rare when you get something for nothing.

I won't be blogging on Monday in observance of Juneteenth. See you next Wednesday.

When I finally got SEE to stream on the Apple TV Plus service it was worth most of the trouble I'd gone to.

This weekend, I got a pleasant surprise. Two years ago, I purchased an iPhone 8 plus and at the time, I purchased the two-year Apple Care. Well with two years of use, being dropped, etc. it kind of wore out quite a bit and wasn't functioning like it should. I took it into the Apple Store here in Salt Lake City, and I used my Apple Care to get an exchange with a brand new iPhone 8 plus for zero dollars. The new phone has been working incredibly well, so I've got no complaints. I would have been completely satisfied with that by itself, but I got a text/notification from Apple that with a brand new phone purchase, I qualified for one year of Apple TV plus for free. So basically, Apple assumed my phone was new, even though it was "technically" an exchange. I was kind of overjoyed, because I don't like subscribing to new streaming services, and this was like a total freebie that came out of nowhere. And it's not one of those, "try this for a week and then we'll start charging you money." No it was a whole year for free.

So the first thing I started to try and watch was the Jason Momoa movie, "See." I thought it would be just a matter of going to a website and trying to watch it, but Apple has got some issues with their technology, meaning they are very cutting edge and unaccepting of older technologies because (in their mind) people should just "get with the program." Sure, I could watch it on my iPhone and my iPad, but I kind of crave something "bigger" if you know what I mean? Those screens are very small.

The first thing I tried to do was cast my phone's screen to my LG OLED Smart TV. This didn't work because my four-year old LG TV doesn't have AirPlay 2 on it. The next thing I tried was seeing if LG had an app I could download from the LG store called "Apple TV." I think the new ones have this app, but there was not one that was downloadable from the LG store for my older t.v. Okay then. What about seeing if I could download an Apple TV app from the Microsoft store for Windows 10? I checked, and that was a no go too.

Next I tried to go to the website tv.apple.com and try to watch it in a browser (which the Apple website said was okay to do). Maybe because it was launch day or some other thing, I couldn't get it to stream in any browser but Firefox (I tried Google Chrome and Edge first). And the stream would periodically crash so that I had to reload it, and then it would never remember where I left off. So I ended up having to fast forward it to the point that I last remembered, watch it for twenty minutes, and then it would crash again. Sigh.

In any event, I made it through two episodes of "See" this way before switching to "Titans" and watching this week's episode with no hitches at all. And as of the writing of this blog post (which is happening on Sunday night), I was able to stream "See" in Google Chrome, so maybe Apple got the issue fixed and just had launch day jitters or something.

The two episodes that I did watch of "See" were an interesting story. It's weird watching a show in which all the actors are supposed to be blind, and I think the most compelling thing about it was to observe how well they get around and even fight while blind. One of the things I don't like about the show are the time jumps. Central to the story are two babies who are born who do have the "power to see" and in order to bring them into the story, they are about twelve years old by the time the second episode ends. That means there's a ton of time that passes in which nothing occurs other than daily life around a village.

This isn't the kind of story that really pulls me in, because I kind of detest big time jumps. It's what turned me off the Starz story of the White Queen, which I found compelling until the story immediately jumped years and years to satisfy certain things in which it wanted to concentrate.

Anyway, I do intend to continue to watch "See," and I'm hoping that a patch comes out to make it easier to view the Apple TV Plus streaming titles. I am reminded though (in my negative experience in using it), how cutting edge Apple tends to be. They are the epitome of a company that uses "planned obsolescence" as a bludgeon by which to browbeat consumers. I just find it dismaying that a television which is still beautiful to me that is now four years old, is purposely being pushed toward obsolescence by app makers who are making things available for everything bought this year...but doing very little for those things purchased in the very recent past. I guess that's just the way capitalism works.

Anyone else watching, "See" with Jason Momoa? The cinematography is gorgeous and there are many visually delightful scenes, which seems at odds with the premise of the story. It kind of reminded me of "Clan of the Cave Bear," only with blind people...which I think is strange now that I think of it. Oh, and no young Daryl Hannah, unless Jason Momoa counts as eye-candy (which he totally does in my book).