By JJ Ledewitz, Senior Arts and Culture Editor
The fourth season of Invincible, Robert Kirkman’s animated superhero series based on the comics of the same name, premiered this March and ended on April 22. The series follows teenager Mark Grayson, who protects the innocent as the superhero Invincible. The series also follows Mark’s father Nolan, aka Omni-Man, the most powerful superhero on the planet who also happens to be a Viltrumite, a humanoid alien (which makes Mark half-Viltrumite).
The following review will contain spoilers:
Season 1 of Invincible follows Mark as he deals with high school drama while making his name known in the superhero community, forming friendships and rivals along the way. Mark also learns the truth about his father: he is no hero, and was sent to Earth to conquer it for his alien race. Season 2 follows Mark in the aftermath of the fight against his father (who is having thoughts of being an actual hero), as Mark faces off against a new villain, the interdimensional and psychopathic Angstrom Levy. In Season 3, Mark trains his half-brother Oliver, while also fighting two devastating menaces: an army of evil alternate-universe Invincibles, and Conquest, an alien from Nolan’s planet who is disappointed that Earth has not yet been conquered.
Season 4 picks up amid the aftermath of the Season 3 finale. Kind of. It begins with a slow first episode that almost seems like it’s there to show what everyone is up to and to reestablish the status quo while doing nothing else. The main superhero team of this world, Guardians of the Globe finally take care of the Sequid problem, a mind-controlling alien-related plotline that has been in the background for way too long. The episode does include Mark killing someone, which forces him to reflect. That’s good. But otherwise, it feels a bit empty.
The second episode does a lot more. A lot of Viltrumite history is revealed, showing young Nolan, his parents and Viltrum’s devastating past. We learn that a virus killed many of the Viltrumites, leading to a horrible turning point in Viltrum history. This episode is one of the standouts of the season, finally answering some important questions while setting up the events of the rest of the season. It also introduces this season’s main villain, Grand Regent Thragg.
The middle of the season is where things really get good, but in order to talk about it, we need to first discuss the elephant in the room: episode 4.
Episode 4 is a laughable excuse for a filler episode. For some reason, we follow Damien Darkblood (a demon detective from season 1 whom nobody asked for more of) as he fights the new ruler of Hell, some generic female villain, in order to restore Satan as the rightful king. Darkblood tries to summon Nolan to help him but accidentally summons Mark, who, of course, helps him, because the story needs him to. It’s an episode that does not need to exist, with a boring plot, laughably generic characters and absolutely no hold over anything else in the season. We didn’t need this, and we shouldn’t have gotten it.
The rest of the middle portion of the season is really solid. A whole bunch of villains from the past return to wreck havoc — Machine Head, Mister Liu and the Flaxans. Nolan and his companion Allen the Alien recruit Mark to fight in the war against the Viltrum empire. The three episodes that follow the group in space are some of the greatest ones of the whole series so far. A new character, Tech Jacket, joins Mark’s side, along with Oliver, who, despite being beaten a dozen times, still wants to fight. And then, Conquest, the season 3 villain, returns.
Conquest’s return is legendary, and the show treats it as such. It feels as though the series saved much of its animation budget (an issue I will get to soon) for this battle. It would seem the battle would present a problem — Mark has fought Conquest before, so how can the show make it even more epic? Well, it does. Conquest doesn’t just go after Mark; alongside some other Viltrumites, he attacks the whole group. Mark’s one-on-one battle with Conquest is genuinely insane, and its aftermath is devastating.
Thankfully, as Mark recovers, Oliver and Nolan bond, and it becomes clear that if Oliver didn’t come with him to fight against the Viltrum empire, Oliver’s seemingly ever-increasing thirst for fighting — along with his lack of father figure — would have corrupted him into somebody darker. Soon enough, after Mark wakes up, the battle is taken to Viltrum, and this is where the real bloodshed begins. Thragg, the season’s main villain, finally begins to fight everyone off. And he’s powerful. Very powerful. He kills Theadus, the oldest good Viltrumite and leader of the Coalition of Planets (a group that consists of Mark, Oliver, Nolan, Alan and some others) and almost kills both Nolan and Mark. The entire episode is brutal, easily the best episode of the season, filled with unending action and fantastic tension.
The finale, however, is not as good. It’s fine, that’s for sure, but it definitely could have been improved. It takes Mark two weeks to get back to Earth, during which he believes Thragg went to Earth and killed people. Once Mark arrives, he sees that Earth was untouched, but he hallucinates Thragg everywhere until he actually runs into him. Thragg gives Mark a choice: attack him and watch everyone die, or let the remaining Viltrumites stay on Earth, disguised as humans, with the goal to repopulate with the humans. Mark picks the latter, and Allen learns that Thaedus left behind a sample of the virus that once killed the Viltrumites.
The season is a great follow up to season 3, but it has two glaring issues, the first one being the filler episode that is episode 4. The episodes before this show Mark and Oliver bonding while Robot and Monster Girl, two borderline-irrivalent members of the Guardians of the Globe, get trapped in another dimension and are barely mentioned again. There’s so much in these few episodes on Earth that could have been expanded on. Sequids, Universa, Titan, Machine Head, Liu — this all could have taken more time instead of feeling rushed. Episode 4 only makes this issue worse, and it really doesn’t need to exist at all.
The other glaring issue is the animation. It has been said to death at this point, but Invincible’s animation is embarrassing. At times, it seems like the images are just being dragged across a computer screen. It could be the pressure to release one season every year, but past seasons were not this bad. Season 1 had more pizzazz; it was more dynamic. Certain background images just disappeared this season, randomly. People’s faces change into others for a few frames once or twice. Thragg is menacing, but I’m sure he’d have been even scarier if he didn’t look like he was frozen half the time.
Overall, Invincible Season 4 is strong. It goes further than its previous seasons, and sets up a lot for the next inevitable season.
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