This review contains spoilers Invincible season 3, episode 1, “You’re Not Laughing Now.”
As it begins its third season, Invincible is in a strange place where ultra-violent gore is one of the animated series’ major selling points, even though it has few lasting impacts. There are emotional and physical fallouts to all sorts of other events – which the season premiere, “You’re Not Laughing Now,” establishes pretty clearly – but this one gaping stylistic hole is hard to ignore.
Near the end of season 2, Rex Splode, Ray, and Dupli-Kate were horribly maimed (it’s a wonder they didn’t die), but they’ve all made full recoveries by “You’re Not Laughing Now.” Rex, of course, has a well-disguised mechanical arm, which is only a joke so far, but it does at least tie into a larger ongoing theme: the ethics of augmenting people with robotics, which the villain D.A. Sinclair was guilty of back in the show’s initial episodes. By the end of the season’s first hour, Mark/Invincible ends up witnessing the GDA’s own nefarious repurposing of Sinclair and his methods first hand.
These discoveries may not factor into the episode’s overarching plot, but they tie each thread together. Mark’s half-brother Oliver has quickly sprouted to the height of a preteen and has begun displaying Viltrumite powers, which his mother Debbie wants to hide from Cecil. However, as is the case with his control over Sinclair and his resurrected-many-times-over second-in-command Donald, the GDA head honcho always gets his way, and comes knocking with a deal to make. Oliver can become Cecil’s next superhero in training, interrupting the Graysons’ fun little domestic comedy-drama.
Elsewhere, Mark’s training continues too, against a giant cyclops who turns out to be an 8-year-old boy with a severe condition – there’s no depth to which Cecil won’t stoop – but for the most part, the titular superhero’s story this week concerns his will-they/ won’t-they with Atom Eve. After a future version of Eve confessed feelings for him in an alternate universe last season, Mark is taken with the idea of asking out the Eve he knows – though his reason for doing so upsets her. Free will is one of the fun little quirks of time travel and dimension-hopping that rarely crops up in these stories, and turning it into the basis of teen romance is an interesting flourish.
The action remains enjoyable too, even though it continues the series’ trend of upping the bloodshed while removing all consequences. When twin thieves Dropkick and Fight Master steal the Declaration of Independence, Invincible and Rex show up to the scene of the crime only to be violently interrupted by newcomer Multi-Paul, the brother of Dupli-Kate, who – like everybody else – believes his sister to be dead. He blames Rex, despite the Lizard League having pulled the trigger, forcing Mark to thwart his many clone copies by ripping them apart. Unfortunately, all the blood and guts piling up don’t amount to much, since this doesn’t kill the original Paul, and the fight is quickly stopped once Kate (along with her new fiancé, Immortal) comes out of hiding and reveals she’s still in one piece.
These various subplots are buoyed by cutaways to the GDA trying to decipher strange geological activity across the United States. This is revealed to be the work of the still-incarcerated Doc Seismic, who ends up kidnapping every member of the Guardians of the Globe – with the help of some giant underground worms and centipedes – and though his plan isn’t fully clear (when is it?), it does bring everyone together for a half-decent finale.
This is also where the GDA reveals their Sinclair-bots and the supposedly reformed vigilante Darkwing. Mark strongly objects to the involvement of the Invincible universe’s murderous Batman send-up, setting up more potential conflict between him and Cecil. Their warring ideologies on reform (and just as importantly, who gets to be reformed) will likely be a major lynchpin this season, at least on the earthbound side of things. Elsewhere in the cosmos, an extended mid-credits tag re-introduces us to the delightful (and now super-buff) Allen the Alien, whose submission to the Viltrumites comes with the ulterior motive of freeing Nolan/Omni-Man from prison for an oncoming galactic war. Of course, that’s just a tease for the time being, and while “You’re Not Laughing Now” underlines some of the series’ weaknesses, it’s also propulsive enough to amuse, and establishes much of what’s to come.
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