Category: Article

This is the fourth in a series of episode reviews for the animated TV show Invincible, starting from the end and working backwards. See the overview here.

Last time our cup runneth over with criticisms.

Now this was a very fine episode indeed — I probably enjoyed this episode most out of everything so far. As a monster-of-the-week outing it outstripped sewer-Frankenstein by some considerable distance, with a cast of engaging, complex characters each with their own relevant motivations and morality.

Mark really is a shit to Amber, who with the benefit of foresight we know is bracing in every conversation for the one thing she wants to hear (“I was busy doing superhero shit that I am going to cease lying to you about”) and all his affected romantic gestures, effortful though they are, do not do her this basic decency — and he is assuming that she’s not smart enough to notice.

Eve’s family drama also reaches a high point here, with the parts I’ve already seen turning out to be a coda to events this episode. Like Mark, she has a fascist for a father — a petty, vindictive, sexist psychopath who does nothing but belittle her in the guise of fatherly advice. The other piece of the puzzle for her is helping out at Amber’s soup kitchen job, which gives her some welcome (albeit as we’ll see, slightly unclear) perspective on what it means to help people.

Debbie’s continuing investigation into Omni-man proceeds apace — it’s very hard for me to see how this plot strand could possibly have been a mystery or twist. It’s effectively “My husband is materially linked to a series of murders” vs “No he isn’t”. The mystery is his motivation, which has a delightful clarity here by way of context: the charming Tiger-man hired by the mob boss stands in as a direct proxy for Omni-man’s beliefs in the climactic fight, hammering all of Earth’s mightiest heroes to and fro and voicing his disdain for their efforts to stop him.

Omni-man loves his son, for whatever that is worth, but he wants his belief in the primacy of force to come before everything. Omni-man watches stoically as the hilarious cast of minor villains led by Tiger, the only actually effective combatant, beat his son to a pulp. It’s a pitch-perfect spoof of late-show Justice League Unlimited. Are we to assume the “anonymous call to Cecil” was the man himself, quietly betraying his ethics?

And to round out the episode’s cast of dubious father figures, we are introduced to Titan, a high-level mob enforcer with a heart of gold who can coat his skin in stone (although several times in the episode the skin under the stone also appears to deflect bullets). In an incredibly audacious move, he scams Mark into helping him make a play against his boss, a man named “Machine head” who eats computer chips to get off. The transition from Titan requesting Mark’s help on the roof of a city apartment block to Mark mulling over his request while spooning out mashed potato from his detached suburban home is as good as the show gets. And if in the end Titan wants to use the ring of power rather than cast it into the fires of Mount Doom? Frankly, that’s his choice to make.

Mark’s whole challenge in this episode, from the perspective of people with common decency, is to see that there are complex situations which cannot be simply punched into submission no matter how unpleasant they are. His desire — borne of his father’s direct instruction, to be fair to him — to seek out problems that are sufficiently grand to require his intervention means that even an issue that seems to him to be small and personal, Titan’s request to help him “get out” of the mob business, causes the near-death of several people. Ensuring that people are fed, while it may not be as dramatic, is a certain way to help. Mark is wrong to postpone it based on the assumed priority of “saving the world”, and he’s rightly going to get dumped for it.

I feel like there are hard limits on the possibility of being a superhero through individual acts of kindness, which is what Eve is quietly building towards in this episode and the next. There are big problems which cannot be solved with simple solutions, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore them — and if you take on personal intervention to solve all the world’s problems, when does that obligation end? The first act of Man of Steel is very relevant here.

The Justice League have their own segment with their own father figure who is unwisely attempting to discipline them when they’d be better off becoming comfortable in their own company, but it’s extremely boring and thankfully short. We also see the cloner twins in the act of cloning themselves, which is pleasant but all-too-brief.

I will say that between fickle, be-mullet-ed right-hand man Izotope this episode and the lank-haired evil scientist from #6, men with long hair are getting really short shrift in this series. And let the foreshadowing alarm ring with the way Saiyan-furious Mark rips the ineffectual villain made of magma in two — that’s the kind of violence you can only get away with on non-human characters, right… right?

