Invincible Season 4, Episodes 1-3: Improvements & Shortfalls

Warning: This review contains spoilers for Invincible season 4, episodes 1, 2, and 3.

Episode 1 of Invincible’s new season gets off to a pretty shaky start with a bland color palette and dull writing that fails to meaningfully characterize Mark. After his chaotic battle with the aging Viltrumite Conquest last season, Invincible’s entire worldview has been shaken, leaving him emotionally numb. Mark’s malaise is meant to act as the crux of the first episode and to set up his story arc for this season, which doesn’t move the meter by much over the next two episodes.

The majority of episode 2, “I’ll Give You the Grand Tour,” takes a much-needed detour from Mark’s slow and boring storyline to focus on his father, Nolan, aka Omni-Man. While Nolan and Allen the Alien travel throughout the universe in search of weapons capable of taking down Viltrumites, their friendship is a highlight of the show. Allen’s casual attitude pushes back against Nolan’s stoic exterior, a dynamic that began to develop last season in their time as prisoners aboard a spaceship.

We get a section in the second episode that even the original comic readers never got to see. Nolan’s troubled past and youth on Viltrum are shown to us right off the bat, including his final “test” before becoming an adult, where he has to fight his own parents in a scene that calls back to season 1’s climactic battle between father and son.

This part of the episode does excellent work deepening Nolan’s character and the eventual redemption arc that the show has made it clear he’s heading towards. Beyond just developing Nolan’s character, the flashback also shows the catastrophic scale of the Scourge Virus that nearly erased the Viltrum Empire.

While episode 2 focused more on Nolan and Allen’s story, the third episode comes back down to Earth to focus on Mark once again. Episode 3 boasts a significantly better color palette, with vivid shading and sharp contrasts, and much tighter-paced writing than episode 1. Likely because a lot happens in the third episode of the season, which is meant to pull viewers along and into the next three episodes beginning with episode 4 releasing Wednesday, March 25th.

It’s also clear by the third episode, if not before, that the animation team has put a little extra into the character’s movement this season. Likely prompted by many fans’ feedback on season 3, which many claimed looked like a PowerPoint representation during some scenes.

Many fans have questioned the show’s use of its budget, debating whether the celebrity voice acting had taken funding from the animation. From a practical standpoint, it’s more likely that the fast releases of new seasons are the culprit behind the show’s, at times, inconsistent visual representations.

But let’s talk about those celebrity voices for a moment. Season 4 of Invincible brings Lee Pace in to voice Thragg, one of the major antagonists of the series so far, and Matthew Rhys also voices Dinosaurus, whom we saw in episode 1 of the new season. And Episode 2 includes Danai Gurira as the voice of Universa. Unfortunately, we don’t see too much of these new characters in the first three episodes of season four. Thragg, especially, is one that comic fans have been waiting to see appear on the show for quite some time now.