This review contains spoilers for Invincible Season 1, Episode 4, titled "Neil Armstrong, Eat Your Heart Out," which is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
The fourth episode of Invincible, titled “Neil Armstrong, Eat Your Heart Out,” makes it feel like an entirely different show from last week’s three-episode premiere. With all its story pieces now in play, the animated superhero saga finds room to breathe, to have fun, and to grant its characters some semblance of interiority. The episode is funnier, emotionally richer, and occasionally more introspective, and it feels like real effort was put into animating each character with nuance. Everything from the choice of subplots to the soundtrack selections hints at a series that has undoubtedly found itself, despite a handful of persisting issues.
After an atmospheric introduction — at an excavation of an Egyptian tomb, the fallout of which is sure to come up in the future — the show re-introduces super-alien Omni Man/Nolan Grayson (J.K. Simmons) and his son Invincible/Mark (Steven Yeun) amidst a flying lesson, as they twist and twirl through the air to the breezy sounds of “Sunflower” by Vampire Weekend. Their father-son banter as they race to Mount Everest is a far cry from their stilted exchanges in prior entries. The injection of humor as they beat a seasoned climber to the summit is both refreshing and wryly timed, in a matter-of-fact, Archer-esque way that permeates the rest of the episode.
Even though Mark and Nolan spend much of the episode apart, the story is built around Nolan’s internal struggle to reconcile his actions — he murdered the Guardians of the Globe, presumably at the behest of his planet Viltrum — with his genuine love for Mark, and for his wife Debbie (Sandra Oh). The Graysons’ family dynamic is a welcome improvement, rife with both winking jabs, and arguments where Debbie finally points out when Nolan is being unreasonable or distracted, and she establishes, in no uncertain terms, that she has a life and identity outside of him. Although, the motivation behind Nolan feeling irritable and off-kilter is particularly alluring.
The episode marks a few major departures from the comics in ways that finally work. Where the first three episodes stuck to the comics’ initial plot, but replaced its satire with dreary, straight-faced violence, the show now pulls from a number of later volumes (for instance, Mark accompanying NASA astronauts to Mars). Originally, Nolan’s betrayal was made known to Mark and Debbie not long after its reveal to readers in Volume 2, and it also involved the revelation that Nolan never truly loved Debbie at all. The show jumbles this chronology for a distinct narrative purpose: by delaying the reveal to Nolan’s family, we, the audience, are made privy to a rather difficult dilemma.
Nolan’s affection, in the Amazon series, appears to be sincere from the get-go — something he only realizes several years into the comic — and the more time we spend with him here, the more we’re made both witness and accomplice to his deceptions. His facial animation allows him to wrestle emotionally between his colonial obligations and the life he’s made for himself on Earth, without the need to express this dilemma in words. He’s made to feel distinctly human. But when his Viltrumite tendencies finally show, the series manages to create a dramatic beat more complicated, shocking, and darkly arresting than any of the gore in preceding entries.
Nolan’s vacation to Rome is a trip down memory lane for him and Debbie, but it culminates in him demanding her trust and approval to satiate his troubled ego before he thwarts a dragon. He doesn’t like being the target of a murder investigation, not because he’s innocent, but because he wants Debbie to believe that he is. What’s more, once Debbie reaffirms her trust in him, he sits back and lets the attack proceed, leaving one of the men investigating him, Cecil (Walton Goggins) to clean up the mess. Unfortunately, the show doesn’t linger on this moment for too long, or on Debbie’s reaction to it, but at the very least, it sets up a dynamic where this Superman archetype can easily detach himself from humanity. That’s an eerie prospect, and it’s the first time the show has really felt like it’s responding to the existing superhero zeitgeist (specifically, Henry Cavill’s Superman).
Nolan and Debbie’s date isn’t the only one that takes center stage. Mark goes out with Amber (Zazie Beetz) for the first time, and he soon finds himself bumbling through conversations and skirting dangerously close to revealing his dual identity. It’s something he clearly wants to do, though he’s forced by his teammate Eve (Gillian Jacobs) to consider the gravity of that decision. It’s choices like these that define Mark’s story in this episode, dilemmas that center the tug-of-war between his superhero and civilian lives. Chief among them is his decision to chaperone NASA’s manned Mars voyage after his father turns down Cecil’s request. Once Mark reaches the Red Planet, he even screws up his mission by looking at pictures of Amber on his phone instead of watching over the astronauts (which seems like it’ll have consequences in the long run, given what they bring back to Earth).
Some of the show’s B-plots begin to feel interconnected, even though their actual overlap is yet to be revealed. Debbie is allowed to marinate in her doubts about Nolan, which stem from the investigation by Damien Darkblood (Clancy Brown), i.e. Rorschach by way of Hellboy. Darkblood, meanwhile, finds himself at loggerheads with Cecil, despite their common goal of figuring out if and why Nolan murdered the Guardians. Cecil is perhaps the show’s major weak link; he’s a shadowy government operative who has all the makings of a morally grey character (at one point, he even mentions wanting to keep things grey), but his voice actor Walton Goggins seems to have been directed towards a strangely monotone, superficial and guileless performance, which feels distinctly at odds with his character.
A handful of other subplots feel awkwardly thrown into the episode, like Robot (Zachary Quinto) spying on the remaining Mauler twin (Kevin Michael Richardson), and stealing a blood sample from Rex Splode (Jason Mantzoukas). Robot hasn’t yet been established as an important enough or friendly enough presence for this trajectory to feel intriguing. However, the plot as a whole is progressing on a number of fronts, so it’s hard to fault the show too much for setting up a few building blocks that feel perfunctory for the moment. Besides, the brief Mauler scene is scored by “Don’t Get Captured” by Run The Jewels, an up-tempo banger, and a choice so on-the-nose for the big, blue prison escapee that you kind of have to respect the gall.
Where the first three episodes swapped the comic’s tongue-in-cheek irony for superficial gravitas, the fourth episode takes an entirely different approach: it’s sincere. The Graysons are a jovial bunch who you want to spend time with — on a minor technical note, their dialog actually overlaps this time, like a real conversation — which makes Nolan’s impending heel-turn feel all the more like a twisting knife. This narrative makes us, the audience, value the time we get to spend with them, probably as much as Nolan does, as the inevitability of his betrayal draws nearer. And while Cecil may have gotten rid of Darkblood for now, a brief post-credit scene hints at something the demonic detective may have left behind at the Graysons’ home. Omni-Man isn’t out of the woods just yet.
