Through its first three seasons, Invincible finished every eight-episode story arc with a bang. From Omni-Man’s destruction of Chicago to Mark’s interdimensional bout with Angstrom Levy to Mark’s brutal showdown with Conquest, each season finale has thrust Invincible into a dramatic, bloody confrontation. But Season 4 has finally broken that pattern.
Last week’s penultimate episode featured the annihilation of Viltrum, effectively ending the Viltrumite War. The epic battle was the culmination of the show’s central conflict with the Viltrum Empire, and the scale of the action met those heightened stakes. But at the end of the installment, Mark realized that the nearly 40 remaining Viltrumites, with nothing to lose after the destruction of their home planet, had likely gone to Earth to claim their revenge. The stage was set for another massive battle to follow in the finale. However, that fight never materializes.
Wednesday’s finale, “Don’t Leave Me Hanging Here,” plays into the audience’s expectations for another classic, bloody conflict to cap off another season of Invincible. Instead, the episode focuses on the evolution of its characters and the toll that recent events have taken on them while also setting up the future of a series that’s far from over.
With Invincible creator Robert Kirkman serving as a co-showrunner for the animated adaptation of his comics, the TV series has always remained faithful to its source material. Still, there are often minor adjustments made to the blueprint that can result in meaningful changes—and the Season 4 finale is another example of a few small tweaks making a substantial difference in the execution of the story.
In the comics, Mark reacts to his epiphany about the Viltrumites’ likely whereabouts just as he does in the finale: by assuming the worst. With nothing else to do as he waits for the Coalition of Planets’ ship to reach Earth, he visualizes horrific scenarios, torturing himself with thoughts of Thragg and his desperate followers destroying his world and killing his loved ones while he’s too far away to save them. When the ship is close enough, Mark jets off on his own, flying across the globe in search of any Viltrumite aggressors. He finds none, and neither does Nolan when he joins his son soon after. For a moment, Invincible and Omni-Man are relieved—and then they turn around to see Thragg waiting for them, prepared to make a deal.
Although the animated adaptation retains the basic outline of these events, “Don’t Leave Me Hanging Here” delays that fateful confrontation and limits it to Mark and the menacing Viltrumite grand regent. Rather than placing that encounter soon after Mark’s return to Earth, the episode effectively inhabits Mark’s worst fears and extends that tension across almost 40 minutes, allowing the audience to feel Mark’s newfound dread of the Viltrumites’ inevitable retaliation and his crippling anxiety about an unseen threat looming around every corner.
After being away from Earth for months and narrowly escaping death twice, Mark returns home with even more emotional baggage than he had when he left. Although Invincible fought against a lot of powerful enemies and survived so many close calls through four seasons, he’d never encountered anyone nearly as formidable as Thragg. The Viltrumite leader punches with so much force that his windup has a gravitational pull. And Mark has to reconcile with not only how easily Thragg could have killed him but also how helpless he’ll be whenever Thragg decides to repay him for destroying Viltrum.
Invincible disperses the same kind of nightmare scenarios Mark imagined in the comics throughout the episode, transforming his temporary catastrophizing into a more lasting form of PTSD as these horrible visions begin to intrude into his daily life. As Mark speaks to Debbie for the first time in months, he suddenly sees Thragg holding her by the throat before ripping her head off. A casual walk around campus with Eve, William, and Rick soon turns into a waking nightmare as Mark sees Anissa in the middle of a massacre. A conversation with Eve becomes her execution—and all he can do is helplessly watch Thragg kill the love of his life. In every instance, Mark doesn’t know whether what he’s seeing is real—and neither does the audience.
When Thragg finally appears in the flesh with a little more than five minutes remaining in the episode, he greets Mark alone. While Invincible bravely attempts to start a fight he’ll never win (a prospect that doesn’t impress Thragg in the slightest), the Viltrumite leader all but ignores his futile efforts and presents him with an offer that he can’t refuse.
