(SPOILERS for Invincible, including the season finale, will be found below.)
Invincible fared well on Amazon Prime this season with weekly episode drops, which helped to build momentum, of course, for the gore-filled series from The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman. More streaming shows should do this weekly thing! (Please.) The format also let the audience mull over how almost everyone (other than the title character) seemed to know that Omni-Man/Nolan Grayson (J.K. Simmons) killed the Guardians of the Globe in cold blood. His son, Invincible/Mark (Stephen Yeun), managed to remain blissfully clueless about his dad’s secretly villainous ways, but that information came out during the finale episode, “Where I Really Come From.” Following Omni-Man’s disclosure to Mark, Father attempted to convince Son to help him assimilate Earth into the Viltrum Empire. Well, Mark’s inherently good and damn well refused to do so, so dad lost his sh*t and all hell broke loose.
The episode threw forth an ungodly amount of blood and carnage, and the saddest thing about it all is that this wasn’t even collateral damage from a superhero trying to save the world, The Avengers-style. That type of damage causes enough fallout when it’s accidental or unavoidable, but Omni-Man does not place any value upon life, human or otherwise. As he pulverized Mark for refusing to join the Viltrum cause, Omni-Man almost gleefully killed an untold number of people. He even furiously pushed Mark through an entire subway train full of people, transforming passengers into pools of blood. It’s obviously the type of violence that not even The Boys could pull off, and Omni-Man nearly had Invincible at death’s door before — wait for it — he grew a conscience, realized that he loved Mark too much to kill him, and fled the scene.
Actually, he fled the planet. Where did he go? No one knows. Global Defense Agency director Cecil Stedman (Walton Goggins) believes that Omni-Man went somewhere far away, and he’s no doubt still alive. Nonetheless, Stedman puts out official word that Omni-Man is dead, and Deborah Grayson (Sandra Oh) is left to process what she learned her husband say over Mark’s headpiece: That her husband considered her to be worthless and a mere pawn in his scheme to raise a human child to help him turn Earth over to the Viltrumites. Mark’s hesitating to become his father’s replacement, and that’s where the season ends.
Yet where the hell did Omni-Man go?
Already, Amazon has announced two more seasons of Invincible, given that the show’s wildly popular, and Kirkman has been out there teasing more TWD stars as additions to the cast. Also, yes, there’s now a new mystery about Omni-Man’s whereabouts, and there’s no way to flat-out pinpoint where he went, but Kirkman’s own source material says a lot.
In short, we can expect to see Omni-Man again. In the comics, he and Mark don’t see each other for a year until an emotional reunion occurs. In the meantime, Omni-Man had flown away in a flurry of mixed emotions, and he decides that Earth is now a lost cause for Viltrum Empire recruitment (since Mark stood firm and then made Omni-Man feel actual feelings). As such, he almost arbitrarily decides to land on another planet, Thraxa, and he figures this will be a much easier civilization to conquer. That’s especially the case since Omni-Man suggested that he wasted seventeen years raising Mark to help him surrender Earth, whereas Thraxans hold a drastically reduced lifespan (less than a year), and since Omni-Man is thousands of years old, he easily becomes their ruler.
Whether or not this means that Omni-Man will mostly absent from Season 2 remains to be seen. In the comics, he eventually sends for Mark, who arrives on Thraxa and attempts to convince Dad to return to Earth. That tactic is not successful, although that’s definitely not the end of Omni-Man. Instead, we find that Mark’s emotional revelations during their climactic fight changed Omni-Man, and he’s now hoping that his new son can be saved from the Viltrumites. This leads to a whole set of new arcs for Omni-Man that send him hurling throughout the rest of Kirkman’s comic book series. For the moment, though? He’s probably hanging out on Thraxa while Earth struggles to move on from the damage he wrought. Quite nimbly, the first season tucked a powerful family drama into a rip-roaring, superpowered adventure that doesn’t look to be coming to an end anytime soon.
The first ‘Invincible’ season is available to stream on Amazon Prime.
