Invincible stares down the finish line in “We Need to Talk.” This was one of the most breathtaking episodes yet, so we’re going to have to dig into some heavy spoilers to get to the bottom of it.
1. Sad Expressions, insubstantial substance
It was very easy to forget that Mark was going through a break-up this episode, it really got smothered under the whole apocalypse going on in the background. Nevertheless, his name is on the titlecard, so let’s pull out our little droppers of crocodile tears for sadsack Mark Grayson.
It definitely felt jarring having Will trying to process the fact that the guy he’s really into got maimed and turned into a cyborg, only for Mark to turn the tables and make it his personal pity party. There is just this tendency in some of the characters where they can’t comfort others without simultaneously bragging and complaining about their own life. Eve had the same issue and it makes me wonder if this is just shoddy writing or some intentional narcissism. Mark basically spends the entirety of each day apologizing, he should at least be better at it by now.
On the flipside of the coin though, having Amber know Mark is Invincible, yet still judging him for being a non-committal coward:
1) Does not make her more sympathetic
2) is such a change in gears that it decontextualizes all her past anger even though it pretends they’re equivalent
3) just proves she’s a character made of hurdles for Mark to jump on his way to adulthood
It feels like Zazie Beets is being wasted on a character made of lofty goals and a dehumanising erudite moral perfection, she can’t be compelling because she’s just made to expose another character’s flaws. It’s exhausting.
2. I guess this was also a Robot episode?
I’ve been pretty dismissive of Robot’s whole character arc up to this point, so this episode must have really put me in my place right? Whole chunks of dedicated screentime, character beats and animated spectacle must have changed things, surely? Yeah apparently he’s still boring, sorry guys.
Between weird go-nowhere plot moments like Robot’s audio glitch, the whole subplot is just sort of uninteresting. For one moment I thought we were going to see a “Ghost in the Shell” style spider-tank and instead we just got ten minutes of an overgrown sea monkey fetus making squelching noises and fighting two villains we’ve seen the same actions scenes from basically every episode.
Still, there were still great moments amongst this however. We got to see Mauler hotwiring a human brain like it was a Ford Focus, a literal Robot in disguise, and more great RTJ backing tracks. I also thought, despite the weird age-changing (more on that later), there were some great character definitions given through Robot’s cloning process. The fact that his consciousness isn’t transported into a new body during the procedure is great, it makes the whole process almost selfless. He’s giving another form of himself a better life, not actually ending ‘his’ own suffering. This is communicated well in his speech from the old body to the new one, which gets to function more as a self-affirmation than a revelation due to their singlemindedness. Plus we got to see that despite their contentiousness, the Mauler Twins can agree on the necessity of making themselves uncertain of their status as clone or creator. It makes the gimmick sort of funnier, like a dog that knows it’s chasing its own tail, but is just too invested in the game to stop.
3. The dirtiest way to build sympathy for Rex
WHY DOES ROBOT HAVE TO ALSO BE A CHILD. I want to get off this ride, I hate how much of my time is spent each week trying to figure out how well writers are treading the line of infantilism, he was in the Teen Team, at least be a TEEN. I know it’s from the comic but I really wish we could grab this weird Rex/Robot/Monster Girl love triangle and throw it in the sun.
It was genuinely cathartic to just be repeating “Why did Robot make himself look like baby Rex-Splode?” Over and over in my head then have real Rex just scream it out loud. Why couldn’t Robot have just made a fake, human-looking face for himself without piggybacking on someone’s DNA. I did not want to feel sympathy for Rex, and the fact that this is how they’re manufacturing it makes me feel like Robert Kirkman is trying to MK Ultra my brain. Still, “You’re ruining my childhood and that’s hard because it already sucked” is a really great quote.
Continued below4. Nolan Grayson vs The World
So blowing up a government satellite, levelling a forest and beating the shit out of every single GDA secret in the closet is probably good grounds for a divorce, right? Aside from the obvious and abundant physical conflict of this episode, “We Need to Talk” exceeded in putting Nolan through a gauntlet of one-on-one emotional melees. Between Debbie, Donald, Will, Cecil and the Immortal, Nolan is forced to affirm his zealotry over and over to varying degrees of success. So let’s take a look through this tower of trials, shall we?
