Invincible’s reputation for hyper-violence is well earned. The Prime Video show’s season 1 massacre of the Guardians at the hands of Nolan/Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons) is harrowing, and it sets the tone for the show’s commitment to realistic superpowered gore and destruction. And few scenes in television history are as gnarly or horrifying as the destruction of a train and everyone on board in the first season’s finale.
With all that carnage, you would think the repeated exposure to seeing Dupli-Kate die on the show would numb the effect when what seemed like her actual death came. But no! It’s brutal in the way only Invincible can be, all blood and guts and sinew. It could be easy to skate past the impact of all that death and destruction and just focus on the spectacle. And yet, season 2 of Invincible took a step back and focused on the varied ways death profoundly changes us, using death not just as a narrative event to push the season’s plot forward but as a thematic throughline the characters have to grapple with.
Big, impactful deaths can happen at a moment’s notice on the show, but that doesn’t mean Invincible moves on just as quickly. Dupli-Kate (Malese Jow) has repeatedly experienced death throughout the show via her cloning powers. It’s the basis of her relationship with the Immortal (Ross Marquand), who himself has died many times (it didn’t take). Despite their massive difference in age, it’s one of the most sincere relationships in the show, as they can uniquely relate to each other’s many experiences with life and death. It might be the least problematic age-gap relationship in fiction.
That’s why it hits so hard when Dupli-Kate appears to die for good in the midseason premiere, “This Must Come as a Shock.” This death is given room to breathe, with a funeral the next episode as the team mourns. The Immortal is hit particularly hard by her death — even harder than previous loved ones he’s lost — because of their strong connection over how many times they’ve escaped that fate and the guilt that can bring.
“What would this actually be like to experience, when you actually take seriously these things that are designed to not be taken seriously?” series creator Robert Kirkman says of the decision to slow down on Dupli-Kate’s death and its impact on the Immortal. “That’s really when we’re having our most fun on Invincible. And this is something that’s dealt with in Highlander and all kinds of different things. It’s not like we’re reinventing the wheel or anything. But when you sit down and think about just how depressing and terrible it would be to be immortal, the luster of Oh, I could live forever kind of goes away.”
This is one of the best parts of Invincible: taking some of the more ridiculous tropes and narrative beats of the superhero genre at face value, and grounding them to analyze how it would actually affect a person. This is especially true in the series’ depiction of death, both in the no-holds-barred brutal ways death gets shown in the series, and in the aftermath, as everyone struggles to pick up the pieces. We may not see each of Omni-Man’s many victims, but the weight of that destruction is felt across the entirety of the season.
Most visibly, Mark (Steven Yeun) and Debbie (Sandra Oh) are still grappling with it. Debbie goes to a support group for the spouses of superheroes, only to be tragically rejected after a member discovers who her spouse is. Meanwhile, Mark is haunted by his fight with his father, the death and destruction it caused, and his fear that he’s more like his father than he wishes to be. He’s also fully aware that he’s not quite as invincible as his name suggests, especially after he loses another brutal fight to a Viltrumite in season 2 when the warrior Anissa shows up and calmly beats the snot out of him.
All of this comes to a head in the finale, “I Thought You Were Stronger,” where Mark squares off against Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown). Levy, a dimension-hopping scientist who has lost his grip on reality, has captured Debbie and Mark’s half-brother, Oliver, holding them hostage in exchange for Mark’s life. Levy is also haunted by death, having seen loved ones murdered by Mark in almost every other reality in the multiverse. Driven to the edge, Mark carries Levy through a portal to a desolate alternate dimension and whales on him. When he finally looks up from the carnage of his attack, Mark realizes he has gone too far and killed for the first time. It’s then he whimpers the heartbreaking line used as the episode title: “I thought you were stronger.”
It’s a mirror image of the first season’s finale, where Nolan nearly beats Mark to death. That event sent even Nolan spiraling (as we see throughout the second season), and Mark is hit even harder by what he’s done. The irreversible damage he’s caused reflects all of his deepest fears about becoming his father, and how inevitable his turn to evil seems in all other universes. And then there’s the direct result of his actions: being stuck on a seemingly abandoned planet with no apparent way out. As Kirkman told Polygon, it’s “the embodiment of ‘If you lose control, you lose yourself.’”
“It was a scene I was really worried about, to be completely honest,” Kirkman says. Stuck on the planet, Mark essentially speedruns the stages of grief. He denies what happened, gets angry at himself, and makes excuses before finally accepting the truth. The monologue was initially written for the comic book (and Kirkman believes spiraling monologues tend to work better in that medium). But it’s rendered masterfully by Steven Yeun, who portrays Mark as pleading and almost childlike, seamlessly alternating between panic, disappointment, and rage as he comes to grips with what he’s done. “I think that in the hands of a lesser actor, that scene does not work and people go, Robert Kirkman is a bad writer, this was a bad idea. We just kind of went for it. And Steven totally nailed it. It could have gone horribly wrong if not for the immense talents of Steven Yeun.”
Yeun’s talents reveal the delicate balance always at play with Invincible and its relationship to loss. Death seems always around the corner for Mark, even though he is (literally) Invincible, and therefore has a different relationship with mortality than his friends or even most of his fellow superheroes. He carries the burden of knowledge: knowledge that he will likely outlive all of his loved ones, except for the father that nearly took his life, as well as knowledge that his own invincibility isn’t as assured as he might like it to be.
