It’s gotta be hard to live in a world entirely constructed out of trolley problems when you, yourself, are a trolley.
That’s how I’ve come to think of Mark Grayson and, honestly, his whole Superman-as-fascist Viltrumite race of late: human-shaped trolleys, flying through the sky, slamming into things, killing people, and sometimes feeling sad about it. It’s a descriptor I’ve come to like more and more as I’ve thought about these three episodes over the last few weeks. Viltrumites—who we’re going to spend a lot of time watching, learning about, and otherwise being stuck with in these outings—even kind of fight like trolleys, in so far as they’re big, fast-moving bundles of kinetic force that inevitably just sort of crash into each other. Whatever visually exciting ideas Invincible’s animators once had for watching these big slabs of space beef slap into each other presumably ran out a few head explosions ago. Now it’s just all trolley crashes, all the time.
At the same time, Invincible spends two-thirds of this multi-episode premiere retreading the sole philosophical question apparently kicking around in its superhero brain: What will, or won’t, Mark Grayson kill for? Viewers hoping we might have moved past this particular bit of gauntlet-wringing after Invincible made his big “I’ll murder anyone who endangers my loved ones” declaration at the end of his battle with Conquest last season will be helpfully reminded—in a premiere bizarrely obsessed with having Mark and his buddies face off against threats we’ve already seen them fight—that Invincible is a show that never lets anything go. And so we spend our two Earth-based episodes tonight (premiere episode “Making The World A Better Place” and third installment “I Gotta Get Some Air”) watching various villains make ever-more desperate “Oh, won’t someone please kill me?!” pleas to Mark Grayson, until he finally finds one he can’t afford not to indulge.
I had high hopes for these episodes initially. “Making The World A Better Place” opens on a pleasantly somber tone, with a montage (set to Nothing But Thieves’ “If I Get High”) of Mark and his various superfriends being slowly ground down by the day-to-day chores of keeping the planet safe. Turns out, humanity’s still kind of pissed about millions of people getting murdered by guys with Mark’s exact face, and that alienating disdain is taking its toll on him even as his body recovers from the Conquest fight. Mark’s misery gets an interesting early expression when he insists that little brother Oliver (who’s been helping out in his Kid Omni-Man identity) go back out to deal with yet another supervillain, despite the teenage alien clearly being exhausted. Steven Yeun delivers good petulance here as Mark treats a life-or-death battle against a living furnace as just one more job on the chore wheel that his little brother is trying to shirk.
But the sense of sameness sets in early, as Cecil (Walton Goggins, who’s still giving the most consistent voice performance of this cast) recruits Robot’s little splinter team of heroes back into the Guardians Of The Globe. Goggins sells the weariness of it all, but the back-and-forth of “We trust you, oh no we don’t, but we’ll trust you enough” here has been going on for a long time at this point and adding in a few little nuances—like the newly christened Rex/Rudy/Robot bristling at being under the command of Jonathan Banks’ veteran soldier Brit—can only go so far. For all that this show occasionally tries to show off the wider roster of heroes kicking around in Invincible’s world, it sure does seem to circle this very small group of folks pretty regularly, and it feels like a wasted opportunity from a “showing off cool superpowers” point of view, if nothing else. (Maybe they’re expecting us to fall in love with Brit, whose amazing superhero ability is “gun.”) Beyond Robot—and in the absence of the real Rex, sorely missed here—none of these characters have ever really gotten any development. Most of the time, they’re just padding for fight scenes, which makes watching them get shuffled around the table yet again feel like a waste.
Meanwhile, the trolleys just keep a-rollin’, as Mark gets confronted by a character I have down in my notes as “Thanos as a dinosaur werewolf,” who picks a fight because he’s mad that humanity is rebuilding in the wake of the Invincible War. Invincible dispatches the delightfully named Dinosaurus pretty easily—only to find himself gripped by bloodlust when confronted by the villain’s human form, who insists he simply can’t stop dino-Hyde from killing again. Having been talked down off that particular murder ledge, Mark then ends up in a battle with a character named Universa, a staff-wielding lady from another universe who insists she has a really good reason for sucking all of the energy out of a local power plant. I’m honestly not sure what this particular fight—wedged in between the Dinosaurus battle, family dinner with Eve’s awful parents, and a far more dire battle against the re-emerging Sequids—is meant to accomplish, besides establishing that Eve’s powers are now officially on the fritz. (There’s something very funny to me, by the way, about the show removing its one consistently cool-to-look-at superpower from the mix. It’d be a shame for these battles to get some kind of interesting visual identity!) The fight in the power plant doesn’t even tie strongly into the “Who’s Mark gonna kill?” conversation—Universa goes down before he can contemplate crossing that line—and feels like a pretty classic Invincible “Well, it was in the comics, so we’ve gotta get it in here somewhere” beat.
