"Invincible," Year Four

Spoilers for the first three seasons ahead.

I'm having some trouble with "Invincible."  I've become convinced that the show probably peaked with the first season.  There's plenty of interesting stuff that happens this year, as Mark and Nolan reconnect to wage war against the Viltrumites.  There are more allies to be gathered and new villains to be revealed.  However, an awful lot of time is also spent on Nolan's apology tour, as he starts to make amends with Debbie, Mark, and Oliver.  And while I appreciate that "Invincible" is still committed to portraying all of Mark's personal relationships with something approaching realism, it still bothers me that the show has spent an inordinate amount of time and effort to walk back Nolan's betrayal, arguably the defining moment of the entire show.  And the show is worse for it.

It's not that three seasons isn't long enough to pull off this kind of development, but "Invincible" is much better at being a superhero action show than it is at being a melodrama.  During the big emotional showdowns the vocal performances are very good, but visually the characters are noticeably static and there's hardly any change at all in lighting or composition or shot choice to help sell the intensity.  "Invincible" has been cutting corners with its animation from the beginning in order to keep the production timeline reasonable, but I felt it more this season.  There are several flying scenes where the limited animation is especially egregious.  It's hard not to notice that the character designs of new characters like The Grand Regent Thragg (Lee Pace), rebel leader Thaedus (Peter Cullen) and new recruit Tech Jacket (Zoey Deutch) are very derivative of other characters.  

Many of the writing choices this year struck me as off.  While I liked some of the individual episodes, there's a real head-scratcher in "Hurm," which is spent exploring the Under Realm, the show's version of Hell that is populated by supernatural creatures.  It might be setting up something further down the line, but feels like a strange digression the way it's placed in the season.  The Guardians show up for two early episodes, set up a big cliffhanger, and disappear until presumably next year.  The most interesting subplot is actually about Eve having trouble with her powers, and big chunks of that take place completely offscreen.  I'm glad that Debbie gets more of the spotlight, but her wonderfully cathartic scenes with Nolan wind up being seriously undercut by where the story goes in the last episode.  I haven't read all of the source material, but I have the same terrible feeling that I had with a lot of cartoons growing up when they were about to do something that drove me crazy - moving back to the original status quo, and resetting the board even where it doesn't make sense to.  Maybe it won't happen.  I really, really hope it doesn't. 

I know some viewers are only here for the outrageous level of violence that "Invincible" regularly delivers.  I don't think this gets remotely as gory as the third season, but the action fiends should be satisfied.  There are many more Viltrumite-on-Viltrumite battles, and the premiere episode had a pretty gnarly take on an alien invasion that I enjoyed.  Those who have been waiting for a full scale Viltrumite war might come away a little disappointed, however.   Despite spending so much of the prior seasons setting up the Viltrumites as an implacable threat, when push comes to shove they almost feel like underdogs in the fight.  It was akin to preparing for the Galactic Empire, and finding out the enemy is a single terrorist cell - it's still bad, but much more manageable.  

I still like "Invincible" enough that I'm going to stick it out until the end, but I've had to adjust expectations.  That relentless sense of narrative momentum from the first season is probably not coming back.  We're never going to get a better villain than Nolan on this show because it was the family connection and the deception that really made the twist hurt.  And now Nolan is more akin to a redeemed antihero, and watching him is no longer very fun or frightening.  I still want to see where Mark and Eve's stories go, but Nolan's wearing out his welcome.  I hope to see less of him from here on out, as it's already been established that "Invincible" works perfectly well without him.

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