With season 2 part 2, Invincible continues to be the best superhero story out there, delivering four more gut-wrenching and exhilarating episodes.
Invincible is a show about consequences. Too often in superhero stories, writers are quick to smash the reset button, eliminating any chance for their world-ending events to have any real lasting effects on the characters forced to deal with them. That’s far from the case in Invincible, to the point where it ends up being the main focus of season 2 part 2. How do these characters deal with the fact that their world is flipped upside down every 10 minutes? What kind of emotional toll does constantly being terrified of a potential alien invasion take on a person? It’s all meticulously plotted, with every fight scene, every throwaway villain, every second of every subplot building towards some of the most exhilarating, gut-wrenching pay-offs to ever come out of the genre. Has there ever been a superhero TV show this good? I don’t think so.
The show picks up with the titular superhero (Steven Yeun) licking his wounds on a planet he feels like he should resent, having yet again lost his father (J.K Simmons), mere moments after the two seemingly began to re-connect. It’s a traumatising situation, and like many of the defining moments throughout Invincible, it’s one that our cast of incredibly likeable and layered superheroes struggle to deal with. It’s an aspect of the show that helps ground everything and keep our characters feeling human, no matter how alien they might be. Mark Grayson might spend parts of this season off-world fighting some seriously strange-looking creatures, but the number one thing on his mind is always his relationships with other characters.
A good chunk of season 2 part 2 is dedicated to the relationship between Mark and his girlfriend, Amber (Zazie Beetz). In a genre populated with so many conventional, seemingly forced romantic subplots, their relationship is one that feels gut-wrenchingly real. It all comes back to that central idea of consequence. Amber is only human, a fact that she’s constantly, cruelly reminded of, and what Invincible shows us is the actual effect that being in that damsel-in-distress role would have on a person. She can’t just reset and go back to normal in the next issue, she’s left with this lingering trauma that results in one of the most powerful moments in the show so far.
What makes Invincible truly great, though, is the fact that it’s not just the show’s leads who feel this developed. Almost every single member of its cast feels layered and complex, with plenty of moments to shine and full-blown character arcs to go through. In every sense of the word, this is a superhero epic, potentially on a scale we’ve never seen before. Yes, Avengers Endgame (2019) may have featured more heroes, but there, the majority of them were little more than action figures being thrown around a children’s playset; in Invincible, every character feels like a vital, breathing part of this world, one that’s constantly developing and growing. So much of what TV great is the world that every show creates, these mini-universes that you find yourself wanting to spend hour upon hour immersed in, and for me, there’s no better show airing right now than Invincible when it comes to that.
Ultimately, what Invincible season 2 part 2 never forgets, amidst all of its fan service and sci-fi shenanigans, is that its heroes and villains are still just people. People with their own set of emotions and their own way of responding to trauma. Yes, Mark Grayson may be “invincible”, and he may be a seemingly all-powerful superhuman destined to save the world, but really, he’s just a boy, terrified of becoming his father. That’s why he doesn’t kill. It’s not because the writers want him to seem more heroic, it’s that he’s petrified of the idea that if he kills even one person, that it’ll cause him to spiral and end up just as bad as Omni-Man. Invincible takes a very real, relatable issue: inflicting the same pain that our parents once inflicted on us, and appropriately scales it up, resulting in one of the most compelling superhero stories I’ve ever seen.
With season 2 part 2, Invincible has cemented itself as arguably the greatest superhero show on air right now. It constantly seems like it’s on the brink of collapsing due to how much it packs into itself, but somehow, it just all works. Every storyline gorgeously flows into each other, every emotional beat feels earned and every action scene is even more exhilarating than the last. It’s paced to perfection, ending with another outstanding finale that pushes its characters to the absolute limit, brilliantly setting things up for what seems like it should be another outstanding season of television. At first glance, Invincible may not seem like the most original thing out there, but I promise, the second that you look a little bit closer, you’ll come to realise that there truly is nothing else out there like it.
Invincible Season 2 Part 2 will be available to stream on Prime Video from March 14, 2024. Read our review of Invincible Season 2 Part 1.