Credit where it’s due, though: The Sequid fight that ends “Making The World A Better Place” carries a heftier charge and serves as the best example, in any of these three episodes, of what an effective Invincible set piece can look like. Last glimpsed in a serious way back in season two, the alien-brain parasites make for a genuinely creepy enemy whenever they climb up out of the sewers, whether they’re sending their black-eyed, eerily smiling drones at our heroes, or crawling out of people’s throats after the threat has apparently passed. I might roll my eyes at how transparent the show is in getting Mark to kill the invasion’s original host, astronaut Rus Livingston—you can feel the writers moving heaven and earth to close off any avenue that does not involve Invincible ending up with exploded brain on his hands here—but the show sells the weight of both the threat and the moment effectively. (It also leads to another guarded heart-to-heart between Cecil and Mark in episode three, and I’m always here for those prickly tightrope walks between the world’s most powerful teenager and the guy stuck holding his leash.) We even get some interesting fallout in the supporting cast, as RoboRudyRex—having Stranger Things’d up one of those rogue Sequids and almost gotten brainjacked by it in the shower—finds himself coming around to the idea that, in a world as lethal as Invincible’s, saving it and murder sometimes look a lot alike.
That tension adds a bit more weight to “I Gotta Get Some Air,” which is otherwise almost bizarrely obsessed with reprising plot points from earlier in the show. In this case, that means the third reprise of the “Supervillain crime lord Titan gets in trouble, tricks Invincible into helping him, and then they fight a dragon” storyline, with the extremely minor twist that it’s Oliver who gets sucked into the battle here instead of Mark. I actually got excited for a minute when Titan’s family was attacked by superpowered assassin Magnattack, who has an impressive and extremely bloody spin on the “magnet powers” brand of supervillainy. (Building his own suit out of metallic knives is a really, ahem, sharp touch.) But then it turns out that this is just building up to another battle with old-guy-who-is-secretly-a-Gyrados Mr. Liu, who fights exactly the same way he did when we met him last year. Oliver freaking out when he realizes he’s overmatched has a bit of heft to it—tying into Eve’s sense of helplessness as her powers are now officially defunct—but watching Kid Omni-Man punch and get slapped by a dragon is not meaningfully different than watching it happen to Invincible last time. A fight against a giant flying dragon should in no way feel this rote.
See also the return of the Flaxans, the aliens from the dimension where time moves much more slowly than it does on Earth, from way back in season one. These guys barely even qualify as characters; they’re just plot devices with guns and antennae attached to them, showing up, deploying some neat-looking mechs, and then eventually getting their asses kicked by the assembled heroes. Yes, RudyRoboRex and Monster Girl end up trapped in the other dimension, which has the potential for something interesting to happen with it down the line. But for now, the sense that this show is just churning through plot beats is palpable. If that’s by design—if Invincible is trying to make the case that the tidal wave of crises never stops—then it fails to do the thing that a move like that requires of creatives, i.e., making the weariness itself dramatically interesting. As is, it’s just showing us things we’ve seen before with slight variations.
But, you may reasonably be asking yourselves at this point, aren’t I forgetting something? I appear to have jumped, in my discussion of these three episodes, from the first to the third, without even taking a second to consider “I’ll Give You The Grand Tour,” the middle installment. And that’s by design, both because that second episode is an outlier—taking place entirely off-Earth, in a sequel to the Allen and Nolan portions of last season’s “You Were My Hero”—and because, boy howdy, did I hate watching it. Did you know J.K. Simmons can give a genuinely boring voice performance? You learn something new every day.
