Invincible – Season 1 Episode 2 Recap & Review

Here Goes Nothing

Episode 2 of Invincible begins with soldiers from the GDA arriving and transporting the Guardians and Omni-Man to the hospital. It’s a bloodbath and with all of the Guardians torn limb from limb, the Director is left with lots of questions.

Debbie and Mark are brought in to see Omni-Man where Cecil Steadman (the aforementioned Director) confirms that all of the Guardians have been slaughtered. They believe a supervillain is responsible but the truth is obviously being obscured here.

With hero numbers dwindling, it’s left to Invincible to head out and stop an impending alien invasion. It’s a nightmarish scenario, with hordes of aliens marching through a portal, fronted by Martian Emperor. With all hope lost, a whole new wave of heroes arrive to help Invincible, including Atom Eve who can conjure pink forcefields.

Inexplicably, the aliens suddenly start to shrivel and drop to the floor. The root cause of this is still unknown though, at least to begin with, as these Flaxan aliens, suddenly turn and leave. While they do, Mark heads back to the GDA with a human casualty from this war, bemoaning that he wasn’t able to do more.

Director Cecil arrives at the crime scene and sees the devastation from the Flaxans first-hand. There, he speaks to Robot who deduces that these aliens were shriveling up and dying because time was moving faster for them in this dimension.

Anyway, Cecil soon shifts across to the Guardians’ lair where Damien Darkblood – a demon detective – touches the blood and manages to piece together fragments of what happened from the previous night. Tellingly though, he’s not able to pin this on Omni-Man – at least not yet anyway.

Later that day, Invincible arrives to see the Teen Team at their headquarters. This is obviously a cheeky nod toward DC’s Teen Titans but aside from Rex Splode and his brash attitude, Mark gets on well with the others. In fact, they even promise to message him if they need his help in the future.

Well, that help comes sooner than expected as the Flaxans, led by the Martian Emperor again, arrive back on the scene. This time though they’re far more powerful and manage to take out most of the Teen Team. That is, until Invincible bursts into action and knocks out the Martian Emperor. With the wristbands holding the key to their restorative health, the group take out the aliens and save the day.

With Omni-Man awake, Mark rushes back to the hospital to see his Father. Although he’s still alive, it turns out the woman Mark saved is not. Nolan brushes this off as a consequence to their job but Mark is not so nonchalant about this.

However, a new threat lurks in space in the form of a cyclops known as Allen the Alien. Nolan suggests Mark deal with this, leading to him heading up into space to confront him. There, the fight comes to an abrupt end when Allen calls a time-out.

It turns out he’s an evaluation officer for the Coalition of Planets. He has just dropped by to make sure there are guardians on the planet, eventually leading to a peaceful resolution between the pair..

Back on Earth, the Martian Emperor returns once more and unfortunately the third time is most certainly a charm. He touches down with much-improved gear, something that eventually sees Omni-Man show up and turn the tide of battle. He knocks the Martian Emperor straight into one of the portals as Mark is forced to watch on in shock.

Inside this alien dimension, a slick red and black coloured montage ensues as Omni-Man single-handedly takes out the entire realm. It’s absolute carnage, and one that sees the scene cut to him heading back home and shrugging off this devastation. As he hugs Mark and Debbie, news suddenly leaks that the Guardians are dead.

The Episode Review

The second episode of Invincible develops each of the characters nicely while throwing in this growing threat from the Flaxans. This works really well to introduce the Teen Team who are obviously a play on the whole Teen Titans angle.

With Mark just starting to get accustomed to his powers, the harsher elements of this superhero gig starts to take its toll. Already you can sense the show is setting up a big Father/son showdown and the seeds are being sown even this early for that to happen.

With more heroes and understanding surrounding the hierarchy at work, the changed emphasis to see the GDA and everyone else scrambling to work out what happened to the Guardians is a really nice bit of world-building. It’s clearly only a matter of time before Omni-Man is found out too but quite what that means for Mark and the others remains to be seen.

For now, Invincible delivers another compelling episode that leaves the door wide open for where this may go next.