5 Things We Liked, and 3 We Didn’t, About ‘Invincible’ Season 4

Invincible season four has come to a close, and it’s time once again to assess the damage of the long-awaited Viltrumite War and see how the flagship Prime Video adult animated series fared this time in adapting Robert Kirkman’s superhero deconstruction comic, which fans have lovingly called Western Dragon Ball Z.

Liked: Debbie reading Nolan to filth

Yes, we’ve already talked about it, but it bears repeating: Sandra Oh is a goddamn gift, and her performance as Debbie confronting Nolan after his piss-poor excuse for an apology will forever be famous. Throughout the season, Nolan’s feet were consistently held to the fire for ruining everyone’s lives, and he still burdened them once more with a war they didn’t ask for. Debbie’s moment felt even more satisfying because of how the comics rushed everyone into being cool with him, with barely any friction his way for all the damage he’d done, as if he were a golden retriever of a man who didn’t know any better.

He killed thousands of people, called his wife of like 20 years a pet in front of the world, had a child with an alien woman shortly thereafter, and basically thrust rearing the kid into Mark and Debbie’s hands. And because the Viltrumites are back for a fight, he expected a limp apology to button things off with Debbie, despite everyone telling him how bad of an idea that was. The dude sucks, and I’m glad the show continued its streak of expanding on the comics and remixing the sequence of events to hold characters more accountable for their fuck-ups.

Liked: More Viltrumite backstory

Speaking of expanding beyond the comics, another cool thing to see this season was how Invincible expanded what we know about the Viltrumites. Not all of it made them look particularly smart or cool as a race of ultra-powerful space titans, mind you—killing each other to purge the possibility of a betrayer in their midst after they’d already been chemically genocided makes no sense—but that was kind of the point. In the immortal words of The Walking Dead‘s Rick Grimes, “There are no rules, we’re lost” (or at least the Viltrumites are).

However, seeing just how lost the Viltrumites are as a tyrannical people, going so far as to have parents run a fade on their children once they’ve become adults as a tradition, really sheds light on how unga bunga the Viltrumites were before they were under Thragg’s rule. They’re basically dogs chasing a car for the thrill without putting any thought into the “and then what” that comes after, and seeing how a broken society led to Nolan being that much of a disaster of a man before humanity slowly reformed him does a good job of foiling the dangers that might lie in store in future seasons. And another thing, the fact that every Viltrumite does the hand thing as a universal finishing move is a neat detail that the show deserves more flowers for.

Liked: All of episode 4, actually

While some fans clowned on this particular episode online for being “filler,” I’m gonna go ahead and say it was probably my second-favorite episode of the season for that exact reason. Sure, I’ll have a bit of a gripe about the episode further down, but what I liked about Mark’s excursion in hell is that it did something the show has been doing pretty well that (again) the comics never quite did. It gave Mark some space to breathe and voice how he feels about all the insurmountable pressure and the queue of bullshit he has to deal with in the immediate aftermath (and sometimes during) the bullshit he’s currently getting beaten to a bloody pulp over.

We get Mark summoned into hell to help the demons because they confused him for his father (an eternal struggle he’s been battling throughout the show), as well as some perspective in his ongoing battle with what it means to be a hero and whether the existence of a heaven or a hell makes him any better or worse off for pulling his punches or going full ultra violence to protect his loved ones. Calling the episode filler simply because it wasn’t more Viltrumite-centric plotting is doing an incredible disservice to the character work the episode pulled off, giving us a peek into Mark’s psyche, which culminates in him bringing back the OG yellow and blue suit (thank god) and having more confidence in himself before diving headfirst into the Viltrumite war.

Liked: Mark and Eve finally feeling like an actual couple

While we’ve lauded the show for sparing us the rocky path it took to finally pair Mark with Samantha Eve Wilkins, there was an air of them getting together that lacked chemistry as a couple, beyond the fact that they obviously liked each other last season. Thankfully, this season does a phenomenal job of showcasing that by having the two share quiet conversations pretty regularly, be it on that damn roof or shooting the breeze whenever they catch each other and unpack the things that’ve been weighing on their minds (or at least some of those things).

While these moments are small in the grand scheme of the season, they’re no less impactful when we see them share their insecurities and doubts with one another (powered by Steven Yeun and Gillian Jacobs’ powerful performances), adding texture to them as a couple you can root for and agonize over, especially in Eve’s case, with her powers going haywire because of her pregnancy, and how they comfort each other when she ultimately gets an abortion while Mark’s off at war. As a comic reader, this moment in particular was a litmus test to see if the show could handle the more complicated aspects of the comic, and it did so with a deft hand. Hopefully, that’ll continue with what’s to come, and the fandom at large will be mature enough to unpack all of that in kind.

Liked: Lee Pace killing it as Thragg

Let the record show that there was a vocal minority of people online clowning on Thragg, saying he was a joke. They didn’t believe this guy, with his fresh line-up and emotional support skull, was the big bad the show had hyped up. They also had the audacity to say that the incomparable Lee Pace wasn’t giving a compelling performance with the measured menace of the Viltrumite ruler. May all of Thragg’s naysayers eat crow because this dude came and delivered in the final two episodes of the season.

