This is the sixth 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 talked all about Watchmen.
Mostly another miss, I fear.
As was potentially inevitable with watching the series in the way I am, this episode dragged a little as scaffolding was rapidly constructed for the events of future episodes—with the real problem maybe being how much of it is for events that I wasn’t wildly endeared to when I was seeing them happen.
Signals were mixed from the opening twin eulogies, where Omni-man as a public figure — matched, you’ll note, with military hardware as an element of state force — is contrasted with Omni-man as a private figure at a small funeral of friends. The sequence somehow fails to make very much of this contrast, where the similar sequence in Batman v Superman (surely a direct inspiration, complete with matching stone monument) contrasts the public sacrifice of Superman with the private loss of a son and a partner, Invincible ultimately doesn’t have anything to say about the bit-characters who have died. All it can say is that Omni-man is duplicitous and authoritarian, which may as well be stencilled on his costume.
The bulk of time is given over to the (re)formation of the Justice League analogue, swallowing up Eve’s prior teammates in what is now clearly a set of Teen Titans (the name was obviously always there, but seeing Robot in action as the Red Tornado analogue seals it all together.) They fight, we see the team assembled — including the tensions that they will carry all the way through to episode #8. We get the introduction to Monster Girl’s tragic circumstances, whereby forcing her to be a superhero seems unspeakably cruel. Let someone else do it, Monster Girl. Live out your remaining life in the forwards direction.
Hell’s Rorschach is back again, this time with more of the demonic styling that his look is derived from. I found him less effective here because Kirkman (or whoever conceived this character for the TV show) can’t really pull off the trick Alan Moore did of properly getting inside the head of a radical libertarian and giving a sympathetic, if not positive, account of that worldview. The demon just seems like an imbecile, a suggestion not improved by his retro-future jumpsuit. He turns up in all the right places, but fails to ask any questions that would advance his investigation or successfully lance the morally grey characters he’s supposed to be furiously casting into good or bad. The best he can do is suggest that you’re going to go to double-hell or whatever. Have him rant! Have him accuse everyone who interferes with his investigation of morally compromising themselves or revealing their own perversions. It feels like because the writers don’t have any respect for the worldview, they didn’t feel obliged to give it any wins — where Moore with Rorschach is constantly weighing the scales towards and then against Rorschach, baiting you into finding him more appealing than the flabby liberal Dan Dreiberg, then reminding you that he’s a racist sexist fascist homophobe. A disappointment.
Conversely CIA Cecil is back to his creepy, manipulative best: teleporting into a teenager’s bedroom to berate them for not advancing US military goals. Then with that achieved, he scoots back to the black site just over the road from our protagonist family, from where he can see a heat scan of the room he was just in. Eve later has a brief moment of voyeurism watching Mark and Amber make out through the window — the weedy CIA assistant is presumably watching as well.
The less said about Doctor Seismic the better: completely incoherent, largely unfunny, the show cannot decide at all what it wants to say via this character’s inclusion. Why is there a link between Amber’s interest in social justice and this old man ranting about slave-owning Presidents while trying to sling some Hawaiian shirt-wearing, camera-toting tourists into a lava crevice? There is so little effort in this sequence that the scene ends with him dunking himself unprompted into some lava.
I did enjoy the scenes between Eve and Rex, which was a pleasant surprise. Rex is here as a flash-forward of Mark and Amber’s relationship, constant minor betrayals interspersed with grand romantic gestures. She’s right to turf him out; the only think I’m left wondering is if there’s enough time left in the first two episodes of the show for Eve to do any being ‘long-suffering’ in. So far she has made at least one assertive, successful life choice in pretty much every single episode, contributing to her overall being one of the most compelling side characters.
More than any other so far, this episode underwhelmed me. Aside from the Doctor Seismic sequence it wasn’t actively dysfunctional as with episode #6, but I might be reaching the limit of gaining perspective from viewing the episodes in reverse order. Little is clarified here by having future knowledge and much is made unnecessary. I’m hoping not to have the same experiences with episodes #2 and #1, but we’ll see.
