Versus, well, Everyone

Season three of Amazon PrimeWhile Netflix might be the largest streaming seervice right now, other major contenders have come into the game. One of the biggest, and best funded, is Amazon Prime, the streaming-service add-on packing with free delivery and all kinds of other perks Amazon gives its members. And, with the backing of its corporate parent, this streaming service very well could become the market leader.’s adaptation of Invincible just wrapped, and once again it’s time to decide if this series is headed in the right direction or not. I always end up feeling a touch conflicted about this show because it’s an adaptation of a series I like, one that I read through dozens of volumes back in the day. It was a great series, and when it wrapped, I (and most fans) felt like they got a solid, satisfying story that explored all aspects of the universe. It took about 15 years to tell its whole story and once it was done it felt like nothing more had to be said on the matter.

That’s not to say an adaptation is bad, in concept, just that it’s treading on ground that was well set back many years ago. A television adaptation would have a big hill to climb to actually be anywhere near as good as the original comic series, and while the show makes many of the right moves – having original creator Robert Kirkman on board, having a visual style that matches closely with the original comics – it still is its own thing, something we inevitably have to compare to what came before. Hell, because it has Kirkman on board and purposefully tries to match the art style of the comics, it invites the comparison. And, unfortunately, it often feels like the show can’t quite match the magic that the comics had.

A lot of this comes down to pacing and the fact that a television series, even one that tries to match book-to-book stories with season-to-season arcs, can never match the pace of a comic series. When we consider that major arcs happened across six or so issues, and those issues came out once a month, a reader would get a small bit of forward progression each month that they could digest and enjoy before moving on to the next small chapter of the adventure. Reading the comic in collected volumes sped that pace up and, in some ways, felt much more like getting a season of television dropped on you. Every six months a new chapter of the story was released, and you could speed through it all.

Somehow, though, the television series feels even more rushed than the comics. Some of this is down to the fact that once you have the episodes, you can churn through them quickly. Amazon released the first three episodes for this third season all at once, and then went once a week from there for the other five episodes of the season. You had to pace yourself some, but it was nothing like the month-to-month wait for the comics to arrive. And that says nothing about the fact that the third season compresses and condenses down material, as the previous seasons did. Some plotting and character arcs feel rushed, while the show feels like it revels in other aspects of the series – the violent aspects.

As I’ve noted before, Invincible, the television series, is brutally violent. It inherits this from the comic, which tried to mash Silver Age bright and colorful storytelling up against the violence, horror, and drama of the modern age of superheroes. I thought the comics pulled off the balancing act fairly well, but it did get fairly violent as the series went on. This makes sense considering we’re talking about a hero (and many of his villains) who have the powers of (effectively) SupermanThe first big superhero from DC Comics, Superman has survived any number of pretenders to the throne, besting not only other comic titans but even Wolrd War II to remain one of only three comics to continue publishing since the 1940s.. When these bruisers come together, people get hurt. Faces get bashed, skulls get smashed, limbs get broken, bodies get torn apart. There was logic to this in the comics, and while the panels were splashed in blood, it usually felt like it was in service of the story (although we could have a debate about the later books some day, I’m sure).

The television series maintains that level of violence, but it hits differently in the series. This is largely because the series is animated, not a series of still frames on a page, so you see more of the gore, watch it splash out and flow, get every animated hit, rip, and twitch. It’s a lot, and that’s coming from a guy that loves watching zombie films. The gorier the better. But even the zombie films of George Romero, which could be quite gory, used that gore in service of morals and story. In the case of the animated Invincible, it feels less like the show is trying to show us the perils of violence and more that it wants to revel in it, like a 12-year-old edgelord.

The Amazon Prime series doesn’t shy away from any of this at all, letting it all flow out. And I don’t think I’d mind that if it were in service of a story that had something to say about its main character, Mark Greyson (aka Invincible, splashed on screen with bright colors and ominous music). The trouble is that despite the eight episodes of this series, with all its violence, villains, and big battles, it doesn’t really feel like the show really has anything to say about Mark at all. The best episodes of this season are all about the other characters, from the head of the Earth Defense Force, Cecil, to Mark’s estranged, former supervillain father, Omniman. Hell, side characters like Rex Splode, Shrink Rae, Robot, and Monster Girl get more honest development than Mark does.

The struggle is that the show keeps reverting Mark back to neutral over and over. He wants to step out of his father’s shadow, but he keeps getting dragged back to fighting the Viltrumites. He wants to forge a relationship forward with Atom Eve, his long-time friend and new girlfriend, but then each big step he could take (like moving in with her) is rolled back by the end of that same episode. He wants to be his own man, his own superhero, but then events keep pushing him back to the GDF. He never gets to push ahead on his own. Ever.

The Viltrumites are a big problem as well. When they were first introduced, and their power was revealed, they felt deadly, dangerous. How could Mark beat one of these when he was so weak? But the show has consistently introduced more and more of them (and, for the sake of this season, we’ll consider any alternate universe Marks as more Viltrumites, since that’s effectively what they are in the context of the show) and it’s watered down how effective they are as villains. The entire back half of this season is taken up with one fight against Viltrumites or another, and what should have been the little seen and oft threatened villain for the show has become old hat.

Sure, the Viltrumites are great for providing violence, but the show is both soaked and gore and so boring about it that it’s hard to get worked up over another Viltrumite massacre. This is especially true when most of the people that get killed are just random civilians without any development. And even when the show does try to get us to care about the random deaths of innocent bystanders, such as in the episode devoted to Powerplex (a man that wanted to avenge his sister and niece who were killed in the fight between Mark and his father) it’s done in such a way that we never really care about Powerplex, and if we can’t care about him then we certainly don’t care about the people he cared about. It’s just a cascade of mistakes.

I suppose I would be more invested in the show if it had handled one core aspect correctly: the relationship between Mark and Atom Eve. This should be the heart of the series, what makes us care about both of these characters. But like a lot of the show, the development of their relationship is rushed. They go from friends that hang out once every three episodes or so to suddenly dating, sleeping together, and in love, all in the span of two episodes. It’s such a hard, sudden turn for the characters that I just couldn’t get invested in them. I wanted to, especially because I know how much I liked them in the comics, but I just didn’t feel it here. And if I couldn’t get into it, despite knowing these characters from the comics and enjoying their relationship over there, how can people that never watched the show get attached to them? It just doesn’t work.

It feels like, because of rushed storytelling and in the absence of solid story and character development, Invincible in its third season tries to cover up all of that with more violence, more action, more gore. Some of the moments in the series are thrilling, some of the fights shocking, but it doesn’t amount to much when I don’t really care about the characters. If this show were about Rex and Rae, or Robot and Monster Girl, or basically anyone else other than Mark and Eve I might have actually liked it more since those characters actually got development and had arcs this season. But the main heart and soul of the show around its titular character is missing and it leaves this season feeling like the weakest of all the seasons yet. And you can’t cover over that with more blood, no matter how much you try.