Oh, and Robot is super, super creepy this episode. Cumulatively, that robot needs to step off. It’s difficult to determine, between Machine Head and Robot, which “artificial lifeform” is more distasteful here.

In total though, a barnstorming demonstration of what the show can do with the setting and characters that’s neither “replay Watchmen” nor “hang off the one big turn that’s coming”. It’s a leap into the very best kind of semi-serialised genre TV and past this point I am genuinely excited for more.

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Next time: We meet an exciting new character in episode #4.

Ranking, best to worst:

1. #5
2. #8
3. #7
4. #6

This is the third in a series of episode reviews for the animated TV show Invincible, starting from the end and working backwards. See the overview here.

Last time we met a very special boy robot.

Invincible #6, with special guest star: Marge Simpson’s wine glass.

After all that exciting climactic nonsense in the first two episode I watched, this episode slams us straight back down to cold, hard earth. Standard TV tropes rule the day here, with a Buffy-aping cold open showing us that there’s a monster on campus. The monster — and the evil scientist’s plot it is borne of — is all a bit naff, with more than a little air of having been conceived entirely to fuel the villain’s appearance in the eighth episode. Which was itself a somewhat unnecessary reiteration of how far the a shadowy arm of the US government was willing to go, given the history of shadowy arms of the US government.

I’m enjoying in retrospect how performative Cecil’s distaste for enlisting this guy is. He was probably already in the graduate program. But no matter how implausible a genius the lank-haired scientist is, it strains credulity to believe he can turn around a monster man in the handful of hours the plot requires him to do it in, even if only in terms of wear on that circular saw of his.

Dorohedoro did the sewer-dwelling genetic scientist with considerably more aplomb. There, the notion of an underground experimentation lair was backed up by the generally fantastical setting; why was the idiot in this episode working in a sewer? In the twelve or so hours following it happening, why did no-one investigate where the self-destructive pain cyborg earlier in the episode had come from? There’s a touch of Spiderman: Far From Home to it, that all these other heroes we are being told populate this world aren’t available to show up.

The script wants us to accept everything hanging very loosely in relation to itself, but at the same time for the climax to be a nail-biting race against time, with Mark having spent time on his own romantic dealings in a way that wastes critical minutes. But we have no reason to thing the villain could work so fast; at the start of the episode it’s evident that the guy who gets ambushed in the cold open spends more time than we see here just waking up again.

It’s an impossibly cruel end for a pleasant side-character too, one that would sit a lot better transplanted to the orgy of destruction in the subsequent two episodes. Sat where it is, it fits uncomfortably well into a trend of disposable gay characters and for what? In plot terms all it does is provide a distraction for the protagonist for all of an evening.

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Everything else is still of high standard, even if several plots are just characters dropping breadcrumbs all episode long — Omni-man’s costume being pored over for telltale blood, the clone twins work to contract and rob a grave, the Justice League. A lot of time is given over to Robot’s medicinal dedications of love, but in material terms very little happens. He’s alternately creepily fixated or adorably devoted, I get it. There’s a pleasing cynicism to how Eve, accosted by her belligerent father that she daren’t go live out some hippie dream, heads into the forest and immediately creating a living treehouse. Eve wants to be a 60’s throwback and she’s not afraid to be say it loud and proud.

The interactions between Omni-man and his family, as well as between Omni-man and Cecil (the worm), are again the high point of the episode. With the benefit of foresight, his declaration that on his home planet of Vegeta teens do not act out splits the difference smartly between “alien father doesn’t understand teenagers” and “authoritarian father actively refuses to understand teenagers”. The truth, as we’re shortly to discover, is both. And in an otherwise perfunctory confrontation with his wife at the tail end of the episode, the moment where he reflexively catches the wine bottle is the perfect uncanny note, briefly looking like an apologising partner bearing a gift, tying his impassive rage back to Mark’s failing attempts to repair his relationship with Amber.