“We will live among you,” Thragg explains. “Wear your clothes. Walk your streets. We will disappear within your society. Your people will never know we are here, but they will save us nonetheless as we use them to birth our salvation. Any attempt to find us, to remove us, to thwart us, by you or the Coalition of Planets, will result in the death of billions and a less pleasant form of life for the survivors. Either way, we will rebuild our race. Your very existence proves this is possible. In return, I offer a truce. We will not influence, affect, aid, or endanger Earth in any way—as long as we are undisturbed. You do not have a choice, and yet you must still make one.”
As Thragg suggests, it’s an impossible choice: let the Viltrumites breed on Earth and allow the alien race of conquerors to start anew, or doom humanity and the remaining Viltrumites alike. The adaptation’s decision to isolate Mark and leave this dilemma to him alone—as opposed to him and Omni-Man—only reinforces the immeasurable weight of responsibility that he bears as Earth’s greatest protector. The series continues to explore Mark’s navigation of the moral challenges of being a superhero, and the finale presents him with his most important choice yet.
Although Invincible is initially consumed by his rage and hatred of Thragg and the Viltrumites, he imagines the terrifying consequences that his rejection would invite—and so he accepts Thragg’s terms. After almost ending the series’s central conflict for good, Invincible has reshaped and extended it, as the threat of the Viltrumites comes closer to home than ever.
While Mark’s reacclimation to Earth and his consequential decision serve as the focal points of the finale, the episode also leaves plenty of room to explore how the other primary characters have changed since the start of the war and the series at large. Eve finally tells Mark about her unexpected pregnancy, her subsequent abortion, and her realization that her pregnancy had coincided with the loss of her powers—all of which she had to face on her own while he was away. Nolan continues to try to reinvent himself and rehabilitate his image after what he did to Chicago and Mark, as well as rebuild his marriage with Debbie, who’s moved on from her relationship with Paul as she’s accepted that she’ll always be a part of this extraordinary life surrounded by superheroes. (Sorry, Paul—you’ll always have that spaghetti recipe.)
Meanwhile, on Talescria, Allen has inherited tremendous responsibilities of his own. He’s grown from being the goofy, one-eyed evaluation officer in Season 1 who mixed up Earth and Urath for years to being the goofy, one-eyed leader of the Coalition of Planets who is already facing pressure from the council to eliminate the remaining Viltrumites, including Nolan, Mark, and Oliver (who’s recovering from his injuries on Talescria). The finale’s stinger follows Allen as he’s presented with a similarly impossible choice. In a message from the grave, Allen’s predecessor, Thaedus, informs him of the Coalition’s secret, last-resort weapon: a perfected version of the Scourge Virus that almost exterminated the entire Viltrumite race. As Thaedus explains, this new variant won’t fail to kill off the remaining survivors—but it might also affect those with “similar genetics,” such as humans.
“For the good of all living beings, use the Scourge Virus to finish what I started, and let nothing stop you,” Thaedus says in the final lines of the season. “No matter the cost, every last Viltrumite must die.”
Viltrum was annihilated, but as long as any Viltrumites are still breathing, the entire universe remains in danger—at least as far as the Coalition is concerned. And so, as Invincible turns to a new season, Mark and humanity face not just the lingering threat of the Viltrumites, now hiding among them, but also the prospect of an even deadlier Scourge Virus unleashed by Mark’s friend and ally.
For much of the second half of Season 4, Invincible seemed to be approaching the climax of the story it had been building for years. Yet the series still has a long way to go. Kirkman has previously predicted that the series could run for seven to eight seasons, or even as many as 10. The finale aligns with roughly the 78th issue of the comic book series, which unfolded over 144 issues from 2003 to 2018. Assuming the Prime Video series remains popular enough to keep Jeff Bezos happy, that seven-to-eight-season estimate may prove to be accurate.
Even as Invincible postpones a resolution with the Viltrumites for (at least) another season, the series and its extensive cast of characters are far from stagnant. Much like Mark, it grows with every decision and its consequences, finding new ways to surprise even fans of the source material. There’s still plenty of room for improvement, especially when it comes to the show’s animation quality and direction. But Invincible has proved that it still has a lot left to offer at what could end up being barely its halfway point.
