@tmtomh
Don't you think that the characters reactions to an alien invasion a bit strange, unusual? Unrealistic? I mean ... the world is being invaded by
Aliens and all that a Japanese worker is trying to do is to get news or her lover's get her lover back? Risking everything in the process and being helped by her superiors coworkers and her lover's father? The soldier is angry all the time and also against the locals but fail to realize something really momentous is going on? The wife seems to be only interested in .. her marriage? The husband in his mistress ... his children? Not so much... And it goes on and on? The president of the USA having declared the World is under an Alien as in from Space.
Invasion? No sense of fright ? Of befuddlement?
Where will that take us going forward? In term of the characters? Where will they be? In the next season? Who will they become? There is a lack of focus in the series? What is this about? Really?
I intentionally did not engage directly with your initial negative comment when I replied to
@kokoon above, but if you want to, okay, sure.
On a general level, the idea that we have any idea of what a realistic reaction is to an alien invasion makes no sense to me. So the premise you are relying on in order to judge the show is not one I can agree with.
More specifically, the main storyline of the invasion has two fundamental aspects to it: (1) most people don't know what's happening, especially for the first 1/2 to 2/3 of the season; and (2) the invasion itself has a murky, under-the-radar type of quality to it: there aren't fleets of alien ships entering the atmosphere all at once; power outages, communication disruptions, and violent attacks are piecemeal and don't initially come with any clear pattern; swarms of 1000s of aliens are not storming all the world's military installations or blowing up the White House. It's not Independence Day, Battle Los Angeles, or even something more mysterious like Signs or Arrival. It's murky and messy.
So in that context, yes, the characters' reactions are completely within the realm of sensible. The soldier knows he's been through something bizarre and inexplicable - and since he can't understand what exactly happened, he follows his training to try to get to a base or a central source of reorganization, command, and information - it makes total sense. He's "angry" all the time? Why would he not be? Is he supposed to just wander alone in the Afghan wilderness looking freaked out the entire time and not actually doing anything, just so you can never forget for a single second that something "momentous" is happening?
The doctor/mother character similarly reacts repeatedly to save her children - she's completely freaked out because the world is being turned upside down. She temporarily joins with her husband despite the fact that she literally just got the shock of her life in her marriage moments before the windows of their house blew out and the neighborhood caught on fire. So she does in fact let go of the anger at her husband when it's necessary to focus on getting the kids safe. Then in calmer moments when she has a minute to collect herself, the pain and shock of her marital situation comes back.
This is why I argued above that the "problem" with this show is not that it's bad, but rather that it's not giving you what you want - which seems to me to be a more one-dimensional aliens-invade-we-freak-out-we-fight-them narrative. There are plenty of those available, and I really enjoy them. And I also enjoy this for what it is. It's no less realistic than those other types of alien-invasion films - and in fact is IMHO far more realistic in how messy it is.