Spoilers for Invincible Season 3!

The last two episodes of Invincible Season 3 have been rattling in my brain for quite a while now. Two different story beats which were highly anticipated and well regarded on release, and as of writing, the highest-rated episodes on IMDB of the show’s entire run.

To anyone who hasn’t watched the show and is still with us, I’ll give you a quick rundown (which also kinda spoils season 1, but hey, you signed up for this): Invincible is a comic-turned-television-show about Mark, a superhero in training trying to remain steadfast to his heroic ideals as they’re tested over and over again in increasingly precarious situations. Mark (aka Invincible) was born to an incredibly powerful alien race which are hellbent on conquering the universe, and he’s seemingly the only one of his kind who isn’t onboard. As such, a lot of his struggles are about balancing his want to do good and not kill his enemies, with how easily he could give in and just massacre anyone who stood in his way. These two episodes focus on this dillema heavily.

Episode 7, “What Have I Done?”, is an adaptation of the Invincible War storyline: thanks to Mark’s arch-enemy, Invincibles from alternate universes are brought to earth and tasked with causing as much destruction as possible. These Invincibles are from universes where Mark did give in and decide to become a conqueror, and they show how dangerous Mark could be if he stopped playing fair.

Episode 8, “I Thought You’d Never Shut Up”, follows this storyline with the arrival of Conquest: following Mark rejecting his given task to conquer earth, another one of his race is sent - Conquest. A powerful, masochistic brute who’s sent as a last resort for planets who refuse to curtail themselves for the empire. He proceeds to beat Mark absolutely senseless and almost kills multiple main characters.

Now, while Episode 8 had much better animation and was clearly the one people were most anticipating, I didn’t really like it personally. I enjoyed it, I found it to be entertaining, but it was also such a letdown in my view. We were promised a cataclysm to follow the one that just happened, and yet it didn’t really… feel that way. After a few months of stewing on it, I think I can phrase why this is.

The Invincible War goes to great lengths to show many different perspectives as this cataclysm ensues, so we get a picture of how this affects everyone in the cast.

We get to see Mark’s mom and brother viewing the events on TV, as she goes into hiding and he goes to help save the world. We’re given scenes of the other superhero groups trying to fight off singular invincibles and being slaughtered in the process. We watch as the Global Defense Agency (mostly made up of non-superpowered humans) barely survives an attack and start calling every superhuman on the planet for help.

While we follow Mark and his attempt to find out what’s going on for most of the episode, we’re given plenty of time to see how it affects people outside his immediate radius. By the time at the end of the episode where cities are demolished and everyone’s working to rebuild, we know how devestating this was to everyone. Not because we were told how bad it was, but because we got to see everyone interact with this apocalypse.

Not only that - this episode brings serious permanent changes to the status quo! We see important main characters die in the fight against these alternate Invincibles, we see this antagonist lose his arm and become reliant on a suspicious group of bio-engineers, we see that the world no longer trusts Mark. This episode comes with serious, meaningful consequence for the show’s world, making it important in the long scheme of things.

Conquest doesn’t do all of that, and it makes the episode feel much weaker the more I think about it.

The episode is almost entirely based on Mark’s POV, which isn’t necessarily bad, but it means that this feels like a personal conflict rather than the planetary threat Conquest is meant to represent. The few times we see someone else, it’s because they’re on their way to Mark anyways, so they’re going to enter the same perspective as before. Sure, there’s multiple scenes where we see buildings explode and random people be killed by this fight, but it feels empty because we have no idea who any of these are. They exist to die and that’s it. Cool. Whatever.

Additionally, there’s so much teasing of meaningful consequence that just never happens in this episode. Conquest almost kills Mark’s brother… but then he doesn’t. He almost kills some random person… but then he doesn’t. We see another superhero die and Mark eulogizes her! A big moment! And then… she comes back to life?? Even fuckin Conquest himself isn’t dead by the end of the episode! This episode undoes changes to the status quo that other episodes this season made! What the hell??

It’s a lot of spectacle, sure, but by the start and end of the episode nothing changed. I’m sure we’ll find stuff out later that this whole cacophany caused, but all of it could have just as easily been fallout of the Invincible War and we could’ve never been able to tell.

Even though “I Thought You’d Never Shut Up” is the higher-rated episode of the two, I really found it to be a letdown. All the lessons that Season 1 taught in terms of making Omniman’s reveal feel impactful (showing the impact on the world, setting up the enviroment, meaningful status quo change) are completely ignored this time around. If you want me to care about an event in the show, numbers and statistics don’t matter. The important part is making me feel like what’s happening right now is going to change the story and where we’re headed.

The Invincible War is great at this, Conquest is not.