“Your time on Earth has made you soft.” “Don’t count on it!” This dialogue exchange arrives roughly halfway through “Don’t Do Anything Rash,” the penultimate episode of Invincible’s fourth season, and there’s every chance that I’m the only person on the planet who’s currently fixated on it. There are certainly more interesting moments in this episode, which spends almost the entirety of its runtime on a massive throwdown between the assembled galactic heroes and the skeleton crew of the Viltrum Empire. At points—especially as it accelerates toward a spectacular, apocalyptic climax—”Rash” manages to transcend Invincible’s usual cruising-altitude tendencies, making for a fitfully fascinating hour of TV. (It even, loath as I am to admit it, made me think seriously about the Viltrumites as a people for a bit.) But then my mind flicks back to that absolutely nothing, two-line exchange, tossed between Nolan Grayson and Viltrumite third-stringer Anissa as they briefly face off amid a wider Goku-on-Goku space fight, and I’m reminded of why this show so frequently exhausts me.
Maybe I’m primed to think about fighting video games anyway, since Invincible is releasing one (Invincible VS) in just a couple of weeks. But the rote, mechanical nature of those lines—clearly included, not to impart any information about any of our characters, but because it had been X number of seconds since either of these combatants talked—struck me as highly reminiscent of those little canned intros that brawlers growl at each other at the beginning of matches in a modern fighting game. The back-and-forth—which doesn’t boil down to much more than “You’re weak!” “Nuh-uh!”—illustrates nothing about Nolan’s strained relationship with his people, or what makes Anissa different from any of her near-identical cohorts, or even the actual moment-to-moment content of their face-off. It’s just filler dialogue, arriving as part of a filler confrontation inside a larger filler battle, and that feels like huge chunks of “Don’t Do Anything Rash” in miniature.
We open with (god help me) another Viltrum Empire flashback, showing how a brief moment of leniency on Imperial Regent Thragg’s part allowed Thedas to assassinate Viltrum’s beloved abusive dad/formative emperor Argall. Invincible seems convinced that we need to see things like this play out in real time in order to understand how the Viltrumites steered further and further into supremacy to avoid processing their generational traumas. But as sales pitches for that concept go, it’s pretty weak. There’s at least a bit of queasy fun to be had when Thragg uses Argall’s funeral as an attempt at a little light bonding-through-atrocity, inviting his people to violently cull each other with various Mortal Kombat finishers as a celebration of “strength.” (The death count for this little communal murder orgy isn’t clear, but the sheer scale of the slaughter is one more point against the show’s repeated attempts to try to make me feel bad by showing the big ring of corpses surrounding the planet. Any suggestion that Viltrumite lives were precious to these psychopaths before the Scourge virus hit them is pretty clearly bullshit.) Ten minutes in, the episode gets its first genuine spark of interest courtesy of (who else?) Conquest, when we get to hear Jeffrey Dean Morgan giggle at being the only Viltrumite to honestly enjoy their spate of collective bloodlust. But that spark of excitement, winning out over mustachioed stoicism, is short-lived, as we finally return to the exact moment in the present that we left off on last week.
A quick attempt to give our B-list heroes more characterization—before they fly off to Viltrum to try to kill Thragg after last week’s retreat—run pretty hard into the fact that most of these characters don’t actually have much of a character once you actually spend any time thinking about them. (Allen: chill dude. Tech Jacket: chill gal. Talia: chill space lady. Only Battle Beast gets to have any fun, with Michael Dorn taking nice, juicy bites out of the scenery.) After some desultory banter about favorite foods, they’ve arrived, and, just like that, we’ve arrived at the big battle scene that will eat up the entirety of the rest of this episode. Which means it’s time to talk about The Problem With Viltrumites again.
I’ve said my piece on the topic of Space Beef before, but this episode is lousy with it: largely anonymous Viltrumites floating weightlessly in space, shouting generic taunt barks at our heroes before slamming into them, with Thragg watching over the carnage like some sort of demonic Mario. It feels telling that, despite appearing in a number of episodes at this point, I can only keep some of these guys clear in my memory by their voice actors. My notes are full of lines like “The Clancy Brown one” or “The guy voiced by Phil LaMarr.” (They’re joined tonight by “Grandma Hair Knife,” who at least has a slightly more diverse set of fighting moves.) Invincible tries to add some diversity to this latest slab battle, giving Tech Jacket darts that make Viltrumites easier to rip apart and introducing Space Racer and a pack of the ice dinosaurs from back in episode two after the initial wave of energy has flagged. But a decent chunk of this episode is still given over to that “Don’t count on it!” stuff: action figures smooshing into each other because someone told this show it needed to be an hour long, despite frequently only seeming to have 30 minutes’ worth of material.
But, hey: That was all pretty negative, so let’s take a second to give out some kudos. Outside the fights themselves, which are mostly pretty dull, this is the first Invincible in a minute that’s seemed to have any interest in genuine visual storytelling, using the expansive canvas of animation to not just tell a story yanked from the comic books but to do something cool as animation. And I’m not just talking about the set-piece destruction of Viltrum, which I’ll get to in a second. There are grace notes throughout “Don’t Do Anything Rash,” from the way the hostile Viltrumites are seen lurking like murderous ghosts amid their dead billions to the demonic flash that fills the screen when Mark Grayson shoots his shot and tries to punch Thragg, only to find out how thoroughly he’s been outclassed. There are moments here where director Stephanie Gonzaga and her team are clearly thinking seriously about how pacing and visual flourishes contribute to an episode’s sense of mood without having to lean on music or dialogue. And while that sounds like a pretty low bar for an animated project to clear, it’s one Invincible has rarely felt all that interested in hurdling over in the past.
