Spoilers follow for Invincible Season 4, Episode 4, “Hurm,” which is available on Prime Video now.
After a momentous three-part premiere, Invincible’s fourth season takes a major detour with only minor emotional stakes. It’s a story that series creator Robert Kirkman never got around to writing in the comics, and while it holds thematic relevance in theory, it plays more like a temporary side quest that does little to advance the characters’ ongoing arcs, or even give them some breathing room for other important tasks.
“Hurm,” named for the grunting catchphrase of hellish P.I. Damien Darkblood — the result of throwing Hellboy, Rorschach and Constantine in a blender — begins well enough, with a conflicted Mark visiting his dad’s old costume maker Art for some necessary soul-searching. Given his violent new trajectory, the young superhero is terrified of becoming his father. However, the kindly, Mark Hamill-voiced mentor puts a vital button on his emotional conflict, telling him: “The fact that it’s eating you alive means you’re not him.” When a sudden phone call whisks Mark away, it seems like his internal dilemma might be the focus of the forthcoming episode, but this turns out to not really be the case.
The ghostly mummy Ka-Hor makes another brief appearance, a repeated running joke that, fittingly, refuses to die. But before the spooky spirit can finally clash with Mark, our hero is teleported to the literal, actual Hell — also known as the Underrealm — amidst an ongoing battle between Darkblood’s demonic forces and the fearsome, flame-headed villain Volcanikka (voiced by Indira Varma, who seems to be having a ball). Prior to Mark’s arrival, the episode establishes a broader mythology and continuing skirmish where we see Darkblood’s sister Domina, among others, brutally torn apart by Volcanikka’s forces, leading the demon detective to summon Mark from the surface, albeit against his will.
After nearly attacking the Devil himself (a delightful Bruce Campbell), Mark is filled in on a fetch-quest and is lore-bombed with Matrix-like mumbo jumbo about the repetition of various “ages” and the remnants of previous iterations of the world, in the form of volcanic monsters set to be unleashed upon the world. That Mark seems bored and annoyed by Darkblood’s exposition doesn’t exactly bode well for the episode’s tone, and given the hardboiled sleuth’s sedate verbal cadence — and his missing definite articles; picture a big, red Yoda in one of the suits from the original Tron, for some reason — it’s hard not to blame our protagonist for mentally checking out.
This isn’t something that meaningfully changes across the episode, even as Mark and Darkblood plummet down an endless chasm to fight none other than the Greek hell hound Cerberus (a trip filled with awkward, joking interactions befitting a Family Guy cutaway). The idea of Mark learning that humanity’s conception of Hell was mistaken has the potential for unexpected moral wrinkles, especially as Mark himself wrestles with his ethical outlook. But what follows is a series of disconnected action scenes where he shoots-to-kill out of a mere sense of obligation, rather than wrestling with the actions that have been weighing on his mind. That Kirkman has long wanted to tell this story imbues it with tremendous potential, but as a fixture of this particular season, it feels entirely misplaced, and it doesn’t even offer the Darkbloods enough breathing room to tell their own unique story.
Setting the subterranean fights to Thrash Metal is apt in the broadest acoustic sense, given the aesthetic connections between the genre and satanic imagery, but it’s one of the show’s very rare missteps in the realm of needle drops. The action is never quite rousing enough to earn its Slayer track. That being said, Campbell’s Satan does end up being surprisingly fun, in a silly sort of way, even as the appearance of Biblically twisted monsters offers Mark no real weight or reflection, or even momentary intensity.
The lack of cutaways to other subplots (the show’s usual M.O.) most definitely hurts the episode, but at the very least, its concluding moments function as a worthwhile cliffhanger. Once the Underrealm story is mercifully dispensed with, we catch up with Eve as she tells her friend William about her pregnancy, before deciding to come clean about it to Mark. However, before she’s able to share the news, another bombshell drops, perhaps sooner than expected: Hovering above Mark’s unsuspecting neighborhood is his old pal Allen and none other than Mark’s father Nolan, in his first appearance on Earth since leaving as a genocidal envoy.
The episode at large may not offer any emotional complications, but the follow-up it promises, in its gripping final moments, most certainly does.
