Spoilers follow for the first three episodes of Prime Video’s Invincible Season 4, which debuts on March 18.
After last season’s bloody conclusion, Invincible returns with a trio of episodes that chart a brand-new emotional course. The much-needed reset finds Invincible/Mark Grayson amidst an extended moral crisis, while practically every other character is faced with existential threats, in a three-part premiere that – despite the show’s continuing flaws – not only coheres thematically, but delivers a significant emotional impact.
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The first and third of these new episodes (“Making the World a Better Place” and “I Gotta Get Some Air”) are an ostensible two-parter dealing with the ripple effects of Conquest’s invasion and a gravely injured Mark beating him to death with a series of headbutts…or so he thought. As revealed at the end of Season 3, ever-shifty defense head Cecil is keeping Conquest on ice at the GDA among other secretive projects involving android tinkerer DA Sinclair. When we rejoin Mark and our ensemble, however, they’re none the wiser.
Some time has passed. Mark’s half-brother Oliver is a teenager now, making it feel as though years have gone by – though given his accelerated alien metabolism, it’s probably been a few weeks. Mark’s arms and leg are still recovering from the Conquest beatdown, so they’re encased in robotic casts, which actually look pretty cool against his deep blue outfit. He and his girlfriend Eve have branched off from the Guardians of the Globe with their security firm, Invincible Inc. They continue to be superheroes for hire, but their paths still cross with Cecil and the Guardians, since the city’s regular, street-level villainous threats continue as usual.
As is the series’ M.O., much of this is depicted in a (re)introductory montage, setting the stage for a radically different Mark with a much harder ethical edge. He’s a hero whose first instinct is to kill major threats like kaiju rather than incapacitating them for capture. Cecil and the Guardians have noticed this, and they stay prepared accordingly, but the person this change seems to weigh most on is Mark himself – a crisis of morality he expresses only to Eve.
The threats the heroes face are distinctly existential, and they yield equally existential dilemmas in return.
The threats the heroes face in Episodes 1 and 3 are distinctly existential, and they yield equally existential dilemmas in return. The question of killing villains in order to stop them for good crops up with old and new antagonists alike, sometimes simultaneously, as each brings with them specific world-ending threats: Dinosaurus, an innocent human scientist possessed by an apocalyptic T-Rex persona, communicates psychically with Mark and hails him as the only hero capable of making tough decisions – i.e. rendering most of humanity extinct, a wonderful irony – to save their planet as it starves itself; Universa, a mysterious alien battle maiden, wants to steal all of Earth’s nuclear power to save her own species, even if it means threatening life on Earth; and the mind-controlling Martian Sequids launch their attack from deep underground, latching themselves to unsuspecting bystanders as the Guardians try to contain entire tidal waves of the alien critters in a dome-like perimeter.
In each case, Mark shoots first and negotiates later – if at all – culminating in him nearly killing Dinosaurus and Universa, and making the perhaps all-too-quick decision to kill the human involuntarily housing the Sequid leader, former astronaut Rus Livingston. Does this stop the Sequids’ spread to all corners? Undoubtedly. In fact, even Cecil agrees with Mark’s methods. But what does punching clean through the face of an innocent man do to Mark’s already-corroding soul? This is something even Cecil remains concerned about, as he continues to try and chat with Mark one-on-one while luring him back into the fold, albeit while hiding his reanimation experiments on the bodies of alt-universe Invincibles.
Numerous superhero subplots emerge during the first and third episodes, and while none of them are necessarily bad, they do suffer from one of the show’s continued issues: hiring traditional screen actors in voice roles (like Jonathan Banks as the Guardians’ rough-and-tumble leader Brit), but refusing to edit around the extended gaps and dead air created in the process. This yields a stiltedness for many of the supporting heroes, but thankfully, they aren’t a particularly major part of the premiere episodes until the interdimensional alien Flaxans attack once more and begin kidnapping civilians. This returning threat, like the other aforementioned antagonists, similarly raises the question of whether Mark and the Guardians ought to be putting a more permanent stop to their villains, if it means ensuring they don’t come roaring back with a vengeance. It’s a trolley problem of sorts, and one that’s likely to underscore the entire season.
Elsewhere, Mark’s brother Oliver – now in brand-new Kid Omni-Man garb that reclaims his father’s symbol – gets roped into an ongoing feud between the city’s mobsters. This is also far less interesting than the premiere’s bigger ethical dilemmas, but as resurgent threats, the likes of Machine Head, Titan, and Mr. Liu (who, despite his fragile state, can still conjure a dragon!) pose similar questions of how to put a long-lasting stop to continued villainy, even at a local level. It’s also yet another conflict that ends when Mark arrives and comes within inches of crossing a line – in this case, killing Titan without a second thought until Oliver intervenes.
