Invincible Season 1 Thoughts
I knew about this show for a little while, but I just passed it off at first like I did when I first heard about the comic. My memory is kind of hazy, but I think I heard about it from the long past G4 program "Attack of the Show" around 2009-2012. They would occasionally talk about comics on there and I remember them showing the cover of one of the issues with Invincible covered in blood and I think they did mention it being a gory superhero comic. I didn't think much about it though. I thought the hero's costume was wack and never thought about it sense.
When I saw the thumbnail for it on my media page on my PS4 I didn't really think anything of it. I didn't even remember that I've seen the comic the show is based on. I heard a few people talk about this show on the internet, but I was kind of like I'm good on superhero shows plus I didn't have Amazon Prime. But I was at my brother's house over the week and I noticed he had it so I decided to give it a watch and daaamn, the shit was good! How good? Well, I'm getting to it.
First I want to say that choosing to make it animated vs live-action was the best choice to me. For superhero stuff I do think that animated is the way to go most of the time. You don't have to worry about budget restraints for the action and CGI so there's no clash there and this is from the same man who created The Walking Dead which was another comic book property, but I do think in that case going live action was the better route. I actually don't think I've seen many animated zombie things before, but I can't imagine it being as terrifying animated than live action, but we're here to talk about Invincible not The Walking Dead so let's do that.
The first episode starts very tame. There are a couple of villains trying to attack The White House for some reason and the fake Justice League come to stop them. Fake Superman (Omni-Man) comes to save the day at the last minute and there's a small inkling that there's something not right about him. He comes in at the right time, but low key his actions feel a bit dickish like when The Immortal went to try and catch some of the people falling and Omni Man scoops them up right before them and says "I had them" in a way that he sounded very annoyed. Everything after is chill. You get introduced to Mark, Omni Man's son who's a high school student just trying to mind his biz. He looks up to his dad and desires to get superpowers like him which he does randomly when taking out the trash at work.
Omni Man is weirdly not excited by the news, but starts to teach Mark the basics like how to how take a punch to the chest. He knocked the wind out of that boy! I was like "damn, you hitting him with full force right out the gate like that?"
The best part of the episode comes at the end when the Guardians of the Globe (Fake Justice League) get murdered by Omni Man and Omni Man was gutter. He was going to take them out without the slightest warning. Red Rush just happened to see him coming at the last second. I wasn't necessarily surprised by this, but the amount of violence and gore I was not expecting. That was a hell of a way to end an episode and it got me interested in seeing what would happen next.
Invincible does a great job at character interaction and creating anticipation like a good DC cartoon. In fact, if you are a fan of the DC animated universe there's no reason for you to not like this show. It has that kind of character focus that a DC cartoon has with the brutality that makes it its own. The characters themselves are nothing you haven't seen before, but it's the presentation, world building, and the anticipation that keeps things interesting.
Since we see Omni Man murder the Guardians of the Globe there's anticipation for the rest of the season for discovering why he did it. My initial question was "Is he under mind control?" as this is the most common answer for this type of thing for superheroes, but as time went on I started to suspect Nolan was fully aware of what he was doing. Cecil, the government man who oversees superheroes is investigating who killed the Guardians along with a fake Hellboy character. The tension in this plotline is so thick and you worry what might happen when they do find out as Omni Man is so powerful, could they do anything about it?
The biggest giveaway to me was in episode 3 I think it was when Omni Man enters the aliens portal and arrives on their planet and says "Sorry, Earth isn't yours to conquer," and then proceeds to destroy their entire world. I like how his wife Debbie isn't flustered at all by her husband's superhero antics. When Mark tells her that Nolan went into the alien's portal she said "So he's going to be late for dinner?" That's every day life for her.
Over the course of the season we get more hints that something is not quite right with Nolan. My favorite parts are in episode 5. When Mark tells his dad that he wants to help people out on the street level his dad says "Why would you waste your time with that? It's beneath you." Also, following the second best battle in the season with Invincible, Titan, and the Guardians against Machine Head's muscle, specifically Battle Beast we see Omni Man looking overhead right when Invincible passes out.
I quite liked that episode, but I was disappointed to see that Titan ended up just wanting to take Machine Head's place as the king of the underground in the city. Why couldn't have just been a brotha trying to get out of the trap like he initially said?
The end of season 1 was so good though. Episode 7 ends with the cliffhanger when Omni Man rips the revived Immortal in half and Mark confronts him. Episode 8 picks up right after and Omni Man's intentions are finally revealed. His planet Viltrum are a world conquering race and he was assigned to Earth to weaken its defenses so the Viltrumites will have an easy time conquering it when they arrive. Nolan killed the Guardians because they were the largest threat. It's not clear why he waited twenty years to do so, but I guess that's something to be revealed in season 2. Nolan also reveals to Mark that he will live for millennia.
Mark won't accept his father's people conquering Earth so he attacks him which leads to the biggest ass whooping I've seen in a while. Nolan is relentless and quasi-sociopathic. He kills humans in front of Mark to make a point of how fragile and worthless their lives are. Even when Mark asks if he loves his mother he says "I love your mother, but she's more like a pet to me." Whoo! I've heard this before from immortal characters, but that shit still hurt. That wasn't even the most shocking thing this episode. When Nolan knocks Mark into New York City and punches him into the subway he holds picks up Mark and holds him into the colliding train. Human bodies just plow through them and it was horrifically gorey. Like I wanted to throw up. Despite Nolan's efforts to desensitize Mark to the death human life Mark still tries to fight and proceeds to giving him the worst beating of his life. Just as he is about to make the killing blow, he pauses as the sight of Mark's missing teeth reminds him of a time in Mark's childhood when he was playing baseball and he actually felt human at the time, but it's when he asks Mark what will he have after five hundred years and Mark says "I'll have you Dad. I'll still have you," is when he regrets his actions and flies off into space never to be seen again.
Invincible hit many emotions throughout it's first season. It provided plenty of shock, humor, anticipation, and empathy. The writing is smooth. The dialogue never drags and in almost every scene you feel like you're learning a bit more about the world and characters. I personally think that maybe the arch with the clones and Robot was the weakest part and the conclusion was kind of weird, but it's a small part in the big picture. I am definitely eager to see where things go. It looks like Earth is waiting for the inevitable return of Omni Man. I hope this time they'll have Battle Beast on their side as I think he's the only one that could something to Omni Man. Invincible needs to train in the meantime.
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