Josh Reviews Invincible Season Four!

Amazon Prime Video’s adaptation of Invincible, the wonderful super-hero comic book series written by Robert Kirkman and illustrated by Ryan Ottley & Corey Walker, continues to roar along, with a terrific fourth season!  The show returned for another fantastic eight episodes this year, and I loved every minute.  This series started off with a bang with a spectacular first season, and it’s continued to impress me every year.

Invincible takes lots of fun, classic super-hero tropes and presents them through an adult prism.  This is a show jam-packed with super-heroes and super-villains, dressed in colorful costumes, engaging in fisticuffs.  At the same time, the characters are depicted with nuance, featuring very human strengths and flaws.  For me, I love Invincible for the way it embraces a love of classic super-hero comics, yet is squarely aimed at grown-ups.  The show isn’t a deconstruction of super-heroes, but it does endeavor to present a realistic picture of what life might be life for these people who are living in this comic book type of world.  That includes violence.  Lots of violence.  There is lots and lots of very graphic violence in this show!!  This is not a show for the faint-hearted!

Also cool about this show: it’s very rare (and super-cool) to see an animated hour-long show.  That’s one of the many things I love about Invincible!

The scale of this show has been growing and growing, and it was exciting to finally get to see a full-blown interstellar war between our heroes and the evil Viltrumites here in season four!  I was thrilled that Nolan and Allen were such big parts of the show this season, and that so much of the back half of the season took place off-Earth.  That was very cool.

As has been the case since the beginning, this series is a phenomenal adaptation of the original source material.  I loved the original comic, and this adaptation is remarkably faithful.  They’ve been following the storylines from the comic with tremendous accuracy.  It’s so rare to see this type of approach in a comic book adaptation!

Even more impressive: while I’d describe this as one of the most faithful adaptations I’ve ever seen, there have still been a TON of changes from the original comic.  And yet, pretty much every single change that has been made is GREAT.  Key to the show’s success: while most adaptations condense the source material, this show often expands what was in the comic, allowing the moments to breathe and ensuring that the big moments land with the proper emotional depth.

This helped elevate a number of important sequences this season, in which we see Mark struggling with the belief that he might have no choice but to start killing his enemies, to prevent them from continuing to harm others.  (I’m going to discuss some aspects of this season’s plot as we move forward in this review, so beware some SPOILERS ahead.  If you’re watching this show but haven’t finished season four, you might want to stop here.  If you haven’t yet watched Invincible, go back and start with season one, and sit back and enjoy!)

Still here?  Ok, for example: I loved the way the show enhanced the buildup to Mark’s battle with Russ, the Sequid host; I loved the added ticking clock of the shield around the city being seconds from collapse; that was so smart, it really ratcheted up the tension.  Along those same lines, Mark’s beating and near murder of Dinosaurus, which was basically just a quick anecdote in the comic, became a very weighty & significant moment in the show; same goes with his conflict with the crime lord Titan.  (I really liked how they fleshed out that battle with Titan and the dragon-summoning crime boss Mr. Liu on the show, with Oliver answering the call at first.)  Together, these events nicely ratcheted up the pressure on Mark, and forced him to confront whether or not he was willing to kill his enemies.

There were many other examples this season in which the writers made great choices in enhancing and expanding upon the original comic book.  I liked how they expanded Nolan & Allen’s fight with the Rognarrs (those big red alien monsters); that became an awesome extended action sequence, with Nolan and Allen trying and failing multiple times to fly off the surface and escape.  I also thought the show found ways to really dial into the drama around Nolan’s return to Earth and the tension with Oliver and Debbie.  In the comics, Nolan is happy to see Oliver right away; but I prefer the way it played out on the show, where Nolan bungles things at first and there’s an arc to the two of them slowly developing a relationship.  I really liked the time that episode six spent, showing the gradual development of a father-son bond between Nolan and Oliver when they were stranded together on a planet.  I particularly liked the scene where Oliver stands up to Nolan and stops him from killing the mama monster.  (That wasn’t in the comic.)  I liked the time the show spent fleshing out Nolan’s youth on Viltrum, far more than we saw in the comic.  It was great to see Nolan’s past and what happened with the arrival of the scourge plague on Viltrum.  (I love that the show kept the gruesome detail from the comic of the ring around the planet of Viltrumite dead.  Yowza!)

