The first four episodes of Invincible season 2 have aired on Amazon Prime Video, and they were mostly spectacular. We finally got a peak into the large-scale events going on in this universe, Mark’s growth as a hero continued, and we were reunited with a certain mustachioed jerk by the name of Omni-Man.
I wouldn’t categorize any episode in this batch as “bad” because all of them generally held my attention and entertained me. That being said, some were definitely better than others, so let’s rank them all from worst to best while we wait for the rest of season 2 to drop in early 2024.
4. Episode 202: “In About Six Hours I Lose My Virginity to a Fish”
The weakest episode so far has been Episode 2, where Mark has to travel to Atlantis to receive Omni-Man’s punishment for killing their king, Aquarus. Aquarus was one of the several members of the Guardians of the Globe that Omni-Man murdered in the first episode of the series, and now that he’s gone, Atlantean culture demands that his son be punished in his place. The punishment in question? Fight an enormous undersea monster.
The title of this episode refers to something Mark says to Cecil in the Invincible comics by Robert Kirkman. In addition to fighting the giant monster, in the comics, the Atlanteans want Mark to marry their queen and make love to her in front of their entire population. Talk about pressure. Fortunately for TV-show Mark, all he has to do is fight a sea monster.
During their fight, the monster blasts Mark with a screeching sound wave that disorients him for a bit, which Cecil takes note of in case he has to use this weakness against him later.
Meanwhile, Atom Eve helps rebuild Chicago and finds out that Omni-Man’s rampage resulted in her dad losing his job. When she tries to help her parents by creating food and gold for them to sell, her dad calls her dangerous and rejects her powers. Eve also learns a harsh lesson about her powers when she tries to build a park on an empty lot, which ends up collapsing and hurting dozens of people because the ground was unstable.
This episode further drives home the immense damage Omni-Man left on not only the world, but his family. His wife is coping by drinking. At one point she breaks down crying after tearing a cabinet door off the wall. The pressure of being the world’s best superhero has fallen fully onto Mark’s shoulders, and he is now Cecil’s go-to guy when planet-threatening events pop up.
3. Episode 201, “A Lesson For Your Next Life”
The season 2 premiere opens in an alternate universe where Mark help Omni-Man take over Earth for the Viltrumites. The evil father-son duo kill the Immortal in a quick fight before dispatching of a resistance movement led by Robot and Atom Eve. This opening is meant to show the destruction that could have been had Mark chose to join Omni-Man last season. We find out that this is exactly what happens in many other universes.
We are also introduced to a guy named Angstrom Levy, who has the ability to open up portals to any universe he wants. He uses his powers to break the Mauler Twins out of prison and commission the evil geniuses to build him a machine. Levy has been collecting different versions of himself from dozens of universes with the goal of transferring their minds into his so he can create a multiversal utopia.
At the same time, Eve advises Mark that he needs to prove to everyone that he is not his father, so he convinces Cecil to let him do hero work again. His first assignment is to investigate a massive power spike in the Mauler Twins’ warehouse. Just as Angstrom’s project is getting underway, Mark busts into the room to stop him. Angstrom tries to push forward, but the machine eventually blows all the Angstroms and the Mauler Twins to smithereens.
The post-credits scene shows that a disfigured Mauler Twin survived the blast to find Angstrom in the rubble. The device worked and Angstrom’s head is now filled with the knowledge of his counterparts, except he is now severely deformed and blames Invincible. Whoops.
I like how this episode introduces the multiverse, which has been overused in recent years with the Marvel and DC universes, in my opinion. In Invincible, Angstrom is really the only character who’s going to engage with it. That’s smart on Kirkman’s part because it decreases the chances of portals to other universe being overused as a plot device.
That said, we don’t see Angstrom again in this batch of episodes. He will be back at some point and he is not happy with Mark.
2. Episode 203: “This Missive, This Machination”
This one kicks off with Mark finally starting college at Upstate University with William and Amber. As Mark’s roommate, William urges him to throw out all the toys he brought with him, but Mark decides to keep one action figure of a character named Science Dog. Mark then goes over to Amber’s dorm room and they have sex for the first time, so this is already a pretty formative episode for our titular character.
While Mark and Amber get it on, we get a hilarious interjection from a narrator and the entire story pivots over to Allen the Alien, the friendly one-eyed Unopan voiced by Seth Rogan. The narrator exposition dumps the entire backstory of the Unopan society, explaining how they were taken over by the Viltrumites. A few survivors fled the planet and began to genetically breed new Unopans in an effort to save their species and develop a super soldier capable of fighting Viltrumites. Allen was the only successful super soldier to emerge from that program. The Unopans soon joined the Coalition of Planets, a group opposed to the Viltrum empire.
