Invincible creator tells fans what to expect from season 3

The second season of Invincible wrapped up early in April with a typically bloody finale. Going forward, the superhero series is only getting denser and richer, with new characters and plotlines being introduced at a rapid rate. Work is already well underway on season 3, so we won't have to wait nearly as long for new episodes as we did after season 1. What can we expect?

Variety posed that question to Robert Kirkman, who wrote the original Invincible comics and who is deeply involved in the show. Let's hit some of the highlights.

Before the Viltrumites

So Invincible is about a teenage superhero named Mark Grayson, the product of a union between a human woman and a man from the planet Viltrum, where everyone is an unstoppable super-being. As we've seen, the Viltrumites are a brutal, tyrannical people, and they now have their sights set on Earth. Expect many more clashes with them in Invincible season 3 and beyond.

"The Viltrumites as a whole, especially over the course of Season 2 with Kregg’s directive to Mark and Anissa’s interaction with him and the hints at more to come, have pretty much established themselves as the major threat to this show," Kirkman said. "There will always be other villains, like Angstrom Levy, that pop up and maybe become the main antagonist for a season or two, but the undercurrent in the show is always going to be what’s going on with the Viltrumite threat."

Readers of the Invincible comics know that a couple of important Viltrumite characters are about to be introduced, including veteran warrior Conquest and Viltrumite leader Thragg, who rules the whole empire. Kirkman said that one of these characters was already cast, but didn't say which one.

Mark's family

Since discovering that his father Nolan was a merciless agent of an alien empire, things have been hard for Mark and his mother Debbie. As we saw, Nolan has been regretting his choices too, wandering through deep space and rebounding with a short-lived bug woman from the planet Thraxa. At the end of the second season, he even admitted to missing Debbie. Is there a redemption arc in the offing for him?

Well, Nolan did massacre thousands of Earthlings near the end of season 1, so that could be tricky. "I think the show is going to have a lot harder time doing anything close to a redemption with Nolan than we had with the comics," Kirkman said. "This moment where he’s realizing that he actually cares for Debbie and is legitimately missing her is kind of the beginnings of seeing who Nolan’s true character is. I don’t think it’s a change in his character. If you go back and you rewatch the first two seasons, knowing that moment, you’ll see things, especially when we first see him in Episode 4 of Season 2 and follow him from Earth to Thrax and we see what he’s going through, you kind of get a hint that there’s a lot more to him. There was a lot more going on with him internally during those moments at the end of Season 1. Exploring his character is something we’re going to be doing for the duration of the show."

Kirkman also said that they purposely pulled focus a bit from Nolan in season 2, since he was so prominent in season 1 and they wanted to establish that this was Mark's show. But now that they've established that baseline, expect Nolan to show up more often. "He’s gonna be in Season 3 a little more," Kirkman said.

Another new addition to Mark's family is his half-brother Oliver, whom Nolan sired with the Thraxan bug woman Andressa. He's just an infant now, but Thraxans age very quickly, so he'll soon go through a lot of changes. "Yeah, you can definitely expect that character to age rapidly the way he did in the comics," Kirkman said. "Where we begin Season 3, at what stage he’s at, that can remain a mystery. But we’ll definitely see different versions of him along the way."

Mark and Atom Eve

Season 2 saw Mark and his girlfriend Amber break up, after Amber decided she couldn't cope with a lifestyle that involved extraterrestrial superbeings trying to kill her at dinner. That means that the path is open for Mark to get together with Atom Eve, with whom he's long had good chemistry. But that didn't happen by the end of season 2. What about season 3?

"What you see at the end of Season 2 is kind of the first beginnings of an evolution of their relationship," Kirkman said. "That’s the story that is really going to be one of the core aspects of Season 3: what their relationship is, where it goes, how it changes and evolves. Whether they’re together or not, officially, remains to be seen. But there’s definitely a lot going on with Mark and Eve that will continue into Season 3 and hopefully beyond."

And of course there's more Kirkman could say. We'll learn more about intractable government bureaucrat Cecil Steadman, for instance. But Kirkman didn't have to entice me to get me to tune in. All I need now is a release date for Invincible season 3. 2025 seems very likely, if not the end of 2024.

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