The only expansion I didn’t love this season was the long “Hurm” episode set in Hell.  It was a good story, but at that point in the show’s narrative it felt to me like wheel spinning for an episode, which I wasn’t thrilled about in a short 8-episode season.  I feel like the writers thought this Hell story was a bigger deal than I did. They used it for their mid-credit teaser at the end of season three, which certainly suggests the writers thought this story was a Big Deal, but I thought that teaser scene was underwhelming, too!  Oh, well.

This show has, from the beginning, had one of the most stacked voice-casts I’ve ever seen.  The ensemble is amazing!!  Let’s start with the main characters: Steven Yeun as Mark; J.K. Simmons as Mark’s dad Nolan; Sandra Oh as Mark’s mom Debbie; and Gillian Jacobs as Eve.  All four characters really got put through the ringer this season, and the actors did a wonderful job in bringing emotional heft to their vocal performances.  Seth Rogen’s Allen the Alien has been on the show since season one, but I love that he was such a big part of this season!! After Nolan, I think he’s my favorite character!!  I also love that Allen’s girlfriend Telia, voiced by Tatiana Maslany (She-Hulk), was a major character this season!  Telia wasn’t at all a part of the Viltrumite War storyline in the comics, and she’s a great addition.  (I’m also glad they gave her a cool uniform, as opposed to the scanty outfits she was usually in, in the comics.)  Walton Goggins continues to kick all kinds of ass as Cecil Stedman, the man in charge of Earth’s global security; and I continue to enjoy Chris Diamantopoulos as the faithful Donald.  We didn’t get too much of the Guardians of the Globe this year, but I enjoyed their new leader Brit, voiced by the great Jonathan Banks (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul); as well as Robot (Zachary Quinto), Monster Girl (Grey DeLisle), Shapesmith (Ben Schwartz), Black Samson (Khary Payton), and Bulletproof (Jay Pharoah).  Christian Convery did great work as Oliver; he really brought this fast-growing teenager to life in the show!

I was so happy with every line spoken by Thaedus, the leader of the Coalition of Planets, because he was voiced by the great Peter Cullen, the original voice of Optimus Prime!!  What amazing casting.  Mr. Cullen was perfect in the role, bringing great nobility and dignity to Thaedus.  I enjoyed the introduction of the armored hero Tech Jacket this season, voiced by Zoey Deutch, with her A.I. armor voiced by LeVar Burton!!  So cool.  I thought it was a great choice to gender-swap Tech Jacket from the comics; it’s nice to have more strong, smart female characters on the show.  (I just wish the show had better established why Tech Jacket could fight Viltrumites more effectively than, say, Robot, or any of Earth’s other many heroes??  What made her be someone who could stand up to Viltrumites?)  I loved hearing Lee Pace (Guardians of the Galaxy, The Hobbit trilogy, Foundation) as Viltrumite Grand Regent Thragg; his oily tones were so great for this royal villain!  I was thrilled to have Jeffrey Dean Morgan back as Conquest and Clancy Brown back as Kregg, two more awful Viltrumite villains.  (Clancy Brown was also great as the demonic Damien Darkblood, who got an entire episode spotlight this season!)  On the heroes’ side, I loved the addition of Winston Duke (M’Baku in Black Panther) to the ensemble as Space Racer!  Other new additions this season were: Kate Mulgrew (Captain Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager & Red on Orange is the New Black) as Domina; Bruce Campbell (The Evil Dead) as Satan; Danai Gurira (Okoye in Black Panther) as Universa; Indira Varma (Luther, Game of Thrones, Creature Commandos) as Volcanikka; and Bobby Moynihan (SNL) as Tech Jacket’s father Edward.  Additional wonderful returning favorites include: Michael Dorn as Battle Beast; Mark Hamill as Art Rosenbaum (who makes the costumes for the Invincible family), and Cliff Curtis as Debbie’s boyfriend Paul.  (I really liked that the show took pains to make Paul likable, rather than someone the audience would be rooting against because he was replacing Nolan.  That was well done.  It was so well done, in fact, that I was disappointed when, in episode eight, we learn Paul and Debbie had broken up off-screen!  That worked in the comics, because we’d been away from Earth for ten months and the shock effect of the changed status quos for many characters back on Earth was powerful, but here it felt like a letdown to me because we’d spent so much time with Paul.)  Brandon Scott Jones took over from Andrew Rannells as Mark’s old friend William.  (I miss Mr. Rannells, though I can understand his passing on this season as William had a much smaller role.)

