Invincible Season 2 Episode 4 review: The Empire Strikes Back

Dread it, run from it, the Viltrum Empire arrives all the same in Invincible Season 2 Episode 4, the phenomenally violent, shocking, and infuriating midseason finale – not because it’s bad, but because we can’t keep watching.

What’s the best superhero fight in pop culture? Doc Ock vs Spider-Man, Captain America vs the Winter Soldier, Batman’s Arkham-inspired warehouse rampage in BvS, and Homelander vs Butcher (plus Soldier Boy and Hughie) are all contenders, but the answer exists in its own face-pulverizing league: Omni-Man vs Invincible in the Season 1 finale.

The pacing, choreography, and escalation of the fight from a visceral standpoint was second to none, but its strength is the depth in every blow, right to the brink of Mark’s death; this was Nolan trying to purge his own humanity and obey his modus operandi, that being of a Viltrumite conqueror. With his fist ready to pummel his son for the final time, shaking and dripping with the detritus of his piñata’d jaw, he couldn’t go through with it.

The pair’s face-to-face in the closing moment of Episode 3 called for applause, yes, but it also put knots in my stomach; Nolan is quite literally the monster inside Mark that can be tamed or unleashed. Episode 4 delivers a shrewdly written, highly satisfying reunion that balms the heart – before bludgeoning it.

Spoilers for Invincible Season 2 Episode 4 to follow…

Invincible Season 2 Episode 4 finally catches up with Omni-Man

Confronted with the horror of his violence, but torn by the guilt and compulsion to go further, we last saw Omni-Man rocketing into space and shedding the blood from his skin as he left Earth’s atmosphere. Episode 4 picks up with him seconds after, with Nolan soaring through the stars and other galaxies in an odyssey of self-discovery, scored to Leonard Cohen’s Avalanche – except it’s the cosmos covering his soul.

Bearded and lost, he sits on far away moons, trying to process everything he’s done (and lost) in service of the Viltrum empire. He eventually submits to his sins, allowing himself to drift into certain death in a black hole – but a shooting star distracts him. Only it’s not a star, it’s a Thraxan ship being pulled towards its inevitably stretchy demise in the singularity. Screaming, crying, and preparing for the end, their ship suddenly stops – for whatever reason, be it a last-ditch shot at redemption or a flicker of grace in the darkness of his heart, Nolan not only saves them but takes them home.

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After placing them down, he heads back to the sky – but the Thraxans plead to repay him for saving their lives. He holds out his hand, and in a chilling transition to the present, we’re back with Nolan greeting his son. Their fist-clenched stand-off is almost unbearably tense, but it’s diffused by Mark tenderly, if angrily, embracing his father with a hug.

“I missed you,” Nolan says, but Mark isn’t ready for pleasantries, asking why he’d force the Thraxans to shepherd Mark all this way on the back of a lie, especially after his lifelong duplicity (and he’s still bitter about his mom being called a pet). “I made a mistake… son,” Nolan adds, but Mark tells him he doesn’t get to call him that anymore. “I guess they don’t know you like I do… f**k you,” he says, before shooting off.

Nolan chases him into the sky, warning him he’ll never make it back on his own; Mark’s teenage arrogance may be overwhelming, but it’s no match for the endless peril of deep space. “Nuolzot wasn’t lying,” he urges, telling Mark that the Thraxans actually do need his help, but not against a meteor shower. Mark keeps up the wilful dispassion before agreeing to hear him out for five minutes, “for them, not you.”

They touch down. “So you conquered this place instead of Earth, great,” Mark says, but Nolan explains that he didn’t conquer Thraxa – they asked him to be their emperor. That’s not all: he has a new partner, Andressa, who’s also the mother of his second child and Mark’s half-brother. “You gotta be,” he reacts, cueing the once-more-shaken title card, before finishing his sentence: “… f*cking kidding me!”

Debbie asks: “Why me?”

Back on Earth, Debbie is still bruised by her haywire therapy session, after a new friend discovered and shunned her for being the not-quite-a-widow of Omni-Man. We see her listlessly walking through Chicago, with life marching on everywhere she steps; with Mark unreachable and everyone else coping, who would notice she’s gone?

She visits Nolan’s grave, despite him not being dead, and questions his intentions in a rhetorical, resentful breakdown. “Why me? You could have taken Earth whenever you wanted… why marry me? Was it just to be cruel, to hurt someone? Everything we built, 20 years… and none of it was real. You weren’t real, none of it… only Mark… I never f*cking knew you. Why me?” she asks, in one of the finest examples of Sandra Oh’s voice-acting talents to date. Debbie’s arc continues to be one of the most affecting in the series.

Later, we see Debbie looking at old photos of Nolan teaching Mark how to ride a bike – except, Nolan never taught him. He had to fly away somewhere for a mission, so Debbie helped him instead. Art, the supersuit-maker, pays her a visit and offers her comfort. She wants answers for Nolan’s actions, but Art tells her she’s never needed anything from him.

