The eighth and final episode of Invincible Season 2 makes its emotional aims clear, but it doesn’t always follow through on them. It’s a pretty solid episode that never slows down, and it brings Mark full circle to a new place of uncertainty, questioning his place not just as a superhero, but as a human being. And yet, it can’t shake the feeling of a missing ingredient.
Perhaps that ingredient is an involved antagonist. The dimension-hopping, bulbous-headed Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown) has a chilling presence, and he commits some heinous acts against Mark’s defenseless mom and baby brother. But he also hasn’t really been seen since the start of the season – back in October, before the show’s four-month hiatus – except for the odd post-credit scene. In fact, Mark barely remembers him.
Levy’s grudge against Mark stems from the explosion of his mind-melding machine, with which he tried to share the knowledge and consciousness of all his interdimensional selves. He ended up with all their memories too, including those of a genocidal Mark from various alternate timelines. So he has good reason to hate Mark (or at least, the general idea of Mark, rather than this Mark specifically), but it isn’t until Levy pushes our hero to his emotionally breaking point that he really clicks as a villain. You could, if you were so inclined, swap him out for pretty much any other previous bad guy on Invincible (or even one we haven’t met) and the effect would be indistinguishable.
We’re shown glimpses of some fun dimension-hopping, though Mark never really seems in danger or like he’s exerting himself when he’s forced to travel the multiverse – even though Levy’s plan is to exhaust him before their big fight. There are zombies, dinosaurs, even a Spider-Man parody, Agent Spider (Josh Keaton, who’s played the real Spidey across a variety of projects), but all Marks need to do to escape each sticky situation is float slightly above the ground. Perhaps it’s for the best that these apparent challenges unfold mostly off screen, so that a good chunk of the episode can focus on Brown’s menacing performance.
Steven Yeun delivers equally stellar work, bringing Mark closer to the brink of explosion the more Levy threatens his family. By the end of their confrontation – set in an apocalyptic future – Mark’s desperation curdles into all-out rage. As he beats Levy to a pulp, blood splashes across his torso. The image, from its framing to Mark’s posture, recalls Nolan pummeling Mark in the Season 1 finale, a horrifying callback that implicitly takes the young hero to the one place he didn’t want to be. He’s become a spitting image of his father.
Mark’s subsequent crisis of faith is focused a little too much on the act of killing, even though we’ve seen him kill before. Granted, he’s usually taken the lives of various monsters and kaiju, but even the episode’s framing leaves him with little choice, and the season hasn’t established any major dilemmas for him in this regard. In comparison, the comic sees Mark taking this step by killing a possessed Russ Livingston, who Robot reminds him was just an innocent host, making his dilemma much murkier. Maybe the episode’s missing puzzle piece is a more complex moral conundrum, or at least, a more rigorous spiritual reckoning.
After some distraught wandering, Mark escapes this purgatorial dimension a little too easily, with the help of a future version of the Guardians, though a word of advice from an older Atom Eve leads to a particularly meaningful scene with present day Eve. As the episode winds down – though not before its one obligatory Robot-Monster Girl scene, and its reveal that Dupli-Kate is alive – Mark bears his soul to Debbie about how trapped he feels by the pressure of being a superhero, and about how his personal life has fallen apart. When he catches a glimpse of Amber overhead, he doesn’t descend to speak to her (after all, he just put her in mortal danger last week), but he instead catches up with Eve, one of the only people who knows what he’s going through.
However, when it comes time to come clean about his feelings for her, he stops short, tragically afraid of how getting close to someone might endanger them. It is, perhaps, the most heroic thing he’s ever done – though he does take Eve up on her offer of using her shoulder to cry on.
It’s a gentle moment to end an emotionally brutal season for Mark, even though the episode leaves several threads without resolution, for better or worse. There’s the ancient mummy business, which doesn’t originate in the comics, but keeps popping up once or twice a season at key moments without actually going anywhere. But there’s also the question of Nolan and Allen, who are on the verge of joining forces in prison, as the finale ends on a particularly interesting note. While Mark has tipped over the edge of violence, and distanced himself from his loved once, Nolan appears to have reached a place of spiritual reckoning: he loves and misses Debbie. It’s as though father and son have switched places somehow, charting an especially interesting roadmap for Season 3.
Verdict
The climactic villain is effectively a stranger, but Invincible’s Season 2 finale puts Mark through just enough emotional torment to work. “I Thought You Were Stronger” is uneven, with quickfire detours that don’t amount to much, but at its best, it fires on all cylinders as it brings the show’s hero to his lowest, most conflicted point while setting up an especially intriguing Season 3.
