We’re back, and hopefully can all still remember the names of all the characters in another very special episode of Invincible. As much as I try to keep a handle on them, spoilers follow.
1. Mark loses months
Master plan or happy accident? When Mark arrives back on Earth he’s been gone for months, no one had seen a trace of him, many think he was gone for good. It’s the kind of set-up we can all immediately empathize with because I was absolutely convinced this show had disappeared into the mist. Invincible was off the air for far longer than I expected after its mid-season finale, a fact that a lot of fans took umbrage with given the sporadic release schedule it had since launch. I usually hate recaps on TV episodes but this one was definitely an essential asset.
I’m fairly sure I was one of the people preaching patience at the last gap we had between chunks of episodes. We live in the era of prestige TV, long gaps are simply high-minded. How else will the philosophers craft their jewels? And you need all that time to truly mull over and understand the 6-ish hours of TV you watched those two years ago. This has gotten ridiculous though, six months for four episodes is the kind of pace that will suffocate this show to death.
You cannot hold an audience on a series with so many overlap plots and mystery boxes with a drip-feed this slow. If we keep having delays like this Invincible is going to push itself into the evergreen territory that properties like Fraction and Aja’s “Hawkeye” occupy. They are famous as a complete set, but the people who actually kept up as it came out will remember the frustration of waiting seemingly forever for the next grain of plot.
Still, the upshot of all this is that since last episode I forgot about Rhea Seehorn bug woman, and got to enjoy her unveiling all over again.
2. Space is for Supers
There have been some great cosmological happenings since we last checked in on Mark and co. Mars Attacks aside, we get a reminder of how much the world’s oeuvre has widened in our check-ins with the Thraxans and Coalition of Planets.
Alongside Rhea Seehorn comedy great Rob Delaney’s Nuolzot gets to do a weird impression of James Adomian’s Bane from Harley Quinn as he enters old age. Peter Cullen’s Thaedus (who remains unattainably awesome) also has maybe the greatest moment of the episode when he rips off his whole to reveal a cut of mustache so iconic that he just has to be from Viltrum. I love when even the characters in the world understand a certain visual shorthand.
I feel like Thaedus had this whole murder mystery plotline that he was involved with alongside Allen. I vaguely remember there being a whole episode dedicated to it in fact. But I like many people DON’T REMEMBER IT because it has been FOUR MONTHS.
3. Responsibility comes at you fast
I think the moral dilemma that baby Oliver represents is a great one. Superheroes are given moral burdens constantly but a baby is a realistic and tangible one. The gravity is constant and easily evoked, and it makes you re-evaluate every character around Oliver as a more high-fidelity person with their own burdens and pre-occupations. Obviously it lessens that complexity when Debbie takes the load, but that’s the burden of the source material, and the story is better for having the dilemma regardless. I do hope that we’re at a point where the writers hopefully know how to get pointy in their exploitation of empathy. We’ve learned familiarity with these characters, may as well see how they can suffer.
Suffering, in this episode, is not a meager commodity. Donald’s existential ennui finally comes to the forefront as he stares his terminator skeleton in it’s lidless robot eyes. I never realized it all through the comic. But Robot isn’t Invincible’s answer to Vision, Donald is. Rex also enjoys an absolute thrashing. In the comic he wasn’t softened up in his story until much later in his arc, so this is a nice obvious way to play with that for heartstrings.
Continued below4. Guardians of (a little less than) the Galaxy
It might be a miracle but we’re coming back from the break and a Guardians of the Globe plot doesn’t suck. Both the A and B plots were really strong this time around. It helped give me a bit of confidence that we’re finally hitting the phase of this series where you realize it is a whole world of strong characters. It doesn’t all hinge on the Graysons.
I love the villains we match them with. I could give or take a martian starfish, but I absolutely adore how they used the omnipotus fight. It’s a funny cut-away and then a really well used narrative device. We know what an event story end of the world fight looks like in shorthand, and then when you cut small segments of it in to reveal a fleeting event from the fight it doesn’t feel too much like a bit.
The Lizard League is hard not to love. The Serpent Society, their forebears, have a bit of a rep in comics, especially for Captain America. The idea is that when you don’t have a better villain to use, you use the Serpent Society. Think of how many times the MCU threatened us with it and then found something else between the couch cushions. Usually when Invincible has a parody of one of those sorts of characters they come with a quirk, but Lizard King and his lot are kinda exactly the same and maybe that’s the best gimmick of all. In every universe they suck, until they’re somehow winning.
5. High-minded-flying-high
I usually take at least one point per review to peer over the production of each episode. “This Must Come as a Shock” largely abstains from the two most common mentions, great needle drops and glitzy surprise castings (though it does have both, Scoot McNairy’s King Lizard is a delight). It does, however, uphold some of the show’s best hallmark elements it inherited from the comic source. That Ottley gore is used well as Dupli-Kate is ripped to shreds over and over in a clever new way to remind the viewer how desensitized it expects you to be to its violence. Now there will be a million clickbait stories on this moment by the time you read my review, but I like how they proved the Ant-Man/Thanos viral internet tactic would be truly horrific.
Mark’s quick change into his costume in the span of one or two lines of a conversation between Debbie and Cecil similarly plays with the comic’s preoccupation with powers-in-casual-scenarios. In its construction this episode is a lot more off-book than past eps. Maybe I don’t have a strong memory and they’ve been off a lot before or this is closer than I remember. But it does feel free from the source in a refreshing way.
Next week! The second half of this Martian two-parter, and hopefully other big plot things before the next long block of patience.