“I don’t know why I miss Nolan so much… he was barely around,” Debbie says, and Art argues: “I always thought you were the strong one, to handle your life the way you did… Nolan has superpowers, he’s indestructible. That’s not strength, that’s having it easy.”

Donald hunts for the truth as Atom Eve battles fate

We should add, the episode doesn’t unfold in this order. However, for the sake of cohesion in recapping its events, we’ve broken the episode apart and joined relevant sections of the plot together – don’t worry, we’ll get back to Omni-Man and Mark on Thraxa soon.

Let’s start with Donald – poor Donald, left to ponder his curious, seemingly unsettling place in the GDA (and world at large) after Debbie’s reaction to seeing him alive. He knocks on Debbie’s door, but she’s not at home, and then he walks over to the cratered land across the street that once had a house on it. He has no memory of what happened there (Nolan massacring every GDA agent in his home, breaking into Donald’s surveillance suite, grabbing his spine through his back like an empty Capri-Sun, before blowing up the house and sacrificing himself).

He finds the security camera footage, and he’s understandably troubled; how could he be dead – not just killed, but blown to smithereens if he’s alive, here, now? In a daze of confusion, he stabs a knife into his arm. Much to his relief, blood drips into the sink. “Thank god,” he reacts… until he notices a bend in the knife’s tip. It looks like Donald is indeed a robot, most likely cloned by Cecil and co. after his death – but is he the first, or is he the umpteenth in a long line of replicant Donalds?

Atom Eve has had a rotten time in the second season. Dead set on leaving her superhero days behind her to help the people of Chicago after the Omni-Man fight, no good deed has gone unpunished: an impromptu playpark that cut through the city’s red tape nearly led to the deaths of several families; and her father holds the convenience of her powers against her, even when she gives him a solid gold apple to help them climb out of the throes of debt.

She meets Amber and William at college, who explain that Mark has been gone for a week on another space mission. “Perils of dating a superhero, good thing he’s cute,” Amber jokes. They offer to skip class and go for coffee, but she refuses to let them do that. She agrees to meet them for breakfast the next morning and heads back to her “place in the city” – aka, a couch in Guardians HQ after dark.

Her sleep is disturbed by clattering in a nearby room – it’s Killcannon. He pulls out Robot’s power supply just as Eve walks in. “You want this back… come and get it!” he tells her, kicking off a superb, much-needed fight scene on a bridge; it’s not essential because of the lack of action, but we’ve been starved of Eve since the beginning of Season 2. Her arc is quietly engrossing: a superhero dying to do good, but each time she helps people, it’s a monkey’s paw of generosity.

Again, it quickly goes wrong. She has the upper hand against Killcannon for most of the fight. “We’re not done yet, not by a long shot,” she says, giving the villain an opportunity to power up his gun and shoot a huge blast – which she deflects straight into a couple’s car, sending them plunging into the river. She quickly dispatches Killcannon and rescues them, but it’s never confirmed whether they’re alive or already dead. She sits on the ground next to them, crying out for the paramedics. “Help… please just help them,” she says.

In her final scene in Episode 4, she resigns to her parents’ home. Her dad said her powers didn’t make her a hero – they make her dangerous, and after her heroism was nearly fatal for those around her, perhaps he was right after all.

Also, in a brief aside, the Mauler twins are back! And this time, the one whose body was half-charred by Angstrom Levy’s botched procedure knows who’s the original and who’s “inferior.” This gets a hilarious payoff in the post-credits scene, so don’t miss it.

Nolan and Mark need to team up

On Thraxa, Mark is still appalled by his father seemingly replacing his family with bugs and “getting it on with a grasshopper” while Debbie is “going through hell” back home. There’s also the fact Nolan says his child is six months old, but he’s the size of a toddler.

Nolan tries his best to explain everything, claiming to have been “lost” until he found revived purpose (and morality, it seems) on this planet. But a storm is coming in the form of the Viltrum empire; not only has Omni-Man abandoned his post and mission, but he’s fathered two children, one of whom is a hybrid with a genetically dissimilar species. It’s not a case of if they’ll come, it’s when, and everyone on Thraxa is at risk.

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“What I did on Earth was unforgivable,” Nolan confesses, but Mark struggles to muster words other than “f**k you”, before telling him he’s “the reason they’re in danger… you signed their death warrant.” Nolan appeals to Mark’s better nature, promising that his brother will be murdered if he doesn’t help him protect the people from the empire.

Just as Nolan offers to train Mark, three Viltrumite soldiers (Lucan, Thula, and Vidor) torpedo through the atmosphere. It’s do-or-die time, so Mark escorts Andressa and her child to safety while Omni-Man readies for the bout of a lifetime. He takes them to the Caves of Roclaine, where she insists she didn’t know about Debbie or his horrific actions on Earth until she was “head over feet” for him.

She also explains Thraxan biology: their entire lives are just one year in human time, so they “grow, learn, and love” faster than Mark’s accustomed to. He’s not angry at her at all, just his dad – but Andressa says he “loves and misses” Mark, even if he struggles to say it to his face.