And now he has the knowledge of how easy it is for him to take a life. The threat of death hangs over him like a pall — and Yeun’s ability to access the more solemn parts of Mark’s previously chipper, youthful demeanor goes a long way toward communicating his changing relationship with death. How can you focus on college, or your relationship with your girlfriend, or even helping your mom take care of your new alien half-brother when you see death everywhere you look? All of those, and more, get dropped by Mark as he gets an even firmer understanding of his responsibilities on Earth (and the fear of the consequences of failure), especially if he’s going to stop a Viltrumite invasion.
Even the nearly indestructible Omni-Man is thinking about death. Hiding out on the alien planet Thraxa with his new family, the first season’s antagonist now finds himself grappling with new, confusing feelings of guilt and responsibility. Much to his surprise, he actually cares about what happens to the Thraxans when the Viltrumites show up, and even seems to have regrets about how he handled things on Earth; the very final line of the season comes from Omni-Man, as Simmons delivers “I think… I miss my wife” with a healthy heap of shock at himself. It’s a far cry from comparing Debbie to a pet in the first season, and his arc is neatly juxtaposed with the different relationship Thraxans have to death because of their much shorter lifespans.
“You’ve got all this death happening on Earth, and you go to this alien planet where they’re like, Ultimately, we recognize our futility,” Kirkman says. “Our lifespans are so short, we think in a different way, we think about society’s benefit, as opposed to our own benefit. Hopefully it’s an interesting contrast. It also might be a commentary on, maybe, maybe, how we could maybe do things a little differently [here on Earth].”
Nolan’s uncertainty suggests a possible better path for him, and invites questions about how much people can truly change. Forgiveness is pretty out of the question, considering what he’s done, but as his cellmate Allen the Alien (Seth Rogen) knows, he’d be a crucial ally in the fight to come. The one thing truly holding him back is his Viltrumite upbringing, and the distaste toward sympathy for “lesser” beings that has been drilled into him from childhood.
While Mark and Nolan are struggling to make sense of death outside of force or fear, others are forced to embrace it and channel it forward. Donald Ferguson (Chris Diamantopoulos) learns a terrifying truth about himself: He has been rebuilt as a robot after dying, with his memory of his death wiped. At first angry at the Global Defense Agency and its agents for rebuilding him without his consent, Ferguson later learns he has died and been rebuilt countless times, and that he was the one who decided to wipe his own memory.
It’s a confusing, transformative moment for Donald. He goes from feeling like a tool to be used at the GDA’s disposal to understanding himself and his role in the world more completely than he ever has before. And he pays it forward by helping Rick (Jonathan Groff in season 1, Luke Macfarlane in season 2), who was also rebuilt as a robot after having his memory wiped. When he learns the truth about himself, Sheridan panics and threatens to end his own life, only for Ferguson to talk him down in a heartwarming scene that drives home that there is no one way to be a person.
“People get turned into robots all the time in comics,” Kirkman says. “But we’re trying to treat it like it’s this heartfelt, very depressing event that one guy has to help another guy through. You start to realize there’s something really touching about Donald accepting that his lot in life is to sacrifice himself for other people and that there is a value to that, and to take that on and learn from it and try to pass that on to Rick Sheridan. We’re just trying to wring emotion out of inherently silly superhero tropes.”
In typical Invincible fashion, it did this partly by balancing seemingly disparate tones. Kirkman says lulling the audience into a false sense of security with jokes — a Seance Dog bringing Mark to a reunion with Omni-Man, or a comic creator quipping about animation cutting corners — only to surprise them with a reveal is a trick he loves to pull, partly because he says audiences are getting savvy to narrative tricks after a “bombardment of content” from streaming services.
“It’s something that on the show has been somewhat difficult at times, because the tonal balance makes absolutely no sense whatsoever,” he says. “There’s almost no rules. It’s the weirdest tightrope to walk and sometimes board artists will be like, ‘Well, it’s a joke scene. So I’m gonna add this joke in the background.’ And [I’m] like, ‘No, this frame is very serious. And this frame is a joke. And I can’t explain why.’
“I mean, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t even know if I understand [the tone distinction]. And sometimes I watch episodes back, and I mean the finale especially, it’s just like Sandra Oh’s giving the performance of a lifetime. And then Mark pops out of a portal with a Fortnite gun. And I’m just like, Does this work?”
But the balancing of those tones is one of the reasons the second season’s grappling with death hits so hard (and why the finale’s reveal that Dupli-Kate is alive feels meaningful). By actually engaging with all of the ridiculous elements of superhero lives — the serious, the silly, the dangerous, and the mundane — it means not only that anything is possible, but that the show has the space to be sincere about the unique challenges of superpowered life. It is precisely the feeling that any character could die at any time that makes Invincible’s more lighthearted scenes feel so fun, and the silliness of those moments in turn makes those deaths all the more tragic. That’s what being human is all about, superpowers or not: balancing grief and joy. No amount of invincibility can teach you that.
Invincible is streaming on Prime Video.
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