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.
