To call Invincible’s newest episode one of its best to date places it in good company, alongside the series’ vicious Season 1 finale. The formula involves striking a balance between bloodshed and quiet reflection, which “It’s Not That Simple” achieves in spades. This also makes a marked improvement over last week’s solid mid-season premiere, since it juggles its numerous action scenes without sacrificing vital character moments.
Episode 6 picks up where “This Must Come As a Shock” left off, with most of the Guardians stuck on a Martian ship as a slithering hivemind of Sequids approaches, while their B-team on Earth finds itself at the mercy of the Lizard League. The space-set action proves propulsive, with flashes of fear and introspection from the likes of Robot (Zachary Quinto) and Immortal (Ross Marquand) nestled neatly amidst the mayhem. Invincible typically treats this kind of thing as fleeting window dressing limited to single scenes, but in “It’s Not That Simple,” the result is, quite fittingly, more complex. Mark (Steven Yeun) manages to save the day with Robot’s homemade bomb, but Robot can’t seem to reconcile his very new, very human emotions – in this case, the rush of fear – with his feelings for Monster Girl. In trying to control his own anxieties, he offers to “fix” her too, a continued insistence she still rejects. Robot may have a human body now, but he hasn’t quite figured out individuality.
For the first time in the series, Immortal ends up imbued with real pathos too. (Not counting his sheer rage at losing his team to Omni-Man last season.) His brief skirmish with Mark aboard the ship, where he has but seconds to admit that Mark is more capable of stopping the Sequids, sends him on a spiral of self-reflection. This, coupled with Dupli-Kate’s death back on Earth, leaves him in a particularly volatile place, leading to his outburst against delightful cyclops alien Allen (Seth Rogen) when he arrives to seek Mark’s help.
Like the Martian half of last week’s cliffhanger, the story’s Earth-bound goings on are quick to resolve, albeit in gory fashion. A gun to a character’s head during a prolonged standoff is no guarantee they’ll get out alive; Invincible may be a superhero cartoon, but when it comes to depicting death and making it last, it’s more Walking Dead or Game of Thrones than the MCU. Then again, being shot in the head is no guarantee a character will actually die, which makes Rex’s fate particularly disturbing.
The show certainly isn’t afraid to kill off characters (it practically began with a massacre), but it also knows that keeping a recently reformed douchebag like Rex in play is a far more interesting fate. Seeing his life flash before his eyes makes him contemplate his past actions even further, which makes him a good shoulder to cry on when Mark finds himself in search of relationship advice. Granted, the bullet wound seems to have totally removed Rex’s already flimsy filter, but that’s an issue for later down the road. For now, all it means is that Eve (Gillian Jacobs) – who seems to still have feelings for Mark – may have caught wind of his issues with Amber.
Mark and Amber’s re-reunion is awkward and strained, but their acknowledgement of the growing distance between them (physically and emotionally) is yet another display of the characters’ newfound maturity. It’s the most heartbreaking kind of drama to witness: They both know their relationship might be untenable, because Mark will always have to step up to be Earth’s savior, and Amber will always be left behind. Nothing is resolved by the end of the episode, but seeking out sage advice – from Art (Mark Hamill) and Eve respectively, in a deftly cross-cut scene – helps put their problems into perspective. Maybe there’s still a chance for them?
On the domestic side of things, despite being emotionally shafted last week, Debbie (Sandra Oh) gets plenty of great material this time, including a minor but lucid subplot about figuring out the best route of childcare for Mark’s adorable half-Thraxan baby brother, Oliver. Cecil’s (Walton Goggins) insistance on helping out certainly opens the door to more family-versus-government drama, with the potential of Mark having to oppose his boss and his friends, but the episode instead goes a much quieter route. Rather than insisting upon snatching Oliver from Debbie, he presents her with options for her to consider, and even sends undercover nannies her way, one of whom comes clean about her double-agent status.
Directly or otherwise, Cecil looms large over the episode. His shadow extends to what should be a joyous reunion between William (Andrew Rannells) and his former flame, Rick (Luke Macfarlane), who was injured in a battle on campus. However, the fact that Donald (Chris Diamantopoulos) brings Rick back to the dorms, and doesn’t seem particularly thrilled about it, tells its own story, since the GDA agent has been dealing with the discovery that his body was re-constructed with metallic parts after he was nearly killed by Omni-Man. Like Donald, Rick’s memory of his trauma seems to have been mostly wiped, though he retains hints of it in the form of nightmares, leading to a particularly poetic line: “Who am I if I can’t even remember what I’m missing?”
The missing pieces of each character make up the episode’s throughline, expressed in every scene through silent reflection – though perhaps the biggest missing piece right now is Nolan/Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons). The character, who was last seen struggling with his newfound humanity in the midseason finale, shows up briefly in a credit stinger (where he’s being held in a Viltrumite prison), but his cryptic advice to Mark makes for a worthwhile mystery in his absence. It’s one the audience has been ahead on for some time – Nolan’s sci-fi novels likely contain hidden truths based in reality – but finally seeing this unravel, in the form of animated re-creations of his fictional adventures, is a delight unto itself.
With Allen and Mark finally reunited, and with a coded roadmap for how to defeat Viltrum in the form of Nolan’s writing, a larger galactic war looms on the horizon – even though Mark desperately needs some downtime from all his space adventures. As if that weren’t enough, another stinger hints at the return of dimension-hopping megalomaniac Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown), who has a bone to pick with Mark and the GDA. Hopefully, Season 2 can maintain this level of emotional command in its final pair of episodes, during which shit will probably hit the fan on multiple fronts.
