Mark Grayson is not a smart dude. It’s one of the things that’s both fascinating, and sometimes frustrating, about Invincible: Even after three seasons in the superhero game, its protagonist rarely thinks past the next punch, whether he’s in the middle of a fight with a giant imaginary Gyarados or simply trying to chart a moral position more complicated than “All bad guys should be put in prison forever.” The show’s decision earlier this season to directly parallel Mark’s moral positions with those of Cecil—who went from extrajudicially executing supercriminals to readily employing them as the stakes of his war to protect the Earth became steadily more terrifying—suggests that we’re meant to be watching our hero’s slow-burn moral development, a steady refinement of more complicated ethical positions. But given that “This Was Supposed To Be Easy” directly parallels an episode from the middle of the show’s first season—and ends with Mark espousing essentially the same “Golly, this is all too complicated!” confusion as he did back in 2021—it suggests his maturation isn’t delayed so much as it is “concussed.”
Given how often they’ve popped up, and how much focus they get here, Invincible clearly likes Kate and Paul. It’s not hard to see why, either: Their powers play to both the show’s strengths and its themes. On a surface level, as a pair of one-person expendable armies, they allow the show to get its fill of extremely red meat while also letting the animators off the leash. (It’s a small moment, but Paul generating a clone just to use as a human ladder after he leaps off a prison balcony is such a cool little touch.) The siblings’ bodies are literally disposable, each semi-fatal splash of red another reminder of the horrendously violent stakes that superbeings operate at in this world. And on a deeper level, they get into the ideas running at the heart of the series: Invincible‘s moral divide tends to boil down to whether you think people with superpowers are obligated to follow rules that are, for them, optional, even as they’re asked to serve as frontline fighters in a never-ending war. Kate and Paul’s argument here, drawn between his naked self-interest and her literal endless self-sacrifice, outline that split about as well as anything in this season has.
Meanwhile, pancakes! The whiplash between sanguine drama and domestic silliness has always been part of Invincible‘s DNA, but it’s been a minute since the show made the switch from “exploding bodies” to “teenage farce” quite this abruptly. To set the scene: Now that Mark and Eve are an official couple, they apparently feel obligated to do a song-and-dance around trying to hide the fact that they’re frequently having sex in Mark’s childhood bedroom, kicking off a whole “Let’s move out!” plotline that both begins and terminates in the span of this single episode. If I’m being honest, it’s one of those points where Invincible‘s generally excellent voice cast isn’t necessarily up to the material they’re being stuck with: Between the length of the series at this point, the way the characters are drawn, and most especially the way both Steven Yeun and Gillian Jacobs sound as undeniably “in their forties” as they actually are, it’s really hard to buy the couple as being this dopily young. They’re presumably meant to come off as “optimistically naïve teens,” but land at “pretty dumb adults” instead. At least Sandra Oh gets to have some fun needling the duo, and the under-the-table kicking between Mark and Oliver at breakfast sells their brotherly dynamic much better than a bunch of lectures and games of high-flying catch.
Mark and Eve’s plans—and their subsequent money woes—bring us to the main event of the episode: the intersection between Eve’s goofy money-making scheme to rent Invincible out as a private superhero of the carceral state and supercriminal Titan’s orders to bust Paul out of jail to make nice with the allegedly terrifying Order. As a way to create scenes where our superhero punches a big green dragon—and to get Jeffery Donovan’s pleasantly unhinged crime boss Machine Head back into the mix—this is all basically fine. But like the first Titan storyline from season one, it also feels completely artificial in its efforts to toss some moral murk into the show’s mix. (I would love to get the day-to-day details on Titan’s kinder, gentler criminal empire, which seems to entirely revolve around community projects and keeping his neighborhoods safe from, uh, crime. Where do the big stacks of cash come from? It can’t all be cookie sales.) Just like last time, Titan effortlessly uses Mark’s simple “see it, punch it” mindset to clean up his problems and even gets to dispatch his true foe and get in some quality daddy-daughter time. Back in his first appearance—when he was still voiced by Mahershala Ali, with Todd Williams now stepping into the role—Titan proved that his real power wasn’t his rock skin but his ability to surf the waves of Invincible‘s tumultuous moral oceans and compromise where Mark can only smash. Four years later…the show is still showing exactly that same beat, with no real development in any of its positions. It might make for a decent dragon fight, but it’s narratively and philosophically déjà vu.
“This Was Supposed To Be Easy,” then, falls back into the pattern I’ve started noticing with the less effective episodes of Invincible‘s third season: It has a few very high highs (see also the increasingly sweet romance between Rex and Rae and the scenes that show Oliver controlling his temper while hanging out with his new human friends) interspersed with a low. At the center of all the issues, to my mind, is Mark himself. I like Yeun, and I don’t need my heroes to always make the “right” decision when confronted with moral problems. But after two-and-a-half seasons of a coming-of-age story, at some point, the age has to come: Watching this guy naively bounce from punch to punch, shocked each time it fucks him over, is beginning to lose its luster, especially when Invincible has made it clear that its world is so much smarter than the hero it’s named for.
Stray observations
- • Title transition: We’re back into good ol’ Invincible yellow-on-blue. (In other color-based news: I still do not like the blue-black suit, and it still makes Mark look like a bug.)
- • Mark not knowing how to set up an email address made him seem kind of doofy back when the comics were being published in the 2000s. Now he sounds completely insane.
- • “Cut the shit, rocks-for-brains, and get to the point. I’m missing my computer classes. How else am I going to learn Microsoft Word and get a job in a fucking office?”
- • It sometimes feels like Mark thinks “prison” is a magical place where all the world’s problems can go. (Again, I know this dopiness is intentional, but it doesn’t make hanging with the dude every episode feel any less eye-roll-y.)
- • Today, in on-the-nose-but-effective needle drops for an episode where our heroes start a private security firm: “Security,” by Amyl And The Sniffers.
- • I’ve been hard on the show’s animation this season, so let me give some props: Eve turning herself into an armored flail for Mark to swing at the dragon (complete with a little Magical Girl Twirl) was a really fun touch.
- • See also: Machine Head’s prison cell pin-up poster being a woman with another Machine Head.
- • I normally try not to get bogged down in superhero logistics questions—I tend to file them all under this “Why not just have Superman turn a big crank on a generator to power the planet forever?” installment of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal—but since the episode itself raises it: I can’t help but think that a woman who can create any matter she wants on a whim might have better fundraising options than a private-security company.
- • “Almost feels like cheating…buuuut, I like cheating!” Donovan really does give a great voice performance here, and it makes Machine Head’s return one of the highlights of the episode.
- • Oh, thank god: Mr. Liu the dragon man is still alive. For a minute there, I was very worried for all the extremely fervent “Mr. Liu the one-note bad guy” fans in the audience.
