"Invincible Season 4" Surprisingly Good

 

    Well, I quickly skimmed over my review for season three of Invincible, and I have to say, most of my original critiques remained. I do think I was quite nice with my rating for the season all things considered, but I was surprised at how much I enjoyed season four. I was just seeing so much discourse, both positive and negative, online being fed to me, so i felt like I had to give the show a spin just to see how much I agreed, and disagreed with everything. And honestly? I was more locked in for this season than I thought I would be. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely still some episodes that are pretty big duds, but for the most part I'm glad to see this show finally start to get it's legs wet and do some more action. Let's talk about it.

    One thing I cannot get out of my head this season was a tweet about someone saying J.K. Simmons is phoning it in. While I don't necessarily agree, I think it's more just bad voice acting direction than anything. If you listen to season one, especially when Simmons does Omni Man's whole speech to Mark, you can really feel the emotion in his voice, pleading to Mark to join and not to make the wrong decision. This season, instead you get this stoic, awkward, almost confused Omni Man who sounds like an alien just learning to use emotions. And I get why they might do this, it's new for him/his people to apologize to others, but also, he literally just spent the last 20 years on Earth, being emotional around his own wife, and he admitted it was more real than acting. So why is he acting like he's never had to "be human" or "be emotional" if that makes sense.

    Other than that once again I am hear to complain about power scaling. Mark just needs to be stronger. I don't know how you're going to build up to the scene where Mark kills Thragg if he literally breaks his own arm trying to break Thragg's skull. I mean he just killed Conquest. I do think it's nice they're making Thragg so strong, but he literally spends a very long time fighting Battle Beast, he's not that invincible or anything. I just don't know what sort of training they're going to be able to introduce that makes Mark's fight against Thragg feel earned if that makes sense. I also just think they needed to make the Coalition's side stronger. Allen at this point of the story should have been able to kill Viltrumite's by himself without any sort of help, the same should be said about Zoey and Battle Beast. I think the show's going to need to make them a bit stronger for the next couple of seasons, otherwise it might feel a bit fake seeing them help contribute meaningfully to the war effort. Like I swear during the prison break last season Allen felt strong enough to kill a Viltrumite by himself, and now he's struggling with Tech Jacket's help? 

    There are a couple of dud episodes too, but for the most part I thought they did a good job adapting most of the comic book beats. The "show-only" storyline was boring as hell, Satan felt quite weak, and I did not care for him or Detective Darkblood in any capacity, nor the way they talked. I surprisingly cared about Paul? I see they're trying to make Nolan's redemption feel much more earned and realistic, especially with characters like Oliver and Debbie, and honestly I think it's working, even if things are going to end up in the same way the comics did. I have no strong thoughts on Zoey being a female. Tech Jacket had little personality in the comics, and they haven't done enough with her character for me to feel any such way about her. If you do you're probably caught up in some culture war thing and need to go outside. 

Final Score: 75/100

    Kind of interested to see what story beats they'll be able to adapt for the next season. This part of Invincible kind of reminds me of The Walking Dead where Kirkman doesn't really know when to end things so it just kind of blends together a bunch of lower or mid-tier events before racing towards the finale. Like realistically I don't know how many episodes of the final season they're even going to spend on Emperor Mark anyways. I do hope he only spends about an episode in a coma, I don't know how many of the other characters are interesting enough to justify that many episodes frankly. We'll see though. I can't believe I'm saying this, but this season and the sort of online fandom that has swelled around it has me actually excited for the next one. And I wasn't planning on even touching this season until it was finally over, I guess some things do change after all.