‘Invincible’ Season 4 Episodes 1-3 review: Redemption is depressing

The argument Invincible has always been making, underneath the gore and the trolley problems and the increasingly spectacular displays of bodies being broken, is quieter than it appears. It is an argument about integration.

About what happens when a being raised inside a totalizing ideology — one that organizes all of existence around hierarchy, purity, and the elimination of the weak — encounters something that ideology cannot account for. Love. Belonging. The terrifying discovery that other people are real.

This is what Omni-Man’s entire arc has been, from the moment he looked at his son in the Season 1 finale and couldn’t finish what he came to do. It is what Invincible Season 4’s second episode, “I’ll Give You the Grand Tour,” finally makes explicit. And why that episode stands as not only the best of this premiere block, but one of the finest hours this show has ever produced.

Invincible Season 4 Episodes 1-3 arrive with at maximum density.

Episodes 1 and 3 — “Making the World a Better Place” and “I Gotta Get Some Air” — are busy cycling through villain encounters and subplots with the controlled chaos of a showrunner aware of how much story remains to be told. At one point, Mark kills Rus Livingston, the innocent astronaut whose brain has been colonized by a Sequid parasite. It’s a cold calculus for Mark, who has zero good options. Later, he nearly beats Titan to death because Titan put Oliver in danger.

The premiere’s Earth-bound material is effective precisely where it is willing to sit with the weight of Mark’s choices rather than moving past them. The opening montage — set to Nothing But Thieves’ “If I Get High,” an unusually melancholic choice for a superhero show — does something the series rarely attempts. It renders the psychic texture of crisis without catharsis. The way sustained emergency feels not dramatic but grinding.

Steven Yeun‘s voice work carries the load and then some. Mark is not a villain in these episodes, not at all. He’s not even being “difficult” or unreasonable. He is a person being reshaped by circumstances faster than he can consciously process them. And the show is honest about the fact that this is how most people become who they become in adulthood.

Eve’s big surprise.

The pregnancy reveal at the end of Episode 3 — Eve, alone in a bathroom, positive test in hand — is a true game changer. It’s also emotionally devastating. Just as the show’s biggest moments earn when they trust implication over exposition. Her powers have been malfunctioning all season, matter refusing to hold its shape under her hands.

And now the audience understands why. She is making something new. The timing is, of course, terrible. The Viltrumite War is coming. Mark is slipping. And Eve is going to have to figure out what she is without the one thing that has always defined her as a hero. All that, without even getting to the physical toll of pregnancy and the reality of young parenthood.

Invincible Season 4 Episodes 1-3 aren’t without frustration. Both Earth-bound installments ask a lot of their villain encounters — Dinosaurus, Universa, the Flaxans, Mr. Liu — and not all of them earn their runtime. The Universa fight in particular exists primarily to confirm Eve’s power loss and feels like obligation. Invincible has always labored under its source material’s scope, and sometimes that heavy hand shows.

Episode 2 is something else entirely.

“I’ll Give You the Grand Tour” is the first episode in the show’s history to contain no Graysons. Mark is absent. Debbie is absent. Oliver doesn’t appear. The episode belongs entirely to Nolan and Allen. And to the history of a civilization that Nolan spent several thousand years believing in, serving, and has only recently begun to understand was a catastrophe he helped perpetuate.

The episode opens on Viltrum before the Scourge Virus, and what it shows is a society organized entirely around the elimination of everything it considers impure. A young Nolan — voiced with an uncanny resemblance to Mark’s affect, which is not accidental — teaches children to recite the virtues of the purge that killed billions of Viltrumites deemed too weak to survive.

His parents beat him nearly to death as a rite of passage. Then they declare him ready and send him out into the empire’s service. He believes all of it. This is his water. He has never swum in anything else.

Then the Scourge Virus arrives, and Viltrum’s billions become dozens. And the episode asks: What does it do to a person? To a being who has internalized the logic of strength and purity down to the cellular level? To watch that logic turn on itself? Watch the strongest civilization in the universe collapse because it spent millennia executing its own members for insufficient power, leaving a gene pool too shallow to fight a targeted biological attack?

The answer, in Nolan’s case, took thousands of years. A human wife. A half-human son. And a moral reckoning that still isn’t done. But it happened. That is the show’s argument. Only integration reversed it. The DNA of community.

The season’s first genuine masterstroke.

Thaedus — voiced with a gravity that only Peter Cullen, the man who has spent forty years voicing Optimus Prime, could bring to a character whose defining act was an atrocity — reveals himself as the Great Betrayer. He is the one who released the Scourge Virus on Viltrum. He killed billions of his own people to prevent them from killing billions more.

Nolan’s rage at this revelation is real, immediate, and entirely understandable. These were his people, his history, the only world he knew before Earth. Even as the audience understands that Thaedus made the only choice that could interrupt the empire’s machinery.

What makes the scene extraordinary is that Invincible never asks the audience to feel good or bad about this. Thaedus certainly isn’t absolved. Nolan’s anger isn’t exactly wrong. The show balances the horror of what Thaedus did and the horror of what he prevented as it foreshadows Mark’s own decisive actions on earth. While Nolan has to sit in this irresolution in a way that J.K. Simmons lands with a knockout punch.

With this vocal performance, Simmons nails the endless calculation in Nolan’s mind. That he has to realize the logic that raised him was not just wrong but self-destructive. And that the person who destroyed it is now asking for his help.

This is what the show has always been about.

The Viltrumite Empire isn’t a metaphor in the heavy-handed sense. It doesn’t map all that cleanly onto any single real-world ideology. And Invincible is wise enough not to insist that it does. But it is unmistakably a portrait of what any fascist system looks like when it organizes itself around the logic of purity and the punishment of difference. It destroys itself. Slowly, from within. Until the only thing that can save it is the humanity it spent centuries trying to prevent.

Nolan is a mass murderer. His list of crimes is not retrievable. The show knows this and doesn’t ask the audience to forget it. What it asks instead is a more uncomfortable question. What does it mean that he changed? That exposure to something outside his own system — a world that valued things Viltrum had no category for — made him capable of shame, of love, of standing in front of the man who released a bioweapon on his home planet and choosing, eventually, to help him?

The answer Invincible Season 4 Episodes 1-3 offer is far from comfortable, of course. Belonging doesn’t erase what came before it. But it does, the show insists, make new things possible that were not possible before. It reverses the direction of a person’s gravity. And that — more than the fights, more than the blood, more than the increasingly spectacular destruction — is what this show has always been best at preaching until it’s red in the face.

Invincible Season 4 Episodes 1-3 are streaming on Prime Video, with new episodes dropping weekly on Wednesdays.

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Images courtesy of Prime Video