In watching backwards, I’m somehow presented here with a straight-up cliffhanger — the start of this episode featured a host of recognisable characters being hauled into urgent medical care following a fight in the penthouse of a large build. Consider me on the edge of my seat for the next episode.

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Next time: Everyone gets beaten to a pulp in Episode #5.

Ranking, best to worst:

1. #8
2. #7
3. #6

This is the second in a series of episode reviews for the animated TV show Invincible, starting from the end and working backwards. See the overview here.

Last time we found out all about the noble Saiyan race.

Finally revealed! The secret origin of Omni-man’s crazy eyes.

I was delighted in the first part of this episode to find the Dragonball comparison given yet further weight by the addition of androids to the mix. This was most pleasing, as diversionary as it felt — viewing with full knowledge of the tiny robot child’s contribution to the climactic events next episode (none).

The conclusion I’m erring towards is that there’s very little deconstruction of the superhero taking place here: there’s a fairly basic superhero teen narrative that seems awfully close to something you might have seen on Justice League or Teen Titans, and then there’s a second story that’s somewhere between John Wick and Jason Bourne about an unstoppable murderous tool of the state being controlled and managed. Perpetual CIA sad-sack Cecil comments at one point that an ineffectual orbital cannon cost several billion dollars; you’ve got to wonder how much was correspondingly spent on the Omni-man project.

The fighting in the episode, was merrily animated. I did appreciate Robocop-by-way-of-Evangelion’s-seagulls — and of course the mass-production Evangelions were also the secret product of a shadowy governmental clique holding them in reserve as a trump card. I was somewhat disappointed in how Omni-man was not the devastating force of nature he was made out to be in my first episode. His failure to kill Cecil, a frail man armed only with a teleporter whose previous advantage was remaining strictly remote, was particularly unimpressive. Come on! The man is untethered from all morality and has the physical strength to tear the Immortal in two, don’t have him take hits for a few minutes first.

The teen drama is slightly more charming here than it was in the finale, and the sequence describing Eve’s morning routine looks delightful. I’m still not sure what to make of her statement “Looks like I’m helping you today”, which was so weighty that it featured in the “last time” sequence in the previous episode I watched.

The bulk of the episode is taken up with the alternately charming and irritating story of the boy android who did very little in episode 8. It’s a little contrived, but I think I can disentangle it: the episode begins with the (re?)introduction of a disfigured man in a life support tank, who tasks two burly clone-men with installing him in a new body they have grown for him. After some grousing they do this, at which point he immediately betrays them and attempts to imprison and/or murder them. Simultaneously, the disfigured man has been masquerading as a malfunctioning robot in the Justice League watchtower subplot, where he has formed a pseudo-romantic relationship with a woman who ages backwards. Their only reprieve is when he’s ordered by CIA Cecil to return to the base, an order which he obeys immediately. All very puzzling, and only reaffirming the space base as the locus of nauseating teen drama.

The best sequences in the episode take place in the family home and locale, a palpable sense of desperation as Omni-man shreds his connection to humanity piece by piece. The only moment missed is a reflection on his inhumanity in the flames of the exploded surveillance-house across the road — both Batman v Superman and Russell T. Davies’ The Second Coming do this scene with more gravitas.

This is the episode it had to be for the subsequent episode to be impactful; a measure of the existing state of affairs breaking apart piece by piece. It’s not as striking as the finale, but perhaps it can’t be.

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Next time: Something a little under-cooked in Episode #6.

Ranking, best to worst:

1. #8
2. #7

This is the first in a series of episode reviews for the animated TV show Invincible, starting from the end and working backwards. See the overview here.

I found this episode to be a very strong opener. A pleasant surprise, and the first half of the episode was very good indeed. Over the full length of the episode some more dubious elements started to creep in, but it was very enjoyable, well animated, and extremely funny. The comic timing on the gag with the ejecting fighter pilot was sublime, giving you just long enough to groan at some laughably non-lethal supervillainry straight out of GI Joe before the fascist moustache man touches down have his full due.