The silent gaps in dialogue tend to work best during the Graysons’ domestic drama, something Mark’s voice actor, Steven Yeun, has come to perfectly modulate as a version of the character forced to introspect on his own destructive nature. Mark meets Eve’s parents for the first time and runs up against the understandable disapproval of her father, who points out that Mark has been the inadvertent cause of both times Eve nearly died. Eve, meanwhile, faces what appears to be a more personal existential crisis when her powers stop working and her atomic constructs quickly turn to sludge.
Mark and Oliver experience tension too, as brothers constantly stepping on each other’s toes, but the show’s most evocative Earthbound drama is still arguably that of Mark’s mother Debbie, voiced by Sandra Oh. We find her caught between flashbacks of her early life with Nolan/Omni-Man and the current question of whether to move in with her seemingly ordinary boyfriend, Paul. She has concerns about how moving houses might affect Mark and Oliver, but they seem fine with Paul’s presence; what she really seems worried about is the idea of moving on and resuming a life of normalcy, given the weight of Nolan’s betrayal that still weighs on her in subtle ways.
This is where the second premiere episode, “I’ll Give You the Grand Tour,” comes into play. While it takes place light-years from Earth, its focus on Nolan and the larger Viltrum Empire is buoyed by similar questions of personal morality and existential threats, and it also introduces the vital question of whether Nolan can be forgiven for his many betrayals as he prepares for one more – betraying his own genocidal people.
In an extended flashback set several centuries ago, we get a glimpse of the ruthless, cultlike behavior that defines Viltrum society. A young, moustache-less Nolan teaches Viltrumite adolescents the way of violence before his own parents arrive to beat him half to death in an act of twisted love signaling his official coming-of-age. However, before he can embark on his first adult mission, a mysterious, weaponized gas dubbed the “Scourge Virus” is deployed on the planet and ends up causing the harrowing deaths of almost all of Viltrum society, who bleed out quickly from every orifice. While this shocking subplot emanates from the comics, its images of mass graves and widespread deaths can’t help but bring to mind the height of the COVID crisis, making images like Viltrum gaining planetary rings made from dead bodies feel horrifically poignant. It is a scar their planet will forever bear.
Even as a reformed Viltrumite, Nolan still wears the scars of this event himself as he narrates the tale to a returning one-eyed Allen in the present. With the help of a rickety space vessel, and a crew resembling that of Star Trek: The Next Generation – the show returns briefly to its parody days in this particular episode – Nolan guides his new cyclopic comrade and his turquoise partner Telia on an interplanetary tour of great weapons and other threats to the Viltrum empire which he was once tasked with thwarting. His methods involved burying his enemies alive for centuries (like the alien ranger Space Racer, who possesses an infinitely powerful ray gun), if not wiping out entire planets by blocking their sun.
Nolan revisiting his past this way serves not only an expository purpose, but forces him to face the person he used to be…and in many ways, still is. However, the episode is also incredibly funny at times, and strikes a deft tonal balance by rooting its numerous raunchy gags firmly in its characters, forcing the otherwise straight-faced Nolan to endure Allen and Telia’s sex noises from one room over. Given this tight character focus, the episode’s biggest revelation is also an emotional one rather than a simple plot twist. We’ve known since the end of Season 3 that the number of “pure blooded” Viltrumites in existence is only a few dozen – information that’s new to Coalition leader Thaedus, the first Viltrumite defector, as well — but what this episode makes clear is that despite facing near extinction themselves, the Viltrum Empire has continued its ruthless conquests in the hopes of rebuilding its ranks by seeding life with compatible species.
Change, it would seem, is a long and arduous journey for both father and son, and it’s about to get a whole lot more complicated.
Underlying these haunting revelations is the macabre idea that, despite experiencing widespread devastation, Nolan never stopped inflicting this pain on others. It’s something he’s only now come to recognize centuries later, and it makes for a stark, unflinching peek into his compartmentalized psyche. In fact, he’s barely gotten past the Viltrum genocide; when he learns that Thaedus was responsible for the Scourge Virus, he (much like Mark in the accompanying episodes) lets loose in a flurry of unforgiving fisticuffs.
Change, it would seem, is a long and arduous journey for both father and son, and it’s about to get a whole lot more complicated. By the end of the second episode, Conquest has escaped and reunited with Viltrum’s remaining leadership, giving us our first glimpse of the season’s main villain: the hulking Grand Regent Thragg, voiced with icy calm by Lee Pace. By the end of the third entry, several former members of the Earth’s villainous Order, like Titan and Mr. Liu, have rejoined their ranks. Admittedly, this pales in importance to the grand, pulpy space opera unfolding elsewhere in the galaxy, as well as the quiet domestic drama in the Grayson household, like Eve’s positive pregnancy test, which is just one of several life-changing events with which the season kicks off.
