Invincible endures! Welcome back to week two, as the show looks at all the rubble lying around it and decides to spend a bit of time rebuilding. Spoilers follow.
1. As seen in issue #…
In last week’s thoughts I mentioned my hope that the first four episodes of season 2 get stuck into the thick of the plot ASAP, this episode is decidedly not that, but it is a strong case for the alternative: having some fun with the day-to-day life of being Invincible. We get three different bombastic main fights that prove the various things this show loves about the comic format, highlighting its best impressions of pulp, noir and fantasy. Not only that, but “In About Six Hours I Lose My Virginity To A Fish” puts a conscious effort into layering and providing levels of culmination to all these other monster-of-the-week plots from the show’s first season. We have the return of the Lizard League, and a forward push on season one’s trip to Mars. It sort of shows the viewer that all these isolated threats can bleed together and create an increasingly descriptive tapestry.
Even beyond the trappings of a comic-esque plot, this episode feels even more acutely like a Robert Kirkman comic book plot. From the very start of the episode, I was grabbed by Doc Seismic’s little eye twitch ahead of the killer line: “you can keep the ones made of wood line”, because it had the most kirkmanian pacing ever achieved by this show. That whole fight is an especially good example of direct stylistic adaptation, using exaggerated key shots and stilted motions to show the viewer all the ‘panels’ that would make up the page of this fight.
2. A break from the blood-splatter
This episode does a particularly good job at showing how the fight scenes in Invincible can be fun without relying on constant gore. The Godzilla angler fish is just a fun concept to put the character up against, we don’t need to see its fish intestines paint the ocean red. Even Invincible’s fight with Darkwing, which I was worried could be much of a muchness, escalates into something grin-inducing when Mark is yanked into the shadow realm.
There were so many bombastic designs to cycle through in every encounter (Lizard League were the best, obviously) that the plot clips through the runtime, the arguable Monster of the week doesn’t show up until the half-hour mark and it’s hard to notice. There are parts of this string of fights that show the chafe in format between 45 minute procedural drama and 25 minute one-and-done cartoon, but that fluctuation never rears its head too dramatically.
3. Delayed gratification and how to know its worth it
There are a lot of mystery boxes in this episode, and I would say it’s the closest to when those dual formats I just mentioned get unstuck from one another. That said, we do have an absolutely thrilling mystery, which was the whodunit from before the episode even began, trying to figure out which character the title “In About Six Hours I Lose My Virginity To A Fish” is in reference to. Fishy indeed.
But overall, there’s just some vague threats that I can’t imagine even a viewer learning this all for the first time could be too hung up about. A second Donald sighting for example, curiouser and curiouser and such. I do feel like I should be covering all of them, but maybe too much scrutiny is what’s going to make those plot points buckle.
4. Super human
I’m not going to come out and say that Invincible is some humanist masterpiece with rivers of empathy for each soul it portrays, but there’s a real effortlessness with which this episode displays the fluctuating emotional states of its characters. Tensions seeth beneath the surface, sometimes as a symbol like Eve’s golden apple (which is a very aggressively Christian symbol for a show that usually avoids writing superheroes-as-a-proxy-for-Jesus), or the awkwards pauses given by everyone after they mention something even remotely Omni-Man related around Mark. You can see the wire being tightened around these characters who are more and more apparent ticking timebombs.
I think all the angst afforded to Mark and Eve had me a bit tired with the range afforded to Debbie Grayson. You have Sandra Oh and still relegate her to being the sad yet supportive wine mom. It’s only when they let her loose on Cecil that we finally get to see her yell and have just a slight bit of assertion in the story.
Finally, the graduation catch-up between Will, Eve, Mark and Amber is great and organic. It’s the sort of scene you would expect to see cut for time in any other show, there’s no major tension or resolution, it doesn’t even necessarily build much of the ‘what’s next?’ that the characters are discussing in that moment, it’s simply just familiar for the sake of illustrating familiarity. That said, I don’t think it could ever hold a candle to the peak ‘mates being mates’ cinema of TMNT: Mutant Mayhem that feels like a sidebar though, unless…
5. Shop talk
Unfortunately ‘Shop talk’ is not about Art the tailor, because we are being deprived of his presence. This just felt like as good a place as any to indulge my rants and talk about how unbelievably well Seth Rogen has cornered the market on the best of current superhero programming. Between Invincible, The Boys, Gen V and TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, he has put together four of the best satires of the genre that still bolster the stories of comics, rather than tearing them down. It does feel like nature is healing when we can talk about artists running the vision of these properties, proven creatives like Seth Rogen and James Gunn, and come for the crown of Kevin ‘brand synergy’ Feige.
Also clear here is the style of Cory Walker, we talked about Kirkman in his pacing earlier, but Walker shines through in his design. He has a penchant for the iconic, two-tone suits built on minimalism, or key visual elements that immediately drive an essential pose or silhouette for each character. Obviously we’ve reached a point in the show where most of what is being adapted are Ryan Ottley comics, but I do feel like you see more of Walker, seeing as he’s actually involved in the show.
I also found it hard to to see tinges of Erica Henderson in the design, seeing as she has picked up so much of the evolution that occurred in Cory Walker’s work and iterated upon it herself for a half-decade. Behind the eyes of Invincible’s mask is Koi Boi, mark my words.
Anyhoo! Next week should be a fun one! Angstrom Levy has been studying for his exams, let’s see if he starts doing anything with what he’s learned.
