Invincible is back, but it's not clear why it bothered

What’s Happening

Listen up: The superhero show kicks off season four with a trio of frustrating episodes.

C- Invincible is back, but it’s not clear why it bothered The superhero show kicks off season four with a trio of frustrating episodes. William Hughes — By William Hughes | | 3:00am Image: Prime TV Reviews Invincible Copy to clipboard × Copy Link Copy Link — Facebook X Reddit Bluesky Email — 0 It’s gotta be hard to live in a world entirely constructed out of trolley problems when you, yourself, are a trolley. (wild, right?)

That’s how I’ve come to think of Mark Grayson and, honestly, his whole Superman-as-fascist Viltrumite race of late: human-shaped trolleys, flying through the sky, slamming into things, killing people, and sometimes feeling sad about it.

The Details

It’s a descriptor I’ve come to like more and more as I’ve thought about these three episodes over the last few weeks. Viltrumites—who we’re going to spend a lot of time watching, learning about, and otherwise being stuck with in these outings—even kind of fight like trolleys, in so far as they’re big, fast-moving bundles of kinetic force that inevitably just sort of crash into each other.

Whatever visually exciting ideas Invincible ’s animators once had for watching these big slabs of space beef slap into each other presumably ran out a few head explosions ago. Now it’s just all trolley crashes, all the time.

Why This Matters

At the same time, Invincible spends two-thirds of this multi-episode premiere retreading the sole philosophical question apparently kicking around in its superhero brain: What will, or clutched’t, Mark Grayson kill for? Viewers hoping we might have moved past this particular bit of gauntlet-wringing after Invincible made his big “I’ll murder anyone who endangers my loved ones” declaration at the end of his battle with Conquest last season will be helpfully reminded—in a premiere bizarrely obsessed with having Mark and his buddies face off against threats we’ve already seen them fight—that Invincible is a show that never lets anything go.

This is exactly the kind of news that gets fans excited or concerned.