Upon hearing that Mark murdered Conquest, his reaction was not shock. He wanted to see what Invincible was made of. And after rocking his pop’s shit, ripping Great Thaedus’ head clean off his shoulders, and further stunting on Mark by having the most demonic impact frame by standing still and taking a punch, he proved how much of a problem he was. By far, my favorite part of Thragg is that he’s got a calculating method to his madness. Seeing that he can scrap harder in the paint than the previous metric of Viltrumite violence, Conquest, while thinking moves ahead of Nolan and Thaedus, sets the stage for a wildly interesting fifth season of Invincible, where the lines of heroism and villainy are going to be compromised beyond what we’ve already seen, and I’m set for it.

Didn’t Like: Animation quality shrinking just as the narrative ambition expands

While we’re at a juncture in the show where Invincible wants to punch like a freight train, it sometimes swings like it’s underwater. A lot of that comes down to a point we flagged in our season premiere review: the animation quality is kinda abysmal. Moments that should be seismic land softer than intended, not because the writing is weak, but because the show’s visuals are inconsistent at best in carrying the emotional or dramatic weight. It’s something fans have been saying pretty much since season two, but with the show amping up its story while its animation is quietly retreating, the animation strain is impossible to ignore this time around.

Outside of a couple of beautifully realized bits of animation in fight sequences, the near-annual release schedule is showing its teeth in the show, and it’s taken some of the air out of the series, making it feel like something not worth subscribing to Prime Video to watch. Even if you’re not an animation connoisseur, you can feel the corners being cut or the animation being cheated, as if the show’s doing its best to get away with just enough movement to plod along and popping off only occasionally. Frames stutter, certain sequences look like PNGs are being dragged across the screen or dropped into a crowd shot, and everything just looks stiff and awkward. We’re not just talking about the action, though that sucks to see, too.

Although the show has earned a reputation as the Western Dragon Ball Z among fans, one distinction it lacks compared to anime is that, when episodes look a little shoddy in the animation department, there’s no redo in a Blu-ray release to improve janky-looking sequences to higher quality. What you get is what you get with Invincible, so it’s hard not to ask why, if you’ve got one shot to realize something you’ve been building toward, you wouldn’t take all the time you need to ensure that it looks as good as it can? Even if it means not having the show release every year?

Fans shouldn’t have to make videos adding shading and compositing to showcase how much better the whole show would look if it got the same TLC its first season seemed to have, which has been all but abandoned for some “fine here” animation that occasionally thrills but mostly tugs at the cape of a story and vocal performances that’re sprinting ahead of the visuals.

Didn’t Like: Mole plotline being weak sauce

Whenever a story reveals that a plan went awry because someone was feeding information to the opposition, you expect the reveal of who that is to be seismic. Invincible‘s mole plotline and revelation felt like it happened within the span of two minutes and was immediately resolved, without any sense of suspense or gravitas beyond “And who is this again?” This sucks both in retrospect and in the moment because the information the mole divulges is crucial to the season finale. So discovering it was some random extra who did it for, well, who really cares, and who was shot in the head and survived just made the whole moment feel like limp shock value. It moved us from point A to point B without being all that interesting of a twist to begin with.

It would’ve been nice to have that question stretch throughout the season’s hour-long episodes, with viewers sizing up who among the red-shirted fodder of alliance folks spoofing Star Trek and what have you was behind it—or, better yet, if one of the named heroes was actually behind the double-cross all along. But it was just some random grunt guy, and the tension that followed lasted for about three seconds, which was a pretty weak segue into the Viltrumite War one could ask for.

Didn’t Like: Viltrumite power scaling and healing factors not making any sense

When Mark and Conquest ran the dozens again, leading to the grossest drawn-out battle where the latter was choked out, and the former had his intestines dug out, it was uncomfortably violent to watch. It really put things into perspective of how terrifying the prospect of an all-out Viltrumite War could be when two beasts are leaving it all on the table. But when all that was needed to happen to fix Mark was to stuff his guts back inside his gaping chest, wrap that up, and feed him a diet of alien eggs for a couple of months, the sense of danger that was once associated with violence in the show begins to fall apart a bit, leading one to ask how exactly Viltrumites work.

Things started to fall apart further with the inconsistencies in power scaling—a staple of shonen anime—not making a lot of sense in Invincible throughout the season. We’ve seen Mark and Nolan boast about stopping a meteor the size of a state, but it takes a legion of its heroes to stop a moderately-sized ship. Mark having as much trouble with a middle-of-the-road gang leader dragon as with a Viltrumite hellbent on killing him kinda makes battles feel like things happen because the story needs them to, regardless of how past feats showcased how strong characters are.

There’s been fan rumbling to explain this with things like the adrenaline theory (basically, the more stressed Mark is, the more powerful he gets), but the show not really spelling out how exactly all of these things work, leading to Mark and crew getting tied up with what should be a minor inconvenience, makes battles feel less tension-filled, harder to follow, and more yadda yadda to get to wherever the story needs to go out of convenience.

Shout out to Oliver, I guess, because he’s the only character that raises the tension whenever folks get to scrapping because the show’s been consistent with where he stands with the threats that come Mark’s way. Mark and the rest, not so much. Which sucks because even when the show has a character do the Viltrumite hand thing, I’m less on the edge of my seat, wondering how so-and-so will survive this, and kinda expecting they will because everyone’s got a crazy healing factor.

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