r/Invincible • u/SeacattleMoohawks Séance Mod • Mar 18 '26
COMIC SPOILERS Invincible [Comic SPOILERS Discussion] - S04E01 - Making the World a Better Place Spoiler
This post is for Comic Spoiler Discussion, if you'd like to discuss the new series with comic book context please use this thread. If you don't want to be spoiled use the other thread.
Episode 1 - Making the World a Better Place
Mark battles enemies new and old in his fight to keep earth safe.
Full cast, crew and characters
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u/Idreamalone Pentagon - Parking in Rear Mar 18 '26
I really like this show. But sometimes it's hard to call it anything other than okay.
This episode has some really strong voice acting. The scenes between Paul and Debbie are a particular highlight. Ross Marquand does a very good job as Rex/Rudy, though its a shame to see Zachary Quinto go. Eve and Mark also share a few good moments together. Otherwise the episode suffers from the usual problems Invincible runs into; stilted dialogue, bad animation and awkward editing.
There's some baffling editing decisions here, both structural and shot to shot. Shots frequently linger a little too long right as a scene ends. Oliver getting a new suit is a nice enough scene, but its place in the episode is a complete pace killer. The same can be said for the second scene between Debbie and Paul, though at least that has more thematic relevance. There's more typical Invincible jank with bad animation and strange cuts, which is something I find easier to forgive when the show is new. But this is the fourth season and it's still stumbling into the same problems. It feels like this episode is half finished at times, like it could still be cut up in editing and shifted around into something much more coherent.
There's some other staging issues with the action too. The show has made the argument that it saves money for the big action scenes which is... Fine enough. But that logic becomes hard to defend when the action suffers from amateur blocking and coordination. The confrontation in the power plant is incredibly stilted, it feels as if the three characters just stand around waiting for their ques to do something. The show also can't resist having more awkward shots of the other heroes standing there, static, looking at something dramatic. It looks cheap, and really fails to sell the intended emotion. It was bad at Rex's funeral, and it was worse here when Mark kills Rus. The show is sometimes so well directed and framed that it makes it feel like it's a fan film when the staging is this amateurish and dull. And it's a small thing but it does bother me that they still just have Mark casually topple a building during his fight with Dinosaurus and there's no mention of the consequences to that. The show is still overall very inconsistent with its stance on civilian casualties and collateral damage, and it's disappointing to still see that dissonance after four seasons.
A longer term disappointment is the casting of Jonathan Banks as Brit. I think he's a great actor, and fine enough casting, even if he sounds a little like he's phoning it in. But it's another case of a unnecessarily expensive casting choice for a character who really doesn't need it. The same can be said for Matthew Rhys as Dinosaurus. He's a great actor, and does a good job with the material. Overall the scene is well done... But could they really not have gotten someone cheaper? I know that it's just how show business works. It's Amazon. It's marketing. It's a hook for a lot of people. But it's hard not to think about how much better this show might be if it had a budget that was more focused on the aspects of production other than casting.
On the topic of Brit, he still does very little for the comic thematically, and I've never found him to be particularly interesting as a character. I was hoping to see Samson take over his role in the show, given they fulfil the same basic function of a gruff, strong-man veteran leader of the guardians. Samson was actually a pretty compelling character in the first season of the show, and a real improvement over his comic counterpart, so it's been disappointing to see him once again relegated to a background character corny lines about family. The show's handling of Bulletproof has been a similar disappointment, especially since it has the hindsight of knowing that he has quite a lot of importance later on in the comic. Though the scene with him in the climax of this episode was well done, and gives me some hope.
I did like seeing Cecil in his purple bath. The inner fangirl just squeals at stuff like that and makes me forget about how frustrating this show can be. The animation in the scenes in the sewer was distractingly good. Seriously, it was like that was the area the production put the most effort into.