"Invincible," Year Two

Spoilers for the first season ahead.

Mark Grayson graduates high school and goes to college, while continuing to work for Cecil as a superhero.  However, his work life balance is a mess and his relationships with his mother and girlfriend become strained, as the fight with Omniman continues to haunt him.  There is a new villain this year, a man named Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown) who can create portals to other universes.  Angstrom reveals that Mark is evil in most other universes, and usually helps his father with the conquest of Earth.  We also learn what happened to Omniman after the fight with Invincible, and what Cecil, the Guardians, and Allen the Alien have all been up to.  

"Invincible" is back to show us the aftermath of its shattering first season finale, and immediately reveals why the show might be in some trouble.  The second season does what second seasons usually do - dig a little deeper into the characters, expand the worldbuilding, and set up bigger arcs down the line.  However, season two is coming back after a hiatus of over two years, because of the long production times for animated shows.  All the fans hyped up for more carnage were instead treated to a season full of angsty introspection  and soul searching as the characters try to process a massive amount of trauma and pain.  What's worse, the eight-episode season was split in half, with an additional three month wait for the last four episodes.

The season does a lot of heavy lifting, but because the big bloody fights are relatively few, and none of them are remotely on the same dramatic level as the father-son clash from the first season, a lot of these episodes feel like filler.  Angstrom is an interesting villain, but not a particularly effective one in the grand scheme of things.  The shock value of the extreme violence has mostly worn off, and the show's creators wisely don't attempt to up the ante, but the show doesn't offer anything as compelling to replace it.  I've pointed out before that "Invincible" isn't as edgy and dark as it seems to be at first glance.  When you get past the violence, the character interactions are written for the YA crowd.  The romances are chaste and hardly anyone uses profanity.  

This isn't a bad thing in the slightest.  Initially I was worried that characters like Debbie and Amber were being kept around longer than they originally had been in the comics.  However, they both give the show a greater sense of emotional reality that grounds Mark, and keeps him from coming off as too much of a tortured hero stereotype.  I'm certainly still enjoying "Invincible" and look forward to its future seasons.  However, I'm worried that the show has attracted the kind of audience that's just looking for extreme content, similar to "The Boys."  There's extreme violence in "Invincible," but that violence has more consequences here, and I'm worried that the audience is not going to be patient enough for it.

Compared to other recent animated projects like "Blue Eye Samurai" and "X-men '97," "Invincible" doesn't match up as far as animation quality.  It's especially apparent this year with one sequence even pointing out all the different techniques that animators use to save time and draw less.  The bulk of the effort is poured into the action scenes, and everything else is secondary.  I'm not complaining, because the action scenes remain very impressive and memorable.  I think a bigger problem might be the hour-long episodes, which often feel sluggish and weirdly paced.  I'm also not a fan of the little winks and nods at other comic book characters - it's awfully cutesy for a show with this many superpowered homicidal maniacs.  

Easily the best episode from this set is the standalone "Atom Eve" special that explores Eve's origins and uncomfortable family dynamics.  It was released several months before the second season, and is as bleak and horrific as anything "Invincible" has ever done.  I wouldn't mind a few more specials like this, but I'd prefer if the creators kept their focus on the show itself, at least until it's on firmer footing. 

   

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