Amazon's Invincible's Uneven Tone Makes For Uneven Viewing

 I might have heard OF the comic book series Invincible by The Walking Dead's Robert Kirkman, but I hadn't read it.  One day in March I saw that there was an animated series on Amazon Prime Video.  It's Amazon's third crack at a superhero series after two seasons of The Tick and two seasons of The Boys.  Those were both live action; the former was a comedy and the latter is a blood-drenched drama with some black humor.  

So where does Invincible fit on that spectrum?  The first episode is mostly pretty light.  Mark Grayson (voiced by TWD's Steven Yeung) is a fairly normal high school student--except his father Nolan (voiced by JK Simmons) is the most powerful superhero on Earth called Omni-Man.  He has mostly Superman's power set and like Superman is an alien.  Mark has dreamed of being like his dad and then all the sudden he is!  He starts developing super strength, invulnerability, and the ability to fly.  Most of the episode then is him coming to grips with it and training with his dad.  The end of the main episode features Mark getting his costume and adopting the moniker Invincible.

So it seemed like a nice superhero universe, albeit a bit unoriginal.  Besides Omni-Man being like Superman there's a Justice League-type group with heroes like War Woman (Wonder Woman--duh), Red Rush (Flash), Darkwing (Batman--and Darkwing Duck), a Martian, a fish guy, and someone who dresses in green.  In a post-credits scene they all go to their mountain HQ and Nolan shows up.  Without a word he just starts murdering them in the goriest, most brutal ways possible.  Which was really a big 180 from the rest of the episode.

The episodes after that similarly weave between nice and nasty.  A lot of Mark's story is like Spider-Man as he goes to high school and has to try to manage a relationship with the girl of his dreams while learning to be a superhero.  It's mostly nice, old-fashioned Marvel kind of stuff.

And then you get these brutal fight scenes that are drenched with blood that are like that first episode a 180-degree shift in tone.  There are bodies exploding and flesh being ripped off people and heroes being beaten into bloody pulps.  I guess that's not surprising from the creator of The Walking Dead and producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who also worked on AMC's Preacher adaptation.  It just makes it uneven viewing as I said in the title.  I mean do you want a grim-and-gritty R-rated Watchmen or Titans-style universe or do you want a PG-13 Spider-Man-style universe? Trying to do both gets kind of annoying.

Maybe it's that I'm getting older but I don't really need the blood and gore and stuff.  Or maybe it's that I've already seen it in Watchmen, The Boys, Titans, Deadpool, and so on and thus it's not really all that shocking anymore.  Or maybe it's that the world is already full of so much shit in real life maybe I don't need superhero shows that are all bloody and gory and depressing.

The stuff that isn't bloody and gory and depressing is fine.  It mostly concerns Mark trying to establish himself as a hero and balance his real life.  Unlike Spider-Man, Mark's powers allow him to go a lot more places.  In one episode he escorts a mission to Mars and inadvertently triggers an apocalypse on that planet.  He also stops an asteroid and fights an alien on the moon.

Like Watchmen a lot of the plot also involves investigating the murder of the superheroes in the first episode.  There's a demon private investigator who's like the Rorschach of the story with his noir detective-like appearance and speaking style.  When a government agency sends him back to Hell, Nolan's wife/Mark's mother (voiced by Sandra Oh) takes over the investigation, slowly coming to grips with the reality that her husband is not the good guy she thought.  One of the lamest plot points is that Nolan hides his bloody, torn costume on top of a cabinet in the house, where his wife sees it when she's cleaning.  The guy who routinely flies to Italy for pizza or Paris for wine just leaves key evidence sitting in almost plain sight in his own house.  Really?  Subconsciously maybe he wanted to get caught?

In the penultimate episode, the government throws everything they have at Nolan to put him down once and for all.  They use conventional ordinance, zombie cyborgs, and even revive a Cthulu-type monster Nolan had taken down previously.  The monster is pumped up full of steroids to make it a tougher opponent.  Mark shows up to help his father, not realizing the truth.

Meanwhile, a couple of bad guys have their own plan to kill Omni-Man by reviving one of the dead Guardians, the appropriately named "Immortal."  When Immortal goes after Omni-Man and Nolan literally rips him in half, Mark starts to realize maybe his dad isn't on the side of angels.

In the final episode, Nolan explains that his people are a race of warriors who forged a vast empire.  Part of that is they dispatch agents to far-flung planets like Earth so those agents can weaken the planet to make it ripe for the taking.  When Mark isn't cool with this, the next fifteen minutes or so is just Nolan beating Mark to a pulp and killing thousands in Chicago and elsewhere in the process.  It makes the Superman-Zod fight in Man of Steel look like a baseball brawl.

But finally Nolan remembers a Little League game when Mark was a little kid and just flies away.  Not just away from the area but away from the planet, to parts unknown.  And Mark's battered body is taken to a facility to recover.

After that it's kind of like Lord of the Rings where it seems like it could end about five times.  When Mark wakes up he isn't sure he wants to be a hero anymore.  Meeting up with an alien on the moon (voiced by Seth Rogen), whom he fought with in episode 2 before they became buddies, Mark finds out that there's a Coalition of Planets trying to organize to stop Nolan's people.  Mark declines to join them and instead says he's going to finish high school.  The show does remind us there are a plethora of threats besides Nolan and his people still out there for Mark and other heroes to deal with.

The ending is a bit flat.  Like with Titans and Doom Patrol, in the end everyone except Mark is just standing around doing nothing during the climax.  And mostly all Mark does is get his ass kicked.  What was the point of spending so much time on the new Guardians team, especially Atom Eve, who leaves the team to strike out on her own when her boyfriend cheats on her with a girl who can create multiples of herself, when they didn't do anything in the end?  Why wasn't there a battle royale against Nolan?  Maybe they decided they'd gotten their asses kicked enough a few episodes ago.  Still, it wasn't all that satisfying.

There are some other subplots too like a small-time villain called "Titan" who enlists Mark's help to overthrow his boss, a gangster known as "Machine Head" because he has a robot head.  Being young and naive, Mark doesn't realize that Titan is using him to consolidate power for himself.  After the death of the heroes in the first episode, a new team is recruited to take their place.  They're led by Robot (voiced by Zachary Quinto) who has a little side project of his own.  It turns out he's not really a robot at all.  He's actually some kind of blobby little humanoid who's living in a tank of goo and controlling Robot like a drone.  He hires a pair of alien criminals who are expert cloners to make a body with DNA stolen from a hero on his team who can make explosions.

Part of Robot's team is Monster Girl who's a girl who turns into a big green monster.  The creepy thing is that whenever she uses her power she gets a week younger.  She's supposed to be 25 but looks more like half that at the start.  That's the kind of weird shit Robert Kirkman can do because he's a big-time author but if I do it I get banned from Amazon.  I actually never did that specifically, though it seems like something I should have thought of.  I'm a little jealous actually.

"Robot" falls in love with Monster Girl and creates his new human body as a teenager so he can hook up with her in human form.  That's not creepy at all, right?  Again, I do something like that and I get banned from Amazon but it's totally OK for Robert Kirkman to do it on an Amazon Prime original show.

Anyway, I liked a lot of this and maybe it'll get a season 2.  There are a lot of comics books in this series so there's a lot more material to adapt.  And they certainly left it wide open to continue the story.