Television
Invincible Season 2: Did It Miss the Mark?
Invincible season two didn’t know what to do with itself
Spoilers and criticisms ahead, and if you still want to read my review, then you might just have to be —
Now, if you can sit down and take a moment, I’ll take you back to much simpler times, before the world was falling apart, when people still argued online about Marvel movies unironically.
I’ll take you back to the ancient days of 2021. On March 25th, Invincible season one came out of seemingly nowhere and changed the way we saw American animated shows, at least in the superhero genre. It was heartfelt. It was grounded. It felt like Spider-Man, except with a whole lot more blood and guts and brain matter splattered across our TV screens.
The story was simple, engaging, familiar enough that we could sympathise with this young teenager exploring his powers and falling in love, but also fresh enough (yes, I know the comic had been out for years, but let’s pretend otherwise) that the finale of season one stuck with us so deeply that Invincible became a staple of pop culture. Imagine that. Some superhero many, many people had never heard of was suddenly appearing in fan art alongside the Wall-Crawler himself, and we all dug it.
Hell, we liked the new kid on the block. We liked his fight and his gusto, and everyone just couldn’t wait to see what happened next for Mark.
The sky was the limit for Amazon’s newest hit show.
Then two years passed and… nothing. Nothing except memes. Hilarious! we all said after the first “Where’s Season 2, William?” meme, then we got it again, and again, and I wonder what else is on that isn’t being cancelled these days, because we were left in limbo. We knew another season was coming, and heck, I even finished the entire comic and all of its spin-offs because I hated the idea of waiting (and thus, I am better than the casual viewer), but we let Robert Kirkman work his magic. We let him have his time to get the story straight and cut out all of the fluff that we didn’t need.
And finally, after years of waiting, on November 3rd 2023, we got it.
How was it? you’re asking, probably. Was it as good as the first season? Better?
In my opinion, no — season two isn’t anywhere near as good as the first, but give me some time to argue my case before you click away.
Whilst season two had its stand out moments — Mark’s fight against Anissa helped us all remember why we were watching this slice-of-life…I mean superhero show again, and that epic final fight against Armstrong Levy — but it never quite felt as focused as it had in the previous season.
Plot lines felt a little awkward and mismatched, as if they were put together just to pad out the show’s run time so we didn’t have the Viltrumite threat way too early and were left with nothing else to do when Mark inevitably gets his teeth kicked in. But it just left the entire season feeling…how should I put it…soggy? Flabby? Unkempt is a more fitting word, because that’s what the entire season was: a mishmash of plots that either went nowhere, didn’t matter, or escalated then stopped as soon as they got interesting, which was something the series desperately needed at points.
Mark fighting a giant sea monster in episode one? Uh, sure, but where’s this actually going?
How about Eve screwing up in a very minor way and having this major reaction? Okay, we could force that onto her character, but is she going to change in any way?
And the Guardians of the Globe! Remember those guys? No, not really.
Because I didn’t really care for a lot of the characters this season, simply because this was also the part of the comic when some of the characters seemingly could not die, even if you put a gun to their head and blew their brains out at point blank range. A bullet? Please. Shrug it off. We’ve still got twenty minutes left of this fight scene, and the villains don’t win here.
I already pointed this out (at least, I think I did — you should probably go and check out my Invincible comic review to make sure I’m right), but there’s a heavy dosage of plot armor drizzled over this series that everyone sort of ignores. The first few times were fine. We didn’t really pay attention to it out of the necessity of just enjoying the carnage. But when a character pulls through getting shot in the head by a pistol with those pesky little things called bullets and can still beat the ever living sh*t out of the villain afterwards, then you’ve got to wonder where the actual limit is.
Pain and suffering is temporary in Invincible, and letting characters get hurt is fun, but letting them survive injuries that would surely kill them — depending on Robert Kirkman’s mood — is jarring.
And when Mark fights the tall, angry, balding Viltrumite next season, you’ll start to see why “believing in yourself until you win because sci-fi will probably explain away why his guts are outside of his body and he’s still fighting” will slowly lose its weight. And that brings me onto my biggest gripe.
This season felt like it had no weight behind it.
This could possibly be chalked up to the horrible decision to have a mid-season break for a series that produces only eight episodes per season. The series wasn’t breaking through that internet culture like it had in season one, with almost every episode of season one getting talked about and theorised to death and beyond until we got our filthy little hands on more the following week. It had us all on hooks and wouldn’t let go.