Viltrumites vs Viltrumites

At that moment, Lucan crushes through the ice. “So it’s true, the great Nolan fathered a child,” he tells Mark, and offers to let him live if he fights well. Their brawl is eye-watering, with Mark barely breaking through Lucan’s brute strength and defense. He slams Mark into the ground and pushes his skull into the ground with a single finger, but he’s saved by Nolan, who spears Lucan into the walls of the cave.

Mark saves Andressa and the boy from being crushed, while Omni-Man bests Lucan in combat; by that, we mean he slices open his power belly with his hand like the slit of a blade. Gnarly. “You deserve death,” Lucan tells him, as Nolan impales him with a sharpened boulder. “I know,” he replies.

It’s far from over: as two Viltrumites hover outside in anticipation, Thraxa has already been decimated, with thousands slaughtered. Nolan can’t process his grief and grabs Mark by the neck. “Why do I care about them? he asks, with tears rushing down his cheeks. “They were weak, short-lived, barely a species… I’m not supposed to feel this way,” he says, and Mark tells him: “This is how you were supposed to feel on Earth.”

Thula and Vidor fly over to them, spitefully observing the Thraxans’ feeble anatomy. “We barely touch them, and they die,” Vidor says. Nolan takes him, while Thula promises to make Mark’s death quick – and it first, it certainly seems like it will be. She goes one step short of actually handing Mark his own arse, overpowering him at every turn (in one particularly cool move, she wraps her braided spear around his neck and drags him wherever she flies).

Nolan tells Mark that he needs to “stop holding back… she’s trying to kill you. If you’re not trying to kill her, you’re going to die. Don’t think: act. You need to fight like a Viltrumite.” Thula launches a second barrage of punches and kicks, basically keepy-upping him through the air – until he fights back with all of his might, drawing blood and lobbing her by her hair straight into a pillar.

Nolan makes light work of Vidor, crushing his head with a double punch on both sides of his skull. Mark can’t go the distance, hesitating at the exact moment he should have killed Thula – and he pays the price, with the soldier slicing his stomach open with her blade. He cries out for Nolan’s help, who swoops in and gives Thula one of the best deaths in the series: he throws her to one side and yanks her back with her hair so fast that her mouth rips apart upon collision with his elbow – talk about jaw-dropping.

“Don’t worry, it’s over,” Nolan tells Mark – but this time, it’s Nolan who didn’t go far enough. Lucan crashes in like a mortar strike, breaking Omni-Man’s back before passing away on the ground next to him. “It’s done,” he tells someone, leaving the three men battered and/or dead.

The Empire arrives in Invincible Season 2 Episode 4

Mark falls in and out of consciousness, seeing Lucan being taken away in a stretcher while his dad is strapped into one himself. “Mark, don’t forget. the good I did, my deeds, my books… read my books, Mark,” he tells him, before Mark blacks out again. Back at home, we see Debbie telling Cecil that she doesn’t want to take the royalties from Nolan’s book sales anymore, and she dumps them all in the front yard in a box – something tells me this will be a larger plot point in the second half of the season.

When Mark next wakes up, he’s confronted by the sight of an eye-patched Viltrumite standing above him. “Good, you’re alive,” he says, before introducing himself: it’s General Kregg, voiced by the incredible Clancy Brown. Mark asks what they’re doing to Nolan, but Kregg tells him not to speak, only listen, and delivers a molar-cracking punch when he tells the general to go f**k himself.

Before leaving Mark alone on Thraxa, Kregg gives him a chilling order: “You’ve survived your first true battle and proven yourself worthy of your Viltrumite heritage. Your father will be executed, and you will return to Earth. You will assume his mission and prepare the planet for our rule. I know this may not appeal to you, given your sympathies, so I’ll put it like this: you can kill a few humans to convince them to capitulate, or we will kill millions if arrive to find you or your planet still defiant against us. We will check on your progress soon, and unlike your father, we do not change our minds. Good luck on your mission.”

Invincible Season 2 Episode 4 review score: 5/5

An exceptionally ruthless, jaw-unhinging moment in superhero television; Episode 4 ups the ante, and the pain – and the worst is yet to come, we fear.

Invincible Season 2 Episodes 1-4 are available to stream on Prime Video now, which you can sign up for here. Check out our other coverage below:

• Episode 1 review
• Episode 2 review
• Episode 3 review
• Angstrom Levy powers & origin explained
• Is Invincible evil? Season 2 Episode 1 opening explained
• Invincible Season 2: Where is Omni-Man?
• Invincible Season 2 release schedule: Dates, episodes & more
• Invincible Season 2 cast: All actors & characters
• Invincible movie: Everything we know so far
• How is Donald still alive?
• Darkwing II powers explained
• The Lizard League explained
• Is Invincible an anime?
• Is Allen the Alien dead?
• Omni-Man cliffhanger explained
• Is Invincible from Marvel or DC?

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