Invincible just finished airing season 2 finale, which very much did not feel like a season finale. Though I suppose that’s sort of the expectations-defying nature of the show, where we don’t need to end on some massive cliffhanger. Instead what we got was a powerful, emotional battle between two characters, Invincible and Angstrom Levy.
It ends (spoilers) with Invincible crossing a line. The man, not the show. Mark breaks his no-kill rule after Levy threatens to kill his mother and brother a dozen different times, on top of wanting to kill Mark himself. While Levy says that he’s upgraded himself to be strong enough to take on Mark, once Mark really gets going well, he’s half-Viltrumite after all.
Levy ends up being a puddle on a desolate world, and Mark spends the rest of the episode haunted by his actions and believing that this moment of losing control has set him on a path to become his murderous father, just as he is in so many other alternate worlds in the multiverse, which is why Levy was so hellbent on killing him in the first place.
It cannot be overstated just how powerful the performances were from Steven Yeun and Sterling K. Brown here. I guess that’s why you hire Oscar nominees and Emmy winners to do your voicework. Just stellar work here throughout that entire, memorable fight. In the end, it wasn’t one of the series most brutal, but for the context of Mark’s character, it certainly was. The end result is Mark quitting college, avoiding Amber and not telling Eve how he felt about her. He heads into next season completely lost and still with the looming threat of his Viltrumite oppressors telling him he needs to take over earth or they’ll all die.
What little time there was to spare briefly showed Monster Girl agreeing to some measure of help for her aging problem. And it appears Allen has a plan to break Omni-Man out of prison, given that he’s now stronger than he’s letting on. Omni-Man really does seem like he’s genuinely ready to march to the gallows, but I think we all know that’s not happening.
Oh, and during Mark’s fight we got an unlicensed Spider-Man cameo (in the comics that really was Spider-Man), a Batman reference and Mark hitting Levy with a Fortnite sniper rifle (seriously). So that was fun.
That’s a wrap for the rather odd season 2, which took years to get here, then broke itself in half for a long gap that everyone seemed to despise. Now, while Robert Kirkman has said that it won’t be as long of a wait for season 3, that took over two years so I’m not sure how reassuring that is until we know some exact dates. I would almost guarantee it’s not going to be a single year.
Excellent show, weird pacing, and now thanks to Amazon, the finale was interrupted for me by multiple, unskippable ads for Play-doh during my viewing. So a mixed experience all around for this season, but a powerful finale today.
Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Read the full article here
