Invincible, Season 4: review

the high point of the season: here's what Thragg (Lee Pace) looks like when you hit him full-force

[WARNING: spoilers.]

It is accomplished. Season 4 of Invincible has just finished, and the stakes have become both cosmic and intimate. Several of the season's major subplots include the continuing rehabilitation of Nolan/Omni-Man (JK Simmons), the developing relationship between Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun) and his brother Oliver (Christian Convery), the growing menace of Grand Regent Thragg (Lee Pace), the fate of the planet Viltrum, and the tumultuous politics of the galaxy-wide Coalition of Planets, an association that stands against the Viltrum Empire and is led, ironically, by a Viltrumite rebel named Thaedus (Peter Cullen, famously the voice of Optimus Prime in Transformers).

As young Mark—a half-Korean, half-Viltrumite hybrid—discovered seasons ago, the Viltrum Empire has ruled the galaxy by forceful subjugation for centuries. Nolan Grayson, known on Earth as Omni-Man, originally lived among Earth's humans and native-born superheroes as the mightiest hero of them all, letting no one know that he was on Earth both as an assessor of Earth's worthiness to become part of the Viltrum Empire and as a judge of whether humans could breed with Viltrumites to produce robust offspring. While on Earth, Nolan had married Debbie Grayson (Sandra Oh); Mark was the result. He came into his powers in his teen years, and his Viltrumite genes proved so dominant that Mark is effectively all Viltrumite in terms of his power levels. This is important because the Viltrum Empire was reduced from billions to only fifty Viltrumites by an engineered virus called Scourge, which is why the remaining Viltrumites need genetically compatible people with whom to breed and replenish their race. Interbreeding exclusively among the fifty remaining Viltrumites would result in a genetic bottleneck, hence the need to breed with Earthlings. While Nolan had apprised his son of Viltrum's imperialistic agenda, he only belatedly revealed Viltrum's ulterior breeding agenda. (Incidentally, Viltrumites can breed with nonhuman races, which is how the purplish-but-human-looking Oliver originated, but Earth humans have proven to be the most genetically compatible with Viltrumites.)

This season, much of the action takes place in outer space. Nolan convinces Mark to fight what is supposed to be the final, definitive war with the Viltrumite remnant. Mark is joined by Allen the Alien (Seth Rogen), Tech Jacket (Zoey Deutch), General Telia (Tatiana Maslany), Battle Beast (Michael Dorn), Thaedus, and others. Atom Eve (Gillian Jacobs) remains on Earth; she's pregnant when Mark departs for space, something Mark discovers only upon returning to Earth after months of battles.

During those battles, Mark, Nolan, and Thaedus—with the help of Space Racer (Winston Duke) and his unstoppable gun, manage to destroy the planet Viltrum as a symbolic gesture to persuade the remaining Viltrumites to surrender and choose peace. But the remaining Viltrumites, enraged, fight on. Grand Regent Thragg nearly kills both Oliver and Nolan; he successfully beheads Thaedus, leaving Allen the Alien in charge of the Coalition of Planets. Mark is, in an early episode, nearly killed by the recently self-healed Conquest (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), whom Mark strangles while Conquest rips out Mark's intestines.

Part of Mark's ethical struggle this season deals with his increasing willingness to kill new and long-time enemies as a way of definitively ending conflicts since these enemies, if left alive, always seem to come back stronger. Oliver, meanwhile, is young and prideful about his powers, but he tends to take on enemies who are too powerful for him, which means he's either frequently injured or frequently rescued, usually by his big half-brother Mark. Luckily, Viltrumite healing factors are so strong that, even after being eviscerated, Mark is back in action only a few weeks later, and Oliver is still alive after his jaw is ripped off.

Season 4 was fairly unevenly paced, with at least two episodes serving as little more than "filler" stories that didn't move the main plot forward. Of course, the showrunners shoehorned the juiciest bits of the plot into the season's three final episodes, which were admittedly more interesting than many of the episodes from previous seasons.