The best part of Nolan’s confrontation with Debbie, and what differentiates it from all the fights that led to this boiling point, was just how it simmers with this threat of violence from him, the way he punches through floors and ceilings amidst this wreckage of the house reminds me of Debbie’s speech to Mark in the first episode how being so overwhelmingly stronger than her doesn’t make him any more of a man. Nolan is trying to project his superiority on to Debbie with his sheer scale, but it just proves him more pathetic in the face of her candidness. Even when he tries to be genuine, it just shows how convinced he is of his own moral righteousness, making the holes in his logic more obvious to her. “You need to trust me” just doesn’t have the same level of sympathy attached when it comes from a sociopath with a secret identity
His disdain for humanity comes to a boiling point in his confrontation with Donald, who is the absolute star of this episode. No one does verbal abuse like JK Simmons, and the sheer disgust with which he calls Donald a lapdog is piercing, especially when he spends the rest of their fight trying to tear Donald open and make him literally spineless. It really feels like his self-assuredness has bled over into full-blown cockiness, which just makes it so much more satisfying when we watch him eat dirt. Like when we see he’s perceptive enough to know they’re about to fire on him, but is too confident to actually believe they’re doing it.
While it’s brief, I really liked that moment where Will drives up and has to face down Omni-Man in this abandoned neighborhood. We’ve seen just how thoroughly Nolan has given up on any pretense of benevolence by this point, so seeing his stony face and violent eyes looking down on this stranded kid is so tense. It also manages to be funny as hell. Just the way he leans into the car and tells Will off for not meeting curfew makes the whole scene feel like it’s a perverted version of usual overprotective parenting, especially when we see him just bend the roof of Will’s car like it’s tinfoil.
While the whole episode is Nolan vs Cecil to a degree, their one head-to-head confrontation is arguably the most compelling of the face-offs. The way it acknowledges just how outmatched Cecil is while giving him this slight edge is exhilarating. It’s so much more compelling when see he’s willing to lay himself down on the wire for a fight. He’s not just a bureaucrat throwing others into the meat grinder, he’s the embodiment of Earth’s bare knuckle defense. Plus the whole fight had this great matador vibe to it, with Nolan just being one millisecond behind Cecil everytime, with him even grabbing his red cape (or tie in this case), but not quite catching the man waving it.
After all that, and a half million other obstacles, we get to see Mark and Nolan facing each other down, both starting to realise what the conclusion of their confrontation looks like. Just watching Nolan gear up for the same speech he was rehearsing, only now with blood-shot eyes and bloodier hands feels like the perfect visual metaphor for the plotline. The final episode was always going to lead to this, it was obvious, so why am I still so hyped anyway? This is going to be brutal.
5. Slaughter and Spectacle
Okay enough about the themes and boring emotions and plot and stuff. How fucking good were those fights??? This episode had such a slow, directionless start, but once it got enough steam it just blasted past every expectation I could have had.
I loved watching Nolan just chew through the invisible GDA cannon fodder. the graphicness of the violence is almost less upsetting than the manner and attitude with which he executes these soldiers. He never really kills them with ‘attacks,’ instead he justs pushes himself through people or moves them beyond human constraints. It’s more violent because it’s more alien and points out greater vulnerability, it proves he can be so dismissive while killing a person.
When the GDA start pulling out their heavy hitters things start to get REALLY exciting. That laser hits like the bomb from “Akira,” and the hailstorm shower of dead birds definitely helped reinforce that atomic dread of the moment. I did think it was weird having this quick of a turnaround for the reveal of DA Sinclair making reanimen for the government though. In the comic, that revelation was a moment that solidified how Cecil’s means don’t justify his ends, but in this context practically any amorality feels necessary. Still, I like watching them beat people up, and we get to see that kaiju again afterwards.
This episode is a textbook example on how to do escalating stakes. The way the show layers and integrates new characters into the fight between Nolan and the Kaiju as they each get more battered down is exhilarating. Omni-Man and the Immortal fight just as dirty as one another, and it makes the last moments of their fight so hardcore it’s a pinnacle on a sequence full of crescendos. I never knew two guys flying through the sky punching each other could work so well! I also can’t believe any news company would televise that fatality though, it’s BEYOND graphic.
Food for thought:
– I forgot that the Immortal WAS Abraham Lincoln!
– Why does Eve sleep in her spandex?
– Couldn’t Cecil just… Find a telepath or use some supersonic message? They should be able to contact Mark without using a phone.
– Put a shirt on, Robot.
– K. Flay’s “I Like Myself (Most of the Time)” as one of Eve’s backing tracks was great, it’s a grungier change in tone from the sparkly optimism of “Knock Me Off My Feet” but still carries just as many synth-pop elements.
Next week is the season finale for Invincible as Mark and Nolan go toe-to-toe, and try not to tear the Earth in half along the way.
