After nearly two decades of Marvel movies, we're starting to see dissections of superhero stories come to the forefront and get the attention they deserve. Prime Video seems to be at the center of that shift, with live-action series like The Boys and Gen V and animated series like Invincible offering complex deconstructions of the genre. In addition to this commentary, Invincible Season 1 brought us a star-studded cast and some of the most brutal violence ever brought to life in mainstream animation. The season ended with protagonist Mark Grayson fighting his father, Nolan/Omni-Man, to protect Earth from a Viltrumite invasion. The first four episodes of Invincible Season 2 pick up in the aftermath of that chaotic showdown.
Omni-Man, once the protector of Earth, revealed himself as an operative of an alien race called Viltrumites, forcing Mark to choose between his father and protecting Earth. After a chaotic battle ended in a stalemate, Omni-Man left his son Mark and his wife Debbie behind as he flew off into space to bring Season 1 to a close.
Throughout Part 1 of Season 2, which consists of four episodes, we get a surprising amount of time with Mark's mother, Debbie. We see her as she grieves alone in her house, we see her as she tries to deny the hurt and get back to her job as a real estate agent, and we see her as she goes to a support group for spouses of superheroes. She's allowed to be alone, just feeling her feelings, whether they emerge as drinking too much wine or slamming a loose cabinet door until the dishes inside shatter. On the surface, Invincible is a show about a half-alien superhero fighting the most brutal villains in existence, so these lonely moments feel especially unexpected and devastating.
Season 2 manages to spend time with other characters, too, ensuring that it's not just a brutal death march through Mark's life. We get some time with Atom Eve, who is still struggling with what it means to be a superhero and the line between helping people and intervening with trained specialists--contrasting with all the times we've seen Superman just laser a steel beam back into place and call it good. At the same time, she has to contend with being a superpowered being who can literally assemble anything she wants out of pure atoms while her father--who has pride in being the family's breadwinner--sees her power as a life cheat instead of a miraculous gift.
Each character the show focuses on has a compelling storyline that, even if fairly short, gives us another perspective on Mark's world. Allen the Alien tells us about his people and the interspecies alliance against the Viltrumite reign. A new character, Angstrom Levy, introduces us to Invincible's multiverse--because everyone has a multiverse these days--and shows us just how unlikely a hero Mark is.
Invincible is, at its core, a story about what it's like to be a superhero, warts and all. Spending time with Eve, Allen, and the superhero team Guardians of the Globe are all important, both to fleshing out Mark's place in the world and to exploring the idea what it means to be a superhero from other angles. My heart broke for Eve when she tried to help people in need, only to have it go wrong and her father to rub her face in her failure. Meanwhile, Allen's story begins as a fun aside thanks to Seth Rogen's voice work. However, it becomes a surprising reminder that danger lurks around every corner. Guardians of the Globe have their own challenges, but more than most anything they act as a pressure release for all the difficult emotions that the other characters bring up. That's due in large part to Jason Mantzoukas' character Rex Splode, though we get a new character called the Shape Smith, voiced by Ben Schwartz, that brings his own humor to the show. Both actors are so naturally funny that it's hard for them to not bring some levity to the scenes they appear in.
The core story remains about Mark, though. He is a massively powerful and nearly unkillable being, but he carries with him the guilt of his father's true intentions and an unimaginable burden. Whether he is dealing with the government after his latest bout of heroics, or is being whisked away on a journey light years away from earth--leaving his friends to cover for him so his mom doesn't find out--Mark doesn't get the luxury of making easy choices.
That becomes especially true in the back half of the these four episodes, when Mark ends up far away from home and is put in an unimaginably tough spot. As a superhero, he has to deal with the responsibility of being powerful, the attention and expectations he receives as a result of that, the effects it has on his family and friends, and how whether or not he intervenes can completely change the lives of people he's never even met. I'm speaking vaguely here because these are some major character moments for Mark, and to lay out the details would spoil huge elements of this part of the storyline. Suffice to say, though, that the fourth episode leaves us on a sort of emotional cliffhanger. It's not a question of what's going to happen, but rather how Mark is going to handle it.
After these first episodes, it feels like Impossible might be a better name than Invincible. In this way, I can see the link between Invincible and creator Robert Kirkman's most successful story, The Walking Dead. Both stories are willing to put their characters in impossible situations with real consequences. Superhero stories are so often divorced from believable stakes, but Invincible never lets you get too far from the hearts of the characters or the way the events of the story affect them.
And maybe that's the point of the name--it's ironic. Yeah, Mark might be physically durable, but he's vulnerable in dozens of other ways that we've outlined above. We've been trained by pop culture to see as a power fantasy and a gift, but in Invincible they're just as likely to be a curse. Invincible works because it never lets us forget that putting on the superhero suit is a decision that Mark has to make over and over. Mark is one of the few superheroes that understands as well as Peter Parker does the pain and burden inherent to doing what they do, and that makes him one of the most compelling superheroes on television right now.