The opening, forced by my malicious watching to be fully in media res, is an efficient and not too self-conscious importing of several arcs of Dragonball. The dad is a Saiyan, the son is a Saiyan, together they come from a planet of fascists who oversee a distant-but-terrifying space empire. The dad is appealing with some fairly thin fascist rhetoric to encourage his slightly weedy son, who he has accidentally raised as a committed liberal, to view everyone he has ever known and loved as somewhere between ants and dogs. Why the empire he belongs to is so enthused about welcoming a planet somewhere between ants and dogs into the peacefully into the fold remains unexplored. It’s not a great pitch, but fascists are often pretty stupid so I’m willing to let it slide — for now.

It’d be nice to see in a future season some character from the Saiyan homeworld (the word is “Viltrumite” but I won’t be typing that more than once) who can give it the full Mishima and present a properly unpleasant vision of the argument for a fascist superman in this way.

But yes, the dad’s arguments are so-so — it’d be easy and consistent for him to make an argument for a hierarchy of beings which included some modicum of respect for his wife, who he obviously has affection for in spite of his statements about longevity and perspective. Dismissing her feels like a sop to making the choice easier for his son, who in one of the best visual/audio gags in the episode he remembers as a gap-toothed youth hitting a home run in softball — by virtue of the noise/image combination of knocking several of his teeth out.

There are themes dancing in the shadows here, the notion of an individual so powerful that the most intelligent man on Earth, standing silhouetted before an array of surveillance screens, poses no more threat to him than the most intelligent ant — an individual tethered by relationships to a life he otherwise wishes to reject entirely. But for his other flaws, Dr Manhattan was not a fascist. Still, extremely promising potential for a work that overall grapples at least somewhat seriously with the legacy of Watchmen in a way that, say, Doomsday Clock did not.

The scene of the dad causing various catastrophes to happen to ‘teach’ his son the fragility of human life is a hammy delight, bringing to mind all the things you might do in an open-world video game where you consciously decouple yourself from the pretence that it’s anything other than a simulation; crashing trains and knocking down buildings. It adds a delusional edge to the dad’s atrocities, where it’s less that he is only pretending to care about human life (and as ever, we know that the power of love will come back to contradict that) and more that he believes both at once: he loves his wife and son and enjoys life on Earth, but he can choose to “remember” that none of it is real.

The only note that doesn’t quite hit is the dramatic sequence where the son attempts to rescue someone from a collapsing building and ends up holding a grizzly severed arm; it’s completely bathetic where it should be traumatic.

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Beyond the father/son strife, the episode was more of a mixed bag. The spooky CIA operative is cloying, his sad-dog attitude as he manipulates and orders people to their certain death one of the more uncomfortably realistic things in the episode. That said, having him stand with several other characters and watch the action unfold on a big screen is such a naked shortcut gluing the first half of the episode to the second, cheating so that everyone already knows what they need to know.

The fact that there’s a second big screen with a second motley crew watching events unfold live takes it to absurdity. This all-too-human set of superheroes is a real weak point, at least in this episode, a bunch of sappy teen drama throwbacks who can surely only exist to get murdered for stakes in future episodes as-yet unproduced. Their presence awkwardly casts them as “real” people, in contrast to the faceless hordes wiped out by the collateral damage of the fight in the start of the episode, which almost endorses the delusional aspect of the dad’s evil-making — the structure of the episode treats some people as worthy of mention and other people as not. The line “we can at least Save People” is the worst in the episode, straight out of a theatrical show of Age of Ultron or some garbage.

I enjoyed the scene towards the end with the mother and the techno-tailor in his Iron Man CAD room, where there’s definitely a story thread potentially brewing about the humans who might welcome an alien fascism so long as it grants them relative boons. How long did the mother spend courting, dating, then happily married to a fascist? When he returns, will she forgive him?

One issue with watching the last episode is first is that there’s nowhere to subsequently go to find out what happens next, and I’m hardly going to degrade myself by reading the comic.

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Next time: We discover a secret origin in Episode #7.

Ranking, best to worst:

1. #8