There’s something very funny about the fact that Invincible only managed to get fun again this season by diving straight into hell. After two episodes of Mark Grayson giving himself an ulcer on the topic of taking lives (and one boring-ass space road trip), the show’s fourth season finally finds some desperately needed joy tonight with “Hurm,” its fourth episode, and it’s not especially complicated about how it goes about doing it: giving Mark a few clear things to punch and a lot of enjoyably heavy-metal world-building to surround it all.
The key aspect about “Hurm” is that it’s one of those things I wasn’t sure Invincible knew how to be anymore: focused. I suspect this is largely a consequence of the episode’s status as an original story, as opposed to Invincible’s usual slavish devotion to recreating moments from the comics. It’s not just that this little digression through perdition allows the show to tell a single, complete story for once; it also allows both Invincibles—the series and the character—to actually relax for a second. When was the last time we got to hang out with this version of Mark, who cracks jokes, goofs around in fights, and lets himself get fixated on the minutiae of things like a demon’s magical helmet? It’s not like the resulting story is completely disconnected from the show’s overall storytelling goals, as Mark is clearly still wrestling with his attitude toward, and the consequences of, head-exploding superhero violence. But he’s doing so in an environment where—planet cracking threats and demons getting exploded by having a firehose of lava shoved down their throats aside—he’s in absolutely no danger of either being hurt or hurting anyone he cares about. It’s a breather, and I have to give credit to series creator Robert Kirkman and showrunner Simon Racioppa for understanding that Invincible desperately needed one of those at this point.
We open—after a brief conversation with Art the tailor—on a deliberately disorienting scene: a battle in the “Underrealm” being waged between the demonic forces of House Darkblood on the one hand (allowing a returning Clancy Brown and the wonderfully hammy Kate Mulgrew to chew the burning scenery together) and a lava woman named Volcanikka and her army of Magmanites on the other. (We last saw them fighting on behalf of recurring villain Doc Seismic last season; if there’s a tie between that old threat and this latest one, the show is kind enough to spare us the connective tissue.) It’s worth noting that there’s none of the show’s trademark irony in these opening scenes: For about 10 minutes, Invincible is just a cartoon about watching heavy-metal demons fight a lava woman while everyone competes to see who can give the most over-the-top line readings. And it’s honestly kind of great—especially when Volcanikka deploys what’s apparently her favorite move on Damien’s sister Domina: shoving her fist into her mouth and then filling her entire body with lava, ultimately causing her to explode into chunks. (When I said I wanted this series to show me things I hadn’t seen before last week, this is the sort of thing I didn’t yet know I meant.)
Having gotten their asses thoroughly kicked, Damien and his boss, Satan (Bruce Campbell), fall back on a last resort: using some of Omni-Man’s blood, pilfered during Damien’s ill-fated investigation of Nolan’s killing spree back in the first season, to try to reverse-exorcise the murderous hero (or his nearest on-planet equivalent) down into the Underrealm to possibly give them a leg up. The result, unsurprisingly, is to suck Mark away from the mission he was on—addressing the show’s endless “misogynistic mummy” running gag, a sentence I’m as perplexed to have written as you are to have read it—and down into the world below.
What follows is a very deliberate effort to remind Invincible’s audience—and maybe its writers, too, if we’re being honest—that this show can still have some fun with its whole “teen superhero” conceit. Placed in an environment where the “good” guys are torture-obsessed demons and the bad guys want to literally flood the planet with magma, Mark is free to trade quips with a deliberately stilted, but engaged, Brown, receive a lot of batshit exposition from a cheerfully sneering Campbell, and in general just not worry about this shit too much. If there’s a subtext here—in so far as the people telling Mark he needs to cut himself some slack on his constant scruple-gazing and just let gravity do its grim work are literal devils who get off on torture—then that concern is also, blissfully, set aside for the moment, so we can focus on the actual fun stuff. That includes watching Invincible play keepie-uppie with a gravel-voiced demonic warrior while he fends off an aggressive Cerberus, watching all the various ways lava people can get bits of them cut off and simply seeing this show realize it can kill a few minutes (via some extremely minimal animation) with a fun back-and-forth between Brown and Steven Yeun. When the climax finally arrives, the fight is so easy that it comes off as a joke in and of itself: finally, a problem Mark Grayson can literally just punch away (at least, for now).
Do I wish the show was always like this, recreating the vibes and beats from before the trauma started piling up after season one? Obviously not. But “Hurm” does make me realize that Invincible’s balance has felt off for the last two seasons, as the rising tide of drama has left less and less oxygen for its lighter side to breathe. The deliberate disconnect between those two elements has always been part of the series’ appeal. (At the risk of making a joke about one of its stars’ biggest roles, this has always been a series with a great sense of whiplash.) But you can’t crack the whip if the series is All Depression, All The Time. Sometimes it’s necessary to just see a young hero get to punch a magma monster in the face for a minute. Hell, what if Invincible spent two episodes a season just being a show where stuff that kicks ass happens at a relatively relaxed pace? Would we completely lose our minds?
I suspect we won’t be finding out any time soon, though. In fact, there’s every possibility that we might have just hit our ceiling on Mark’s good times for season four, period. Leave aside his own, as-yet-unrevealed feelings about being a potential father, since Eve doesn’t even get a chance this week to break the news. The Daddy Issues Express just showed up hovering over the Grayson family doorstep. Fun times are over. The Viltrumite War is here.
Stray observations
- • It’s genuinely hilarious to me that Mark angsts this much about whether he deserves to have yellow back in his costume.
- • “In the battle of fire against fire, the winner is the one who burns brightest. Watch…me…BURN!” It’s really fun to imagine Racioppa writing a line like that and nodding with satisfaction at how stupidly metal all the demon-on-demon conflict here is.
- • There’s so many cool little details in the art here, too, like Volcanikka’s severed magma fingers sticking out of Damien’s chest.
- • Just a fantastic voice-acting episode all around. Given that Damien is essentially “What if Rorschach from Watchmen was also a demon?” Brown is saddled with some vocal tics that don’t allow him to do his usual trademark purr, but his slow-burn timing is still great. And Mulgrew, Campbell, and Indira Varma are obviously having ridiculous amounts of fun.
- • Also in the “hell yeah!” pile: the loving detail as the demons’ bones and muscles regrow.
- • “Please, violence like that is merely foreplay for my kind.” “Dude. Gross.”
- • Mark just assumed that all the big demon-y monsters he’s been fighting over the years were “a radiation thing,” not some remnant of a lost age.
- • “You said it was forged of pain. How does that sound fragile?!” Yeun gets a lot of fun out of Mark’s irritation throughout this episode.
- • Damien’s an interesting character because he’s like 90 percent premise, but there’s some nice work here as he tries to sell Mark on the idea that sometimes there’s really nothing left to do but choose between the less planet-destroying of two evils.
- • That’s “Raining Blood” by Slayer underpinning the final battle, a fine pick for watching demon eyeballs explode.
- • A fun last touch: Satan being shocked by the existence of aliens.
- • We slam back into our main story somewhat inelegantly, although it is nice to see William—who’s essentially an avatar for the show’s season one sense of fun—serving as a (slightly reluctant) sounding board for Eve’s baby woes.
William Hughes is a staff writer at The A.V. Club.