In general, Invincible seems to be listening to its fan base and not going too far off the rails in terms of (1) faithfulness to the original comic series and (2) attempts to shoehorn in some sort of sociopolitical agenda. This season feels, for the most part, like good old-fashioned storytelling, despite a bit of race- and sex-swapping here and there. A lot of the season's interest comes in the form of Grand Regent Thragg, who has led the Viltrum Empire since the murder of Emperor Argall (Frank Welker, famously the voice of Megatron in Transformers) by the renegade Thaedus, a Viltrumite who has long been against the empire's agenda of conquest and enslavement. Thragg—who is drawn to look like a muscular Freddie Mercury—is established to be a fantastically powerful Viltrumite for whom even enemies like Nolan Grayson are but puny opponents. One of the most memorable scenes depicts what happens when Mark, furious, slams his fist into Thragg's head with enough force to crack a planet: We see a quick, red flash of what appears to be a demonic skull, possibly symbolizing Thragg's almost-supernatural power and immovability. The flash is over in a moment, but for me, it's the high point of the season. I've heard rumors that some fans are dissatisfied with Lee Pace's voicing of Thragg, and I too have to wonder whether Pace, with his smooth and deep voice that worked so well for his role as Thranduil, is the right choice for Thragg. But overall, I think Pace does a fine, workable job.

One of the season's filler episodes is devoted to Mark's side trip to hell to help Damien Darkblood (Clancy Brown) and his master Satan (Bruce Campbell!) in their battle against another hellish divinity named Volcanikka, who has usurped Satan's throne. This episode is skimpy on action, but it makes up for this lack with plenty of comedy and a truckload of exposition on the true metaphysics of hell and the outer Earth where we mortals live. Earth has apparently gone through a handful of "ages," with different waves of creatures arising in each age. Unfortunately, the creatures from previous ages don't all simply disappear; many giant, powerful creatures from the first and second ages still remain and haunt the world (we're in the fifth or sixth age now), and it's the job of the current hell-beings to keep things under control so that these primordial beasts don't run rampant on the earth's surface. So the beings of hell aren't evil the way our mythologies portray them; they actually serve a salutary, protective function. Mark, despite helping Darkblood and Satan, still can't quite bring himself to think of hell's denizens as anything but evil. The episode is an interesting aside but has no obvious effect on or relevance to the season's larger plot.

The season ends with the planet Viltrum destroyed and the remaining thirty-eight Viltrumites on Earth. Thragg meets Mark in the sky and makes a pact: The Viltrumites will live in peace and anonymity among the Earthlings, quietly breeding and replenishing their bloodlines and population. In return, Mark and his fellow heroes will leave the Viltrumites alone: A violation of this pact will mean the destruction and enslavement of the planet. At the time Thragg makes this pact with Mark, Mark's father Nolan is away in space (with his ex-wife Debbie) to see to his other son, Oliver, who is still recovering from his injuries. Mark feels the burden of representing the entire earth and making a decision that will affect the future of the planet. Thragg's stated motivation for this pact is that his role as grand regent includes safeguarding the survival of the Viltrumite race, a priority that is now more important than conquest.

Mark also discovers, upon his return to Earth, that Eve was pregnant when he left, but that she'd had an abortion while he was away. The atom-moving powers she had lost during her pregnancy have returned, but Eve has also gained weight (entering what I like to think of as her "fat Apollo" phase). The real problem for Mark, though, is that his pact with Thragg was made privately, so no one else in the entire Coalition of Planets knows about this agreement—not Nolan, not Allen the Alien, not even fellow Earthling Tech Jacket (a teen girl with a Blue Beetle-style set of armor). This will obviously cause problems in Season 5.

Overall, this was a very interesting season of Invincible. Despite the seemingly unnecessary digressions from the main story, the continued low quality of the animation, and the often-questionable physics in space and elsewhere, the voice work remains excellent, and even though the entire story is a bloated, typically comic-booky mess, the world-building and plot-weaving remain interesting enough to keep my attention and make me care. The story as it plays out in the comics goes on for a long time, but assuming the showrunners have found their rhythm, I'm not expecting any major dips in quality in the near future.