At the same time, the show briefly remembers that it can be a pretty great character drama when it wants to be, as Thragg takes a flash-step smacking of Nolan’s ass down through Viltrum’s atmosphere as an opportunity to privately pitch him on a very different flavor of redemption arc. This is literally the first time I’ve heard Lee Pace, a fine actor elsewhere, seem to actually give a shit about anything happening around him in this show, and it’s compelling: Thragg lays out everything seductive about supremacist ideology for a lightly receptive Omni-Man, reminding him of how comforting it can be to lay down your morality and just embrace a home that looks and feels like a philosophy of strength. (Which, conveniently, always seems to match up with Viltrumite strength; anything else is simply trickery or “cowardice.”) J.K. Simmons has fun playing verbal tennis here; Nolan doesn’t entirely dismiss what Thragg is saying, so much as he points out that it’s a losing position; Viltrum’s already dead. Which is when we finally see a crack of emotion in Thragg, one that recontextualizes all that skull-fetishizing he did last week: Despite ruling over a planet of 50 people surrounded by a planetary ring of corpses, he snaps when Nolan suggests Viltrum is a “tomb.” It only took all season, but we’ve finally got something compelling to latch onto with our main villain.
He spends the rest of the episode taking it out on everybody else, as we learn that Thragg really is in a whole other class of strength compared to every other character on this show. Invincible has had a lot of fights where new villains shrug off our heroes’ best hits, but rarely so convincingly; at no point does Thragg even sweat as he trounces everybody around him. In the end, Nolan and Thedas conclude that they can’t score any points by hitting the man himself, so they strike instead at his heart: Space Racer fires his “goes through anything” gun at Viltrum’s core, and Mark, Nolan, and Thedas fly down through the hole, eventually cracking the planet in half.
The resulting sequence is, genuinely, glorious and one of the coolest visuals Invincible has ever produced, as the initial strike transforms the surface of Viltrum into a vista not at all unlike hell and then makes it so much worse as our heroes delve deeper and deeper. Powerful both visually and metaphorically, it’s one of this show’s rare moments of superhero might that feel legitimately awe-inspiring, culminating in the sight of the planet shattered into lava-ravaged chunks. Thragg is slightly less appreciative, of course, dispatching Thedas with a decapi-tantrum before pulling the ol’ “impale a guy on your own arm” trick on Nolan. It’s only when he’s literally crushing Mark’s eyes—after the young hero previously caught his attention by revealing he killed Conquest—that we get any sense that the Imperial Regent can feel restraint at this point. Instead, he and his few remaining loyal subjects depart, with a mournful murmur of “We are too few already.”
A poignant—and long—shot of Mark and Nolan’s comatose bodies floating through space is finally interrupted by rescue, but the relief is short-lived. Oliver’s stuck in what the show probably can’t legally call a bacta tank after getting his arm ripped off in the fight (presumably just to drive home the Empire Strikes Back vibes of it all). And Mark finally realizes why Thragg was so curious about him and his Earth-grown strength. Turns out the Viltrumite War isn’t over; it’s just coming to the homefront.
This is a frustrating episode of television, because it highlights Invincible’s better and worse natures nearly simultaneously. There is a lot of filler here, as too many characters with not enough characterization slam into each other for long stretches of running time. That said, those moments when the show clearly gives a shit, instead of just killing time, are genuinely impressive. The more I’ve thought about season four of Invincible, the more convinced I am that its hour-long runtimes do it no favors. Cut the rote, fighting game moments out, and this could have legitimately been a great 30 minutes of TV.
Stray observations
- • I might complain about the opening flashbacks, but I’ll always tip my hat to a funny casting gag: If you have a character played by Peter “Optimus Prime” Cullen, who better to cast as his nemesis than Frank “Megatron” Welker?
- • The shots of the Viltrumite kids starting to beat on each other as part of Thragg’s trauma purge was successfully upsetting.
- • Thragg has a line where he says that (obviously unsuccessful) efforts are being made to find Argall’s kids; it’s not clear to me if that’s building to something or just a way to explain why his title is “Regent.”
- • Thank fucking Christ, they shaved Mark.
- • There’s a sweet moment when Oliver says his favorite food is Paul’s spaghetti and meatballs.
- • There’s a lurking idea here that, once he’s done with Thragg, Thedas is going to kill all Viltrumites, including Nolan and the boys. It doesn’t amount to anything, on account of “head came off,” but it’s a nice reminder that even the Viltrumites who’ve rejected the tenets of their racial superiority still think of the universe through that “we’re the only important ones” lens.
- • Does anyone else find Nolan’s refusal to put on some damn shoes distracting?
- • The artificiality of some of the fight setup is really goofy; Zoe only gets a handful of the “make Viltrumites vulnerable” darts because they’re really hard to create/the script said so.
- • Winston Duke doesn’t actually get anything fun to say as Space Racer, but his character’s gun is still one of the coolest effects on the show. Every time he tags a Viltrumite with it and leaves a perfectly circular hole in their corpses, I do a little fist pump.
- • It’s very polite of the planet’s molten core to burn off Mark & co.’s shirts but not their pants or underwear.
- • Oh, and Allen is now in charge of the Galactic Good Guys, presumably because it stops them from having to draw another guy.
William Hughes is a staff writer at The A.V. Club.
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