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.
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.
