Said act of filicide comes at the end of another hard-hitting Invincible parable, this one centered on one of the survivors of Nolan Grayson’s attack on the city of Chicago. One year ago, 2,341 people got murdered in the Windy City as an object lesson in tough parenting from a god to his wayward son, and two of them were Scott Duvall’s beloved sister and niece. Until that day, Scott (Aaron Paul, giving a great voice turn in this episode) was just a semi-normal dude, a GDA researcher with a low-level and useless energy absorption power that he never intended to use on anybody. Afterwards, as his grief curdled into rage, Scott became a lot of thing: a crusader for justice calling for superhero accountability, the office guy nobody wants to eat lunch with, and then, maybe inevitably, Powerplex, the supervillain(?) at the heart of this episode. Scott doesn’t want to rob banks. He doesn’t desire glory or supremacy over others. (Indeed, the show’s willingness to not let Powerplex’s expanding superpowers overwhelm him with a less focused motivation is one of the episode’s better touches.) Scott Duvall only wants one thing: To make Invincible hurt as badly as he has.
The serialized nature of Invincible‘s storytelling often makes it hard for the show to fully explore a theme, with the need to push forward five or six different plotlines per episode getting in the way of landing a bigger idea. Like “You Were My Hero,” though, “All I Can Say” benefits mightily from focusing, especially since it’s doing so on one of the series’ biggest ideas: how much individual lives matter in a world where select individuals can kill thousands of people on a whim, and the question of who, in that situation, is accountable to who. Mark, Rex, Oliver, Scott, and even Debbie’s boyfriend Paul all weigh in at different points tonight on the topic of who “matters” in a universe where individual family spats can develop the body count of a natural disaster. The episode’s coldest moment (pre-baby nuking) doesn’t involve punches being thrown at all: It’s a district attorney telling Scott that the rules genuinely don’t apply to superbeings. Eve—typically on the ball (see also her assessment that Mark needs to understand he’s also one of Nolan’s victims)—might correctly point out that Powerplex is unwell, but the episode never goes so far as to outright state that he’s entirely wrong: Mark might cosplay as human, awkwardly trying to deflect Oliver’s moral algebra comparing the number of people their dad saved versus the number he killed. But every time Cecil or the GDA has tried to even loosely police his behavior, it’s been all death threats and smashed Pentagon ceilings. The fact that Mark is, ultimately, only accountable to his own thoughts and feelings is presumably a big reason why Angstrom Levy’s got so many evil alt-Invincibles available to draft into his own little superteam in the episode’s stinger.
So while “All I Can Say” does still do some of the show’s usual meandering—checking in on Robot’s efforts to stop Monster Girl from de-aging, Rae’s decision to quit superheroing for good, Mark and Amber reconnecting at William’s birthday festivities, etc.—it does so with a much better eye than usual on demonstrating how those small human moments impact the superhuman ones. At the same time, it makes the smart move to keep treating Scott as a protagonist for the hour, checking in on his home life and showing the lengths he’s going to to get his revenge without actually becoming the supervillain everyone keeps trying to paint him as. If the episode has a major weakness, though, it’s also in those domestic scenes: Despite casting Kate Mara in the part, Scott’s wife Becky is barely a character, simply serving as a steely-eyed enabler of her husband’s revenge scheme. We get one good moment right at the end, when she turns on Invincible when he tries to “rescue” her. But for the most part, Becky’s there to give Scott sympathetic shading and serve as a symbol of the cost of his obsession, getting jerky-fied with their baby when his powers rage out of control in the episode’s final fight.
Which raises the same question I’ve been tacitly asking with all these “Fuck!”s: Is this the bridge too far? Invincible is a gory show, sometimes with deadly seriousness and sometimes with a gleeful sense of fun. (Reminder that Multi-Paul’s multi-body jailbreak was just last week.) But even for this series, a slow, lingering pan over the body of an infant with its hair burnt off and its eyes melted out of its skull, is fucking bleak—and, worse, possibly gratuitous. The show wasn’t being subtle about the cost of the path Scott was going down with his vendetta before he cooked his family, so both going through with it, and showing the results, is an exercise in excess more than necessary underlining. When I sit down to review next week’s episode, and the show makes a joke about Mark’s comic collection or Rex’s immaturity, that image is still going to be kicking around in the back of my head: “Yeah, but they sure did kill that baby.” It’s a new standard in extremity for the series, an expansion of its own acceptable behaviors, and doing that always alters the way we receive a TV show. In this case, it also has a more immediate consequence: taking an episode that felt like one of Invincible‘s more pleasantly focused dramas in recent memory and pushing it over the line into brutal and heavy-handed melodrama. Mark, and Steven Yeun, drag it back a little in the final moments, demonstrating the weight this encounter had on him, but still: They nuked the baby! Fuck!
Stray observations
- • Genuine gut-drop as the cold open zoomed out and showed that familiar cityscape, realizing what’s about to happen just before it does. (Looking back, the show uses all the same shots as “Where I Really Come From,” including the crossing guard and the guy getting in his car.)
- • “Our laws don’t apply in situations like this.”
- • The GDA refers to Anissa as Viltrumite Subject 3; Oliver is 2A.
- • Scott is so insanely twitchy at his job that at first I thought he’d somehow infiltrated the GDA.
- • That’s John DiMaggio playing low-level supervillain/training dummy The Elephant.
- • Aaron Paul sounds goofy and forced trying to give his monologues, but it feels like it’s by design.
- • Structurally, the decision to stretch Powerplex’s vendetta out across multiple incidents—including, admittedly, some welcome time with Ben Schwartz’s Shapesmith—does deflate some of the episode’s momentum.
- • The gag with repeatedly dropping the title screen as Powerplex rants about Invincible is both funny and cute. (And then they sure did kill that baby.) The final sequence flips to blue-on-white, for those of us keeping track.
- • I know they’re cheekbones, but the lines on Paul’s face always make him look like a Muppet to me.
- • This week in very obvious needle drops: Rudy techs out to Beck’s “Ghettochip Malfunction.” (Also, he’s apparently solved Monster Girl’s transformation problem.)
- • Rex on romance: “I don’t want to say it was magical, because magic scares the shit out of me.”
- • If you’re going to create a “monument to the dead” for your TV show in a resolution people can read, you might want to make sure that the repeated names aren’t quite so easy to pick out. (Many condolences to the A. Goodman family though.)
- • Yes, show, it’s very cute to draw the two cops investigating the memorial fight as Bunk and McNulty from The Wire. (And then they sure did kill that baby.)
- • How the hell did Jason Mantzoukas become the heart of this show?
- • I know I am belaboring this point, but the second zoom in to the little burnt-up baby hand is one of the more disturbing things I think I’ve ever seen in animation.
- • “Scott. I remember them, Jessica and Gretchen. I didn’t know their names before, but I remember them. Things changed for me after Chicago. At first, all I could think of were the people I couldn’t save. But that made me bad at being able to save the ones I could. So I buried those feelings away. I think that was a mistake now. I hope that’s a comfort to you.” I gave Mark, and Steven Yeun, a hard time last week, so I’ll acknowledge that this is a good, well-delivered piece of character growth.
- • The reveal of Viltrumite Mark and his little mustache in the stinger is very funny. Also I’m starting to suspect where those different Invincible color schemes we’ve been flipping between in the title cards have been coming from.
