Just a day after Amazon’s Invincible, based on the comic book series by Robert Kirkman with artists Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley, earned an addition two seasons, the first-season finale dropped — and oh, boy, was it a ride. The episode was almost exclusively taken up by a fight between Omni-Man, now revealed as a murderer, and his son, the titular hero. In the context of the episode, Omni-Man reveals that the Viltrumites (the alien race he is part of) are actually galactic conquerors, and his role on Earth is to prepare humanity for invasion and soften them to the idea of becoming part of the empire.
None of this — let alone watching him murder a fellow superhero in cold blood — sits well with Mark (Invincible), who declares his intention to stop his father. The battle goes on for quite some time, but there was one particularly brutal segment in the middle.
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Explaining that Viltrumite lifespans are hundreds or thousands of years, and that the life of humans is such a blip that he can’t see them as anything more than pets, Omni-Man takes issue with Invincible siding with his birth planet. After killing a man and seeing that it traumatized Mark, Omni-Man decides to fly into the city and kill lots of people, presumably to illustrate for his son that their lives are so fragile and meaningless.
The opposite happens, though; as Invincible tries (and mostly fails) to save people from his deranged father, there is a particularly emotional moment in which he finds himself holding up a portion of a collapsing skyscraper, inside of which are a mother and her young daughter. This scene, according to Kirkman, is the most important one in the episode.
“That was the most important scene in the episode to me,” Kirkman told ComicBook. “What I would say when we were having meetings on the episode, is that you see superhero battles where entire cities collapse, and it means nothing to you. I want Invincible to be the story where one building collapses and it means everything. So I wanted to take that time to have you identify with this person. You see what it’s like for her and her child to be inside of a collapsing building, the terror that comes from that. And because we’re drawing it out so much, in a traditional superhero story, those are the people that are getting saved….You feel like they’re going to die, and they don’t. They get saved. That’s normally what happens. If you get to know someone in these stories, they get saved. And so to show Mark struggle to save them, and have him be unable to do that, it injects a ton more emotion into the story, a bunch more drama, and you can identify with Mark more, because of that scene. You see just how helpless he feels, and how frustrated he feels, and how distraught he is over being unable to save these people.”
From The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, and based on the Image/Skybound comic of the same name by Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Ryan Ottley, Invincible is an hour-long, adult animated superhero show that revolves around seventeen-year-old Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun), who’s just like every other guy his age—except that his father is the most powerful superhero on the planet, Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons). But as Mark develops powers of his own, he discovers that his father’s legacy may not be as heroic as it seems.
Invincible stars Sandra Oh (Killing Eve), Seth Rogen (This is the End), Gillian Jacobs (Community), Andrew Rannells (Black Monday, Girls), Zazie Beetz (Deadpool 2), Mark Hamill (Star Wars: The Last Jedi), Walton Goggins (Justified), Jason Mantzoukas (Brooklyn Nine-Nine), Zachary Quinto (Star Trek), Mahershala Ali (Moonlight), Melise (The Flash), Kevin Michael Richardson (The Simpsons), Grey Griffin (Avengers Assemble), Khary Payton (The Walking Dead) and more.
You can stream the whole first season of Invincible on Amazon Prime Video.