Allen works as the Coalition’s point man on finding other beings capable of fighting Viltrumites. He explains to the council that he finally found such a person on Earth named Mark Grayson. The council is hesitant to trust someone like Mark, who is half-Viltrumite, but their leader Thaedus agrees that it is a lead worth pursuing, especially because they also know that Omni-Man abandoned his post, which is unheard of behavior from a Viltrumite.
While Allen is getting dinner with his girlfriend Telia, three Viltrumites attack and beat Allen nearly to death. In the hospital, Thaedus comforts Telia and tells her to leave the room before he disables Allen’s life support systems. This massive cliffhanger calls into question Thaedus’ true intentions and leaves Allen’s fate unknown.
Back on Earth, Mark gets a visit from a real-life Science Dog, which freaks him out because he is supposed to be a fictional character. Mark takes him outside and beats him up, demanding to know who he really is. Under the disguise is a praying mantis-like being called a Thraxan who begs Mark to help him stop a meteor shower on his planet. William convinces Mark to go help the Thraxans. Mark says his goodbyes to Cecil and Amber; the former is unhappy with Mark’s decision and the latter supportive.
After the six-day journey to the Thraxan planet, Mark finds there are no meteors and he is immediately introduced to the monarch of the planet. The big reveal is that the monarch is none other that Mark’s dad Omni-Man.
This episode is loaded with good stuff. We finally get an idea of how the galaxy is laid out as a conflict between the Viltrumites and the Coalition brews. But Allen’s backstory, Peter Cullen’s (Optimus Prime) elegant portrayal of Thaedus and Omni-Man’s shocking return still don’t make this the best episode of season 2 so far.
1. Episode 204: “It’s Been a While”
This episode seriously cranks things up a notch on all fronts. Debbie liberates herself from Cecil and the demons Omni-Man left behind, Donald realizes that he is part machine and the Mauler Twins find out what happens when one of them knows the other is a clone: mass dysfunction.
One storyline that is really bumming me out is Atom Eve, who has seldom showed up at all in this season so far, and when she does, she is getting life thrown at her hard. When she tries to build a park, it collapses and hurts a lot of people. When she tries to help her parents, her dad yells at her and calls her dangerous. When she tries to stop Kill Canon from stealing, she accidentally sends a car off a bridge. Atom Eve really needs a win soon because she is going through it.
The real meat and potatoes of this episode is Omni-Man returning to the series. We see that directly after he left Earth, Omni-Man drifts into space with no destination in mind. He flies aimlessly for months until he lets himself start drifting into a black hole. This is a pretty significant change from the comic book, as it shows how much regret and guilt he felt after the horrible things he not only did to Earth, but to countless other planets in the name of Viltrum.
Of course, he doesn’t tell Mark any of this. Their meeting quickly deteriorates as Mark realizes that his dad tricked him into coming to Thraxa and that he still hasn’t apologized for the destruction he left on Earth.
But Mark is convinced to hear his dad out. To his disgust, he discovers that Omni-Man has become the emperor of the planet, married a Thraxan named Anissa and had a son with her. Talk about family drama.
Omni-Man explains that the Viltrumites will find him eventually and that Mark needs to help him protect his new brother. Even though Omni-Man’s unnamed son will age quickly thanks to his Thraxan DNA (Thraxans only live for one year), the Viltrumites will kill him for being inferior if they find him. Just when they are figuring out a strategy, the three Viltrumites who pulverized Allen show up and chaos ensues.
An all out brawl sees Omni-Man seemingly kill all three of the Viltrumites before getting brutally kicked in the spine by Lucan. Mark also gets stabbed in the gut by Thula. Both Omni-Man and Mark survive while their opponents die, but they still lose. A one-eyed Viltrumite named General Kregg explains that Omni-Man will be executed and that Mark will assume his responsibility of getting Earth ready for the Viltrumite occupation. If he doesn’t, they will kill millions of people on Earth. Before Omni-Man is taken away, he tells Mark to read his books.
This episode takes the stakes and raises them significantly. We now have a direct threat from the Viltrumites and a clear “what the hell do we do now” moment season 2 can be proud of. The Viltrumite fight scenes in this episode are elegantly done with plenty of Mortal Kombat-like gore, which is just perfect for this show. There are also so many questions. What happened to Mark’s brother? Is Allen dead? What’s in Omni-Man’s books? We’ll have to wait until more episodes start dropping next year — hopefully early in the year — to find out.
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