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[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Invincible Season 2 finale.]
In classic Invincible fashion, the April 4 Season 2 finale featured a whole lot of blood, guts, and shocking twists — along with setting up a host of other issues for Mark (Steven Yeun), Nolan (J.K. Simmons), the Guardians of the Globe, and more to tackle in Season 3.
Between the ferocity of Mark’s take-down of dimension-hopping baddie Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown), a burgeoning relationship between Mark and Atom Eve (Gillian Jacobs), the beginning of a redemption arc for Nolan, and much, much more, there’s undoubtedly a lot to chew on here for fans of the show and comics alike. However, this jam-packed episode still found time to close a chapter of Mark and Co.’s journeys, while also opening the door to a new one, or, as Angstrom’s abilities foreshadow, many new chapters.
Below, co-showrunner Simon Racioppa outlines the reasoning behind some of the finale’s biggest scenes, what we can expect from our most beloved characters going forward, and how Season 3 is coming along!
Angstrom Levy was absent for much of the latter half of the season, as Mark dealt with the Viltrumites, the sequids, etc. What was behind the decision to have him as the Big Bad for the finale?
Simon Racioppa: In the books, he is the Big Bad, so that kinda helped make the decision right there. Also, he’s got a great arc. He’s one of the first villains that is really Mark’s villain in a way. He is an antagonist to Mark, partially created by Mark. He’s not Nolan’s villain, he’s not someone that Nolan fought, he’s not someone that the Guardians fought. Mark was there for his birth as a deranged villain. So that’s interesting. This second season, we see Mark coming into his own and in a very comic book trope-y way, getting his own nemesis, so that’s one of the things we wanted to explore.
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You’ve worked on The Boys: Diabolical as well. With the shows in The Boys universe, Invincible, etc., there’s been much more of a tongue-in-cheek approach to the superhero genre in TV specifically. Would you say this has come about as a natural progression to such an influx of superhero content over the last decade? I know in Episode 7, there’s that bit with the Seance Dog creator…
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I don’t know! We try to walk a fine line. Superheroes and comic books inherently are a little ridiculous. We have characters flying around in suits, but that’s also why we love them. What we try to do on this show is keep enough of that fun, stay true to that material, but also ground it in a lot of other ways, like the relationships, and what Mark is going through and the trauma of being a superhero.
If you kill someone, accidentally or on purpose, are you okay with that? Is that something that keeps you awake at night? Are there repercussions to that? Those are all questions we want to get into, so we walk this edge between still having fun with those tongue-in-cheek moments like that thing where we poke at how animation is made, but also Mark having a real relationship with Amber [Zazie Beetz] and the fallout of that relationship when she is threatened to get at him.
Invincible is a very gory show, but it’s not just there for shock value, as we see with Mark grappling with the aftermath of what he did to Angstrom. How do you guys depict gore in the show to be calibrated for shock as well as emotional impact?
We try to give a weight. If someone gets torn to pieces, what are the reverberations of that going forward, either for the person who gets torn up or the person who does the tearing? We want to be sure when we’re doing violence — which, obviously, we do a lot of — that it has weight, otherwise it feels too comedic. It has to have a reason, a character reason.
The Boys, I think, does this really well, where they have crazy, gory scenes, but there’s a reason it’s there. It makes sense for the characters, it makes sense for their universe, and we try to do the same thing. Mark is crazy, superpowered strong. If he really starts whaling on somebody that doesn’t have powers, they’re going to be violently and gorily killed or affected by that. That’s just the scenario that we’ve set up in our world, so if that happens, we have to show you that consequence.
In this batch of episodes, we get to see a lot more of where Debbie (Sandra Oh) is, where Amber is, where Eve is. How has it been figuring out how to thoroughly flesh out those female characters from where they were in the comics?
Obviously, there’s screen time constraints — some characters get more screen time and more importance, so we get to flesh them out further — but we try to make sure that almost any character that’s on screen feels as real as we could make it. In the books, Debbie’s a major player, but we wanted to spend a little more time with her, make her almost as important as Mark. It’s Mark’s show, but when she’s there, we want her to feel important, to feel as if there’s a reason we’re watching her and that her story is compelling, especially her emotional journey.
Her husband turns out to be this crazy mass murderer about to take over the planet! People write whole movies about being cheated on — this is 10 times worse! If we couldn’t mine good, emotional storytelling out of that, then we’re not doing our jobs.
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There’s been a lot of character progression with Rex (Jason Mantzoukas) in the second half of the season in particular. How did you go about crafting this redemption arc for him?
The general shapes of it are in the comics, but we’re just spending more time with him. Jason Mantzoukas is amazing. We wanted to go a little deeper with it, so if we’re going to take you on this journey of Rex almost being killed, we want it to be worthwhile. We want to give you some reason to root for him..
I don’t think the effects of Season 2, of what Rex went through, are done yet. You almost get killed, you get shot through the head, you lose your hand, you don’t get over that in two weeks. That’s something that we try to do on this show, is make sure that if our characters go through traumatic events, we’re not just like “Okay! New season! Everyone’s back to first position, and we’re just telling another crazy story!” That stuff continues on, and we try to spend a lot of time being like, “Okay, where is Rex right now?”
So it was just a nice place to spend a little more time with Rex. He’s got this great beat where he goes through these events, so let’s beef it up!
With these traumatic events, we’ve seen many perspectives on the consequences faced by those who come into the crossfire between superheroes and villains, like Rick (Luke MacFarlane) and Donald (Chris Diamantopoulos). Can we expect to see a path forward for these characters in later seasons?
I would say so. Obviously, there are some storylines that naturally wrap up or diminish, because other things pop up, but our characters like Rick, William [Andrew Rannells], and Donald aren’t going anywhere. We want our characters to feel like they exist even when you’re not looking at them. You’re watching Mark do all these things while William and Rick are back at school, and they’re going through their own healing process there, so when we see them again, we want to imply that all this stuff has happened to them. The goal is to make every character feel like they could be the star of their own show and have this compelling storyline that you might only see snatches of but should hint that there’s this bigger life.
In this finale, we have a fun dimension-hopping moment, and a lot of the specific dimensions we see him go to are in the comics, like Spider-Man, Batman, The Walking Dead. What kind of added significance did it have adapting that storyline, especially in the last couple years with that being such a prevalent trope in superhero media?
[Sarcastically] I mean, Mark doesn’t go — that’s not Spider-Man, that’s not Batman, that’s not The Walking Dead… [Laughing]
No, no, of course.
It’s fun! We do our multiverse a little differently than other shows, but if you were fighting a multiverse villain, maybe this is something that would happen! Again, we try to ground our episodes and the things that happen in our characters, but we also want to have a good time, we want to show you some exciting things. It was just fun getting to write that sequence, and that was Robert’s [Kirkman, creator of the show and co-creator of the original comic series] episode of getting to be like, “Let’s see some other dimensions, let’s make this cool, compelling battle between Mark and Angstrom there at the final episode of the season. ”
You said you’re working on Season 3. Are there any sort of broad story beats or anything that viewers can expect?
Viewers can read the comics, if they want to know! Obviously, we change things, but buy some Invincible comics! They’re really great, and you’ll get a hint at what’s coming up next. Hopefully, we’ll still surprise you in a lot of places, even if you’ve read all the books multiple times.
We’re deep in work on Season 3. It’s coming along. I can’t wait for people to see it because every season I’m working on becomes the favorite season, so Season 2 was my favorite, and now, Season 3!
Invincible, Seasons 1 & 2, Streaming Now, Prime Video