After last year’s midseason finale left Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun) bruised and bloodied at the hands of Viltrumites, the second half of Invincible’s second season kicks off with an entry that, despite being occasionally rushed, is focused on rebuilding. Nolan (J.K. Simmons), now captured by his kin, is unfortunately nowhere to be seen, and the series’ leading women unfortunately get the short end of the stick. But despite dropping the ball as an ensemble piece, Episode 5 advances the show’s plot definitively setting up major battles on three different fronts in the process.
Season 2 opened with Mark recovering from his beatdown by Nolan and taking it rather poorly. He begins the second half in a similar position – i.e. in a bloody pulp – but this time around, he comes out of it in a much healthier place, not only helping the Thraxans rebuild their fallen kingdom, but believing that Nolan is a better man. Two months go by, and while his younger, purple-skinned half-brother remains an infant, the child’s mantis-like mother Andressa (Rhea Seehorn) has entered old age, and hopes to charge Mark with his care once she passes. Mark, though reluctant to take him (and to return home so soon), has evolved considerably. He’s a responsible hero now, so he accepts what’s best for his yet-unnamed sibling.
In Mark’s absence, things remain a combination of goofy and dangerous on Earth. The Guardians of the Globe battle Omnipotus, a giant, Skeletor-like creature, who commands them to “tremble before my unlimited power” – to which The Immortal (Ross Marquand) retorts in deadpan fashion: “No!” Meanwhile, Donald (Chris Diamantopoulos) finally confronts GDA head honcho Cecil (Walton Goggins) about his missing memories and cyborg arm, a disorienting discovery that Cecil callously comes clean about, with little care for Donald’s emotional state. This subplot is only given a small handful of scenes – Mark’s return home takes up most of the runtime – but it feels emotionally volatile.
Unfortunately, the episode also continues Invincible’s trend of using single, fleeting scenes to nominally get us up to speed on the goings on elsewhere. At Guardians HQ, the teenager Robot (Zachary Quinto) shows concern for Immortal’s training exercises and their reverse-aging effects on his romantic interest, Monster Girl (Grey Griffin). But she swiftly rebuffs his interference before the episode moves on, and seldom folds this interaction into subsequent scenes in which the duo appears.
The Mark-centric scenes also suffer for similar reasons. His mother, Debbie (Sandra Oh), has long been the show’s emotional core, but we don’t get to see how she reacts when Mark shares the news about Nolan and his half-Thraxan son – and asks her to take care of the kid. It’s economical in terms of plot – this information is familiar to the audience, though not to Debbie – but it robs the character and the audience of a sequence key to her emotional journey. Instead of witnessing and experiencing her rollercoaster of emotions, the scene simply skips forward to her acceptance of looking after the child of the man who betrayed her. Similarly, when Mark reunites with his girlfriend Amber (Zazie Beetz) at college, the episode fades past these difficult revelations, to more quickly get Mark from point A to B. The episode may be titled “This Must Come As a Shock,” but few moments of shock actually end up on screen.
On the plus side, a conversation that plays out to its fullest potential involves not only Atom Eve (Gillian Jacobs) but surprisingly, Rex Splode (Jason Mantzoukas), her goofy, fast-talking ex who finally slows down to have a serious, meaningful chat. Eve, having turned her back on heroism after messing up one too many times, is in desperate need of a pep talk, and the fact that Rex steps up works as its own little redemptive arc, though in true Invincible fashion, it’s practically a premonition of doom for the seemingly reformed hero (he makes it out of the episode alive, but not in one piece).
Everything goes wrong at once for Mark and the Guardians. Just as Cecil is about to send his men to snatch Mark’s baby brother from Debbie’s arms, the show’s Martian chickens come home to roost. Shapesmith (Ben Schwartz), an alien who’s been moonlighting as human astronaut Rus Livingston, finally comes clean when the Guardians learn of a Martian ship approaching the atmosphere, though it turns out Cecil and Immortal were already aware of his deception. The real Rus, now controlled by an alien hivemind, makes his way to Earth as part of a conquering mission, forcing Cecil to ask Mark to return to space (along with some of the other Guardians) despite admonishing him for leaving in the first place.
Things don’t quite go to plan aboard the Martian ship, and they aren’t much rosier on Earth, since the newly re-formed Lizard League decides it’s time to take over the world’s nuclear arsenal. It’s a silly, cartoonish plot with serious consequences, including in the short run, when Shrinking Rae decides to pull a couple of Ant-Man-in-Thanos’-butt maneuvers with gory results. But while it works the first time, she isn’t quite so successful the second time she attempts to (literally) get inside her opponent’s head. But before we have time to process the horrifying implications, Rex has one of his hands chomped off and ends up with a gun to his head.
On Earth, and in space, the Guardians are in a spot of bother. However, once the episode’s credits play for a few seconds, the story starts back up again and presents us with Invincible’s most consequential mid-credits scene thus far. It turns out that Coalition leader Thaedus (Peter Cullen) hadn’t actually taken Allen (Seth Rogen) off life support in order to kill him. Rogen’s delightful cyclops alien regains consciousness and wakes up super buff, after which Thaedus explains his gambit: taking him off life support would either lead to a slow death, or make him strong enough to finally oppose the Viltrumites, albeit with Mark’s help. The aged leader also reveals that he’s a turncoat Viltrumite himself, and he does it in the funniest possible way: by ripping off his enormous beard to reveal a signature Viltrum mustache. Gasp!
