The third season of Invincible is only eight episodes long. Each episode is roughly 40 minutes each. Taking place a while after the last season, Mark is working for Cecil as a superhero. Although with Cecil being Cecil, he has his plans and backups in case Mark breaks out and does his own thing. Given that Mark’s dad did just that and caused a lot of damage, it’s understandable but can feel unfair and brutal from Mark’s perspective. It explores Cecil’s history, and the early part of the season explores Mark’s response to all this.
Mark and Cecil’s relationship pretty much go as well as expected. You really can’t have a relationship that’s built on distrust and deception. This part of the plot was quickly resolved though but it doesn’t feel rushed. The season them moves onto Mark’s alien half-brother, Oliver. Oliver is growing quickly and rapidly gaining his abilities. He’s just like Mark when he discovers his powers, being eager to use them to help others.
Mark sets about training Oliver but obviously it’s not as easy as they’d assume. It doesn’t help that Oliver is still a kid at heart, despite growing up so fast. His ideals do not perfectly align with Mark’s and it can be horrifying when Oliver explains his reasonings after doing something, and Mark realizes that it just reminds him of their father. It is a distressing moment and hammers home the realisms of such a scenario, even if it might not make for the best story. This is also the point where it gets much more violent and gory. It’s a heavily stylized kind of violent but can still feel over the top and unnecessary.
Another continuing subplot is Mark’s personal life. It isn’t focusing on how he handles being both a superhero and a teenager, but more so being just a typical teenage drama. Rather than deconstructing the genre, we just see Mark as he matures but still gets a bit awkward when he needs to when asking the girl he likes out. It is sweet when it needs to be but the season tends to focus on these moments a bit too long.
There are similar issues with previous seasons, such as the constantly shifting scenes that focus on one subplot in one episode and then another one in the next. It affects the pacing by jumping around all over the place. By doing this, it also has the byproduct of making it easier to forget what happened in that subplot up until now and you need some refresher. A lot of things happen during the season such that it feels it’s both moving too fast, as well as moving too slowly. It’s moving too fast because we are rapidly cycling through the threats. As soon as Mark has managed to subdue one villain, another one pops out and each time, it gets bigger.
On the other hand, it feels too slow because the slow scenes drag the episodes length out without adding much value. They break the pacing and clog up the story. Each subplot can feel disjointed, so that the season doesn’t feel coherent. In eight episodes, it can go through eight different subplots, if not more. If it was all interlinked, or if there was a common thread through all of them, then it would have made much more sense.
While Mark is shown to be powerful and he even has the superhero name of Invincible, given that he is the protagonist, the show goes out of its way to show that this may not be the case. Mark gets hurt all the time and if he wasn’t superpowered, he would have died a long time ago. The other heroes struggle a lot more and Mark encounters threats where you don’t think he might be able to overcome.
Mark being overwhelmed by his enemies, comes to the forefront in the final episode, where yet another ultimate threat comes. The show got gorier as the season went out. There are some genuinely shocking developments, both in terms of the gore as well as what happens. No character is safe, and they do things to characters that you don’t expect.
Overall, the third season of Invincible has its highs and lows. It is interesting to watch and there are some good story developments. Although it can feel muddied and confused at where it wants to go at times. As a result, it can be disjointed in how it tells its story, making it hard to tell how this arc in this episode relates to the next one in another. Characters come and go, and so it can be hard to remember just who is who.
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