Invincible Season 2 Episode 5 Review: Continues to Shuffle the Cards in an Interesting Way
Cast: Steve Yeun, Sandra Oh, JK Simmons, Walton Goggins, Gillian Jacobs, Zazie Beets, Andrew Rannells, Jason Mantzoukas, Kevin Michael Richardson, Zachary Quinto, Ben Schwartz, Gray Griffin, Chris Diamantopoulos, Peter Cullen, Seth Rogen, Rhea Seehorn
Director: Haylee Herrick
Streaming Platform: Prime Video
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4/5 (four stars)
And so, after 3 months or a little more, we return to talking about Invincible Season 2, which returns to our screens and on Prime Video with the premiere of the second part of the second season. A distribution method that we still do not fully understand, because if on the one hand, it is an animated series full of events and storylines to the point of exaggeration and therefore perhaps we wanted to avoid an excessive overload, on the other hand, this very mass of events it only makes the return a little more complicated each time – it is no coincidence that the same platform has uploaded a dense recap of the first episodes of Invincible Season 2 on its social networks. We reserve a definitive judgment, however, only at the end of the season, when we will have a complete and exhaustive overall picture, even if the clear feeling is that this distribution strategy – which we could mischievously see as an attempt to multiply and repeat traffic on a major production in different periods – doesn’t exactly do justice to the series based on Kirkman’s comic.
For a product that knows no stops, which bases its narrative precisely – for better or for worse – on an enormous quantity of information, characters, and stories, being interrupted in the vision so often causes a bizarre dispersion, as if a sense was always missing of pace or a piece of the mosaic, despite the contact details. But having said that, how did Invincible present itself again? In reality with an excellent episode, violent and exciting from start to finish, despite the usual historical flaws. The decision to divide the distribution of the second season of Invincible into two blocks, of just four episodes each, was not well received, a choice motivated by the creator Robert Kirkman by not wanting to risk that the discussion around the series, available every week, would be attenuated during the Christmas period (a justification that no longer makes much sense in light of other stratagems such as that of the second season of What If…?, which caused a stir precisely with the decision to propose new episodes daily in the middle of the holiday period). Now the second block, which begins with the episode we talk about in this review of Invincible Season 2 Episode 5, is going relatively unnoticed, penalized by two months of inactivity in the ruthless algorithmic world of Prime Video.
Invincible Season 2 Episode 5 Review: The Story Plot
After discovering that his father was on another planet, where he was lured by deception, Mark tries to help the inhabitants rebuild what was destroyed by the Viltrumites after they caused panic and kidnapped Omni-Man. At the request of the queen of the planet, Mark returns home with his young half-brother, shocking his mother. There’s no time to settle down and meet up with friends at university before there’s already a new case: a spaceship from Mars is arriving, and the Guardians of the Globe have to figure out how to avert a possible invasion. Elsewhere, Martian Allen is about to discover new details about the mission entrusted to him some time ago…
A narrative that resumes about two months after the dramatic ending of part 1 and sees Mark still on Thraxa, busy helping out in the reconstruction after the attack of the Viltrumites. Soon, however, the time will come for our hero to return to Earth and face once again not only the consequences of his father’s decisions, not only the aftermath of his absence and how it affected the people dear to him but also a new and fearsome space threat coming from none other than Mars. It is an episode that immediately and prominently reminds us of the extraordinary strengths of this second season of Invincible: first of all, despite the general chaos that characterizes the narrative, a much more marked attention towards the psychological in-depth analysis of the protagonists, It matters little whether it’s the terrifying repercussions of Nolan’s lies or the complex sense of guilt Eve feels with every mistake she makes.
A breath of fresh air that slows down the frenetic pace of the series just that little bit and at the same time makes the relationships between the various characters – as well as the events themselves – much more impactful on an emotional level. Simply put, if Omni-Man’s betrayal and the atrocious clash with Mark had not left such scars they would not have had the same importance and would not still be remembered as an epochal moment. If we then combine aspects of this kind with tangible improvements in the management of some secondary storylines – the Martian in particular, introduced almost casually in the first season and here instead resumed calmly and in several episodes before exploding – the second part of Invincible presents itself in dazzling shape.
Invincible Season 2 Episode 5 Review and Analysis
Indeed, if the progress is confirmed in the coming weeks, we will have no difficulty in going out on a limb and stating that the series has never been such a clean diamond. The very balance of the premiere is worthy of applause, with a strong but staid start, a section dedicated entirely to the characters and their lives in the two months of Mark’s absence, and only then a decisive acceleration towards the exquisite truculent and wild action for which the series became famous. But, as we underlined in our review of Invincible Season 2 Part 1, the historical flaw that the transposition of Kirkman’s comic continues to exhibit also appears here: there has been significant progress in the management of the secondary storylines, but some fail to shake off the annoying label of being disconnected from the rest – yes, we are of course referring to Donald. Non-communicating vessels, which appear in the script of the episodes in random ways and times and therefore fail to create any interest or emotional involvement. And it couldn’t be otherwise when they often involve secondary characters who have rarely been more than a silhouette in the background.
The fixed cast has been confirmed once again, headed by Steven Yeun (Mark), Sandra Oh (Debbie Grayson), and JK Simmons (Omni-Man). After Sterling K. Brown in the first episode of the season, this time the most interesting recruit is Ben Schwartz, now a leading name in the field of animated voices, in the role of a Martian who pretended to be an Earthling for months, and thanks to that subplot also returns Seth Rogen as Allen, the alien who at the end of the first year had opened the world of the series to threats from other planets. And then there’s Peter Cullen, one of the heavyweights behind the microphone for several decades, best known for having lent the voice, almost continuously from 1984 to today, to Optimus Prime in the Transformers franchise. And it is he who takes inspiration for the vocal timbre of Thaedus, the wise old man who has something to hide…
Commenting on the first episode, we talked about how chance – or perhaps bad luck – wanted the season to talk about the Multiverse when the topic is now hackneyed, perhaps even boring, in superhero-themed films and series. But this only concerned the first chapter (which we had seen without knowing the content of the subsequent ones, in the absence of screeners for the press), since the show also enjoys being unpredictable about the different narrative lines to be taken into consideration per episode in episode, between parallel worlds, alien invasions and the simple desire for a normal life within the walls of the school, the moment in which the series comes closest to a more classic story of heroes, without the need to distort it with explicitly adult situations (also thanks to the nice ploy of a narrator who is ashamed every time someone is about to have sex and therefore moves on to something else). But then the blood flows again, because of the conclusion of this increasingly ambitious second cycle.
Invincible Season 2 Episode 5 Review: The Last Words
Invincible Season 2 Part 2– formulas that will always be a bit of a tongue twister – Invincible presents itself with a bang and is in great shape. All the clear improvements that we had already noticed months ago compared to the 2021 debut are present and taken to the maximum: much more decisive attention to the psychological in-depth analysis of the protagonists, a lot of space dedicated to the consequences of the gargantuan mass of events, management – in most cases – of the secondary storylines aimed at making them more integral parts and not non-communicating sections and, of course, the exquisite bloody, ultraviolent, truculent action. Unfortunately, the limitation of the transposition of Kirkman’s comic remains the usual, namely that not all secondary storylines have received an improvement, which is also evident in this premiere. And so, the narrative, albeit to a lesser extent, continues to give an unpleasant feeling of fragmentation in some situations.
