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.
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.
