Invincible‘s third season is off to a legendary start. Out of all the released episodes at this time, Episode 2, “A Deal with the Devil” is most likely to floor audiences. As superhero media evolves, the stories get more mature. A recent preoccupation has been the superhero’s place in the systems that monitor and control them. Marvel Studios’ Captain America: Civil War, Warner Bros. and DC’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Amazon Prime Video’s The Boys have taken this postmodern approach to varied results. None have nailed it like “A Deal With The Devil,” which navigates unchecked power and methods of control.
At the start of the episode, Mark Grayson/Invincible (voiced by Steven Yeun) is pissed. He’s seen his mentor, Cecil Stedman (Walton Goggins) of the Global Defense Agency, use technology created by supervillain D.A. Sinclair to make his own army of robots called Reanimen.
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Filled with unbridled fury, Invincible won’t stop destroying the Reanimen, unable to calm down. Outside of the obviously impressive spectacle of Mark ripping apart automatons left and right, there’s an extreme discomfort to his outburst. One can almost imagine what Mark would do to the bodies of human beings if so provoked.
Actually, the audience doesn’t have to imagine- we saw this happen in the finale of season 2 whenever Invincible mercilessly beat down Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown) into a bloody pulp. This image is forced back into the brain whenever, towards the end of this episode, Mark puts a hand to Cecil’s throat, threatening him never to come around him or his family again.
Where do other series get the ramifications for your strength wrong?
In Captain America: Civil War, the dangerous show of power that sets the story in motion is truly an accident made by Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), leaving a level of sympathy for her. Likewise, in Batman v. Superman, Henry Cavill‘s Superman is being blamed for the destruction caused by his adversary in the previous film. In The Boys, most superheroes are so cartoonishly evil that they fit more snugly into the satirical realm.
Throughout Invincible, we’ve really come to know and love Mark Grayson, believing in his good heart, so seeing what his unchecked emotions can do sends a shiver down the spine. “A Deal with the Devil” brings a reality check: Mark Grayson, if pushed, could be a danger to us all. Without even much prodding, his innate power and unstable emotional state could lead to a cataclysm. For the first time in the series, the audience truly sees the potential of Mark Grayson as a threat. Yet, is he any more nefarious than the systems he exists within?
What appears to be an overly excessive use of power for Invincible takes on another shade when considering the system he operates within. The Global Defense Agency, Cecil specifically, have kept the Guardians of the Globe in the dark about just about everything. Now, equipped with the Reanimen as another method of order and refusing to divulge much of anything to the team, Cecil and his agency represent something far more insidious than the potential of Mark making a heel turn.
This is only solidified whenever Cecil activates a switch that produces a sound in Mark’s head that echoes the Atlantean kaiju he fought in season 3. Seeing the way Cecil treats Mark and the tone Cecil takes with the rest of the team, Rex Splode (Jason Mantzoukas) is horrified, leading a mass exit of most of the team. It’s a point of no return, where how Cecil truly regards the team appears to come out through his actions.
Invincible Season 3 Episode 2 focuses on control and what Cecil gets from it.
Batman v. Superman exhibited an interesting variation of control, with Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) playing on the fears of the public at large to pit The Dark Knight and The Caped Crusader against one another. By that same trade, Captain America: Civil War shows the fallibility of the government in doing what’s right Invincible outclasses both by outclassing that power will more often than not be seen as nothing more than a manipulatable asset to be deployed. If Mark instills fear, the reaction to Mark’s show of power provokes absolute terror.
More or less, The Boys plays with this concept on the same level. In that series’ world, superheroes are all nothing more than a pawn of the Vought Corporation, a way to show force when they’re not selling merch for the company. What Invincible has that The Boys doesn’t is a bit of a twist: in flashbacks, the audience learns that Cecil himself had doubts about how the Global Defense Agency handled its “rehabilitation” of supervillains, even going to prison. For the all-too-familiar excuse of the greater good, Cecil learns to shove it down, becoming a cog in the machine. The systems that govern us almost always win, which is a chilling thought.
The constant dance between power and control in “A Deal with the Devil” feels like a thesis on what Invincible is successfully accomplishing in its third season. Director Haylee Herrick and writer Helen Leigh knocked this episode out of the park so much that it’s the kind of episode that sustains a series for years to come.
This is the sort of mature, bold storytelling that fans of comic books and adult animation have been looking forward to for a long time. Most importantly, it comes to a brave conclusion: no matter the fear of awesome power, attempting to control that power will only worsen the situation. If Robert Kirkman wasn’t already proud of Invincible, he should be by now.
Invincible Season 3 es are now streaming on Prime Video.