And we were all excited until they announced their damned break.
But having that break in the middle, nearly two months worth of a break, seems to have tripped the show over. When it returned, I just never cared about the characters anymore. I wasn’t even mad at Amber for being insufferable. I was just bored with their personal gripes and relationship conflicts and oh, look, Nolan mated with a giant cricket. Anyway, we’re back on Earth this week where Donald (everyone’s most beloved character) is having some crisis about not being a real boy.
The show kept going from one point to the next, flip-flopping from a major event to just another day in our uber cool teen superheroes’ lives. This distanced viewers from the characters and the story. I wasn’t invested in anyone or their story lines, which is strange, because this part of the comic was one of my favourites. I thought that this part would have me on edge like it did years ago as I flipped through the pages.
But all I did was sit there and wonder if there’s something else I could be doing instead of watching animation that hasn’t really gotten any better since the series’ debut, or sit through another hour of Nothing Burger.
I was of the opinion that the multiversal threat would play a much larger role this season, considering everything that’s coming our way in probably the next ten years when we finally get half of season three. Having stuff in a comic and keeping it there is fine. Comics are a very special medium. They allow authors and readers the time and space to have all these different plot lines come together gradually into one screaming catastrophe.
But television just doesn’t work like that, because if we’re going to sit through every single thing the comics covered, we’re going to be here for a very long time. Armstrong Levy could have been a far more fascinating villain, one with a lot more depth and character that could have been fleshed out throughout the series instead of wasting time on Immortal and Kate and Robot being an odd, geeky little weirdo toward Monster Girl.
Imagine this: a short season of eight episodes. Mark has to deal with his dad getting down and dirty with alien insects, the Viltrumites sending the occasional warrior (Anissa, for example) to scope out the planet, its people, and Mark, all whilst Armstrong Levy remains as this stain on his soul — someone he could have helped, someone who was trying to do a good thing but got lost in his own ego and madness. Now Mark has a driving force that takes him away from Amber, William, college and a mother who desperately needs him at home, as he fights to find Armstrong, searching for what made him create that machine, and what exactly is going on with his new brother and the Viltrumite empire?
Mark is out to prove himself, prove that he’s not like his father? Then fine, let’s do that, but let’s also make sure that Mark has a little bit of agency.
And then what happens when he learns why Armstrong Levy comes back, finally, after all the blood and sweat he’s put into finding and saving him, just to hurt his mother and baby brother? Well, it’s Mark’s breaking point, of course, and we can still get that amazing scene of him smashing Armstrong’s head into bright red paste. But…he’s also just like his dad, and just like all the other Invincibles who are running around ticking off their Geneva Conventions check-lists in other universes. He’s untamed power waiting to be set off at a moment’s notice, and now he’s afraid of what he can do.
And guess where that leaves us? Right at the end of season two — the actual season two ending we got in the final episode, where Mark quits college in hopes of learning to become a better superhero for everyone’s sake.
Mark Grayson was never meant to be a complex character. He was simple, understandable, and was meant to be a good kid in a very confusing world, and that’s what made him interesting. But this season…
Well, Mark just didn’t have a direction, or anything to actually do.
And once I realised that, it kind of broke my heart. Anyone can say they’ve got a purpose, say they want to achieve something dearly, but it’s another thing entirely to prove it, and Invincible season two just didn’t prove to anyone — or me, at least — that it knows what to do with itself.
Am I going to keep watching? I don’t know. The art was great in the comic, even when the story wasn’t, but the show doesn’t have that to rely on. People just don’t talk about this show the same way, either, and bringing it up in conversations always end with Oh, that show. Some episodes felt like Saturday morning cartoons with dashes of red to make it seem a little more adult, more grown up, but it’s getting into regular television territory now, and season three is going to have to be great.
And if it isn’t, well, I don’t have a witty one liner this time. All I’ve got to say is that the studio’s hopes of seeing eight, nine, maybe ten seasons of this thing are going to be nearly impossible for the kid we used to root for.
Or maybe I’m just cynical and hate everything nowadays, and only write reviews to argue with people online. I don’t really know anymore, and my friends all stopped watching this show months ago. So tell me what you think: was this season good in your opinion, or was it just not as great?
Tell me everything you think, because with the break between seasons, we might as well come up with an entirely new superhero in the comments.