This show has always been impressively (and shockingly, at times) violent, but the fight between Mark and Conquest at the end of episode five was absolutely the most gruesome, awful thing I’ve ever seen on this show.  I was squirming in my seat.  Wild!!  We also got some huge action sequences during the Viltrumite War storyline, which were very cool.

Other thoughts:

• I didn’t think the recurring Star Trek: The Next Generation joke was all that funny.  (The characters on the Coalition ship ferrying Mark, Nolan & co. around were drawn to resemble characters from TNG, just lame; and there was a squeaky, rusty sound effect for the doors on the ship when they slid open or closed.)  Why are we poking fun at TNG?  Seems random to me.
• When Nolan, Oliver, & Mark were stranded on the planet in episode six, I thought it was strange that they weren’t more worried about the Coalition getting annihilated without the three of them around to help.
• My only small complaint about the Viltrumite War arc in the back half of the season is that I’d have liked to have gotten more of a sense of the scale of this galactic conflict.  We got to see a few major battles, but the progress of the rest of the war was generally depicted as grids on a computer screen.
• The destruction of Viltrum was shocking, and a very cool sequence!!  Though, as was the case when this happened in the comics, I was surprised by what seemed like an extremely unwise escalation on the part of Nolan/Thaedus.  (It was Thaedus’ idea in the comics, but Nolan’s on the show.)  It seems obvious this would cause the Viltrumites to strike out at Earth, right??
• At first I thought it was an annoying cheat that the Viltrumite attack on Earth seen at the start of episode eight turned out to just be in Mark’s imagination, though then I really enjoyed the way the show visualized Mark’s post-traumatic stress after returning to Earth.  I love that this show doesn’t shy away from the psychological damage to Mark after all he’s been through.
• Eve’s weight-gain — so, I’ve been waiting to see how the show would handle this!  I’ve always had mixed feelings about this storyline in the comics.  I liked the realism of the idea — it makes sense that a young person like Eve under such severe mental strain might gain weight.  And, of course, her weight-gain had the added effect of being a fake-out for the audience, who would think at first that she was still pregnant.  On the other hand, I also felt that this reduced Eve to something of a punchline, and I didn’t like seeing this strong female character sidelined.  So I have long been curious as to how the show would handle this.  For the most part, I thought it went OK.  I still am not totally in love with this storyline, but I thought that visually they did a nice job; Eve didn’t look as silly as I thought she did in the original comics.  And I felt the emotion really landed in the scene in which Eve finally admits to Mark what happened.

I thoroughly enjoyed Invincible season four!  I am sad it’s over already!  I am so glad season five is in the works.  Is it possible this show will be able to go the distance and adapt the entire run of the comics?  I hope so!  By my count, we’re about halfway done with the comics storyline by the end of season four, meaning the show would need to run for around eight seasons to tell the full story.  Are there any other streaming shows that have run for eight seasons??  Here’s hoping that Mr. Kirkman and the Invincible team will be able to bring this story to completion!!  I am counting the days until season five!!

Please don’t forget that I have a brand new comic book, SIGNAL FIRES, and it’s available for order NOW!

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