Almost three years elapsed between the conclusions of the first and second seasons of Invincible. Not only was the Prime Video animated series off the air for 31 months after its Season 1 finale, but Season 2, which started in November 2023 and ended in April 2024, also had an unfortunate midseason break that lasted nearly four months. Although it isn’t exactly uncommon these days for TV shows to force fans to wait between each batch of episodes, it’s a challenge for any series to build momentum amid such lengthy absences. But Invincible fans don’t have to worry about any of that this time around because only 10 months after the Season 2 finale, the show is back for its third-season premiere—and without any midseason break looming in the weeks ahead.
As if to make up for lost time, Invincible returned on Thursday with not one but three episodes, the first of which picks up right where the series left off last year. Like the show’s past two seasons, the third will feature eight installments, with the last five following a weekly release schedule. The series is beginning to find its rhythm as the story’s stakes and scale steadily build.
When creator Robert Kirkman spoke to Variety about Invincible at San Diego Comic-Con in 2024, he highlighted the creative team’s intention to build on the high stakes of the show with each successive season.
“Season 2 is an advancement of a lot of things that were introduced in Season 1,” Kirkman said. “The stakes were higher, things got a little crazier, and there were a lot of pieces moving that were hinting at a lot of bigger stories. Those bigger stories really start crashing down in Season 3. … It’s an escalating show where each season is going to be bigger, crazier, more intense, and that stuff really kicks off with Season 3.”
For Invincible fans who haven’t read the show’s source material, it may be hard to imagine how much “more intense” things can get than, say, Omni-Man ripping through an entire subway train in Chicago by holding up Invincible’s body as the cars packed with passengers move toward them. But those who have read Kirkman’s original comics know the guy isn’t lying. In Season 3, Mark Grayson is entering an especially dark chapter in his life, and he has a new dark blue suit to match it.
Of course, things have already been pretty bleak for Mark since he first gained his powers. In Season 1, his father nearly killed him along with thousands of citizens in Chicago after revealing that his mission was to conquer Earth. In Season 2, Mark was tricked into reuniting with Nolan on an alien planet before having to watch him almost die at the hands of other Viltrumites, who nearly killed Mark as well. On top of all that, Mark and his high school sweetheart, Amber, broke up; he was offered the impossible choice of either preparing Earth for the Viltrumite invasion or watching it be destroyed; and then he killed Angstrom Levy after the villain badly injured his mother and threatened his infant, alien half brother.
Everything that’s happened in the short span of Mark’s life has left a lot of trauma for this young superhero to unpack. Season 3 finds Invincible training under Cecil and the Global Defense Agency’s supervision as he prepares for the day when another Viltrumite will arrive. But he’s also beginning a new relationship with Atom Eve and assuming the responsibility of helping raise his half brother, Oliver (now voiced by Sweet Tooth’s Christian Convery), who has already aged into his tweenage years and developed powers of his own. Invincible has always done a good job of balancing its flashy (and gruesome) action sequences with character-driven storytelling that examines the human elements of the superhero genre. And Season 3 piggybacks on the bloody conclusion of Season 2—and the guilt about killing Levy that Mark carries—to consider ethical and moral questions surrounding crime fighting and justice.
Invincible is a reflection of decades of superhero comics and storytelling. It constantly seeks to subvert tropes of the genre and play off of the expectations of its viewers (and readers before them). The likes of Batman and Superman famously have “no-kill” policies when it comes to handling their adversaries, even though allowing them to live means that they afford the Jokers and Lex Luthors of their world the inevitable opportunity to break out of prison and harm more innocent people. (This moral dilemma has been explored in DC comics plenty of times.) Invincible uses Mark’s fatal confrontation with Levy as a launchpad to examine this trope from several angles.
In the first three episodes of the new season, Mark grapples with what he did to Levy while being forced to reconsider his worldviews and what it means to be good or bad. When he discovers that Cecil and the GDA have been working with Darkwing II and D.A. Sinclair, both of whom murdered innocent people, Mark confronts Cecil and demands that they be sent back to prison.
The second episode delves into Cecil’s backstory, showing how he shed his idealistic views to become the ruthless government authority who is willing to do whatever it takes to protect the lives of the many. After previously refusing to work with reformed supervillains, Cecil comes to embrace his former boss’s motto: “We can be the good guys, or we can be the guys that save the world. We can’t be both.” He argues that Mark is a hypocrite, considering how he killed Levy (whether intentionally or not). Then Cecil uses his army of ReAnimen—zombified super-soldiers designed by Sinclair—and a hidden implant lodged in Mark’s head to bring the volatile superhero back into line.
This chain of events leads to Mark parting ways with Cecil and the GDA. It also creates a rift within the Guardians of the Globe, as some of its members leave the superteam to form one of their own outside Cecil’s control. With new relationships forming among the show’s expansive roster of heroes and villains, Invincible continues to develop its characters in compelling ways while slowly pushing its story closer to the central conflict involving the Viltrumites. At the same time, the new season introduces even more characters, whose celebrity voice actors join the series’ already star-studded cast: Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul and Jonathan Banks, Kate Mara (House of Cards, The Martian), Simu Liu (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), and Xolo Maridueña (Cobra Kai), among others.
Kirkman has said that he hopes to adapt Invincible’s story across seven or eight seasons, but the show needs to attract and maintain enough of an audience to convince Prime Video to make that happen. (Season 4 was officially green-lit in July 2024, and production is already underway, according to Kirkman.) Shorter waits between seasons could certainly help, but a major factor in both the quality and the popularity of the series is its ability to navigate the challenge—and opportunity—of pacing a narrative that already has a clear ending.
“Because the 144-issue run of the series is completed, we have complete hindsight into how the comic-book stories went, how important each individual subplot became for the length of the series,” Kirkman explained to The Ringer last year. “It’s really kind of assembling a puzzle when we sit down to map out a season. A lot of work goes into that, and there are certainly some new innovations that are brought to the table in that process. But for the most part, it’s plugging in different things and figuring out what we’re going to expand and what we’re going to truncate based on where the story went in the comics.”
Through the six episodes of the new season that were made available to critics, Invincible has settled into a good cadence by devoting ample time to evolving its characters in quieter moments and secondary plotlines while picking its spots to focus on propelling the big story lines, like Allen the Alien and Nolan’s shared imprisonment in space. Part of that calculus comes from the creative process that Kirkman described, as the show expands on certain elements of the comics and cuts out anything that feels extraneous to its narrative in a different medium.
As Prime Video renews Invincible one or two seasons at a time, Kirkman and showrunner Simon Racioppa just need to ensure that they’re not holding back too much of their best material, given that the show’s future is never guaranteed. And if the show continues to pursue shorter gaps between seasons, there could be undesired consequences for the animation quality. While the show’s visuals have always been pretty good overall, they’ve never been its greatest strength. The time and effort required to animate some of the spectacular artwork that Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley created for the comics was one cause of the series’ past production delays. And Season 3 evinces more instances of possible corner-cutting to meet the demands of a quicker release schedule, with a high volume of static backgrounds and other tricks of the trade that Invincible previously revealed to the masses.
Even in its third season, Invincible has room to grow, and it’s still solidifying its footing on what is hopefully a long road. “I feel like we’re just getting started,” Kirkman told Variety in 2024. “I’m very hopeful that this show can be around for a while.”