As the title suggests, “Grand Tour” involves a repentant Nolan giving Allen a walkthrough of the various anti-Viltrumite threats he catalogued (and crushed) during his time as one of the Empire’s scouts, while also giving the backstory on that whole “There are only 50 pureblood Viltrumites left” thing from their last appearance together. Turns out, the miserable, child-abusing slavers of Viltrum caught themselves a bad case of consequences back when Nolan was Mark’s age, becoming the target of an extremely deadly supervirus that killed so much of the planet’s population that the survivors had to build a new ring around the planet entirely out of dumped and frozen corpses. The show attempts to generate some pathos out of the insane extremity of this civilizational trauma, but I have to be honest: In an episode that takes some extremely broad and unfunny swings in an effort to get laughs, the only one it actually pulled from me was when Allen suggested we should feel bad about the mass death of the Viltrumite people. With the exception of Nolan—whose redemption feels so implausible, unearned, and forced that not even Simmons is able to sell it—we’ve never met a Viltrumite who was anything less than a full genocidal supremacist with a body count in the thousands if not the millions. The idea that their extermination was anything but a good idea left uncompleted is extremely hard to take seriously.
Which leaves us little to hang on to in “Grand Tour” besides the Allen/Nolan double act. Simmons, stripped of the anger that gives so many of even his more joyful performances life, comes off as listless. And Seth Rogen, as Allen, can’t extend the character beyond the basic beat of “Hey, this scary alien guy talks like a cheerful Seth Rogen.” It’s fun in small doses but lethal in higher concentrations like this. Add in a reprise of stuff we’ve mostly seen before, some generic monster fighting, and bottom-of-the-barrel sitcom shtick like “Loud roommates won’t stop fucking” and “What if the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew sucked” and it makes for truly terrible TV alchemy: comedy that leaves you feeling depressed and dramatic moments that only made me laugh. It’s the lowlight of a three-episode block that wasn’t brimming with highlights in the first place.
Which leaves me to ask: Is this just Invincible now? Trolleys in space going through the motions? There are still sparks of humanity to this show—the dinner with Eve’s family, her despair at losing her powers, and pretty much any time Cecil is onscreen. And the show isn’t incapable of putting a good fight in front of viewers, even if it only happens one episode out of three. But the sheer weight of repetition here is draining: I sat down to these three episodes excited for the series to show me something new and instead watched as it treated character beats and battle sequences as buttons to mindlessly hammer on. I get that Invincible wants to make being a superhero feel like a grind. Does it have to make watching it feel just as bad?
Stray observations
- • One genuinely funny bit from the first episode: Oliver and Mark teasing their mom’s boyfriend about his nervousness around sleeping over. (Also, Debbie and Paul are moving in together. I genuinely appreciate that the show treats this character’s journey as though it’s as important as all the superhero stuff, especially since Sandra Oh remains a delight.)
- • This season’s title cards couldn’t be more on-the-nose: a glass plate slowly breaking more each episode, revealing the void beyond.
- • So, Invincible, Inc. is still a thing, except they’re taking all the money they’re being paid and giving it to charity? Wasn’t the whole point that Eve and Mark didn’t have any income that wasn’t superheroism-based?
- • Oliver gets a new costume from Art. We also get a brief flashback to Debbie talking Nolan into getting his first “human” superhero suit.
- • It really felt like the show could have made something out of Universa attacking the power plant at a time when the Sequids were hammering the shield that needed a lot of power to function, but that would require the show threading together plotlines from different issues of the comics, wouldn’t it?
- • It’s honestly hilarious how little time it took Conquest to break out of Cecil’s little playpen.
- • The fact that the Viltrumite rite of adulthood apparently involves both your parents beating you within an inch of your life recontextualizes the smackdown Nolan put on Mark back in season one. Yes, it codifies their whole “hurt people hurt people” shtick; no, it doesn’t make me any sorrier to see them get turned into space trash.
- • Scott Aukerman tries his hardest as the “Picard, but an idiot” space captain to no avail.
- • The visual effect on Space Racer’s infinite range ray gun: still pretty neat.
- • One of the many irritating things about the Viltrumites as bad guys is that any big buildup to a character reveal is just going to be…a guy with a mustache (in this case, one voiced by Lee Pace).
- • The one silver lining of yet another Titan plotline: getting to spend time with Jeffery Donovan’s deranged Machine Head, line for line the most fun voice performance in the entire show.
- • D.A. Sinclair is still hanging around the Pentagon, too, being creepy and trying to show that he’s “made amends” to Mark—even as he continues making Reanimen out of some of the alternate-universe Invincibles from last season.
- • Oh, and Eve’s pregnant, but, c’mon: You’d already figured that out.
William Hughes is a staff writer at The A.V. Club.