Invincible: Season 1, Episode 5 Review - "That Actually Hurt" - IGN

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After a rocky start, Amazon’s Invincible picked up steam in last week’s fourth episode, a breezier, more sincere entry that focused on the Grayson family’s various dilemmas. This week’s fifth episode, “That Actually Hurt” continues that trend by pushing Mark Grayson/Invincible (Steven Yeun) into an uneasy partnership while also pitting him against the most domineering of supervillains: time management.

The episode kicks off with a bit of ultra-violence that, like the gore in the premiere episodes, feels too cartoonishly indulgent to have a real point — but by the time the episode wraps up, it feels like the show has undergone a metamorphosis. The violence in the episode’s climax, wrought upon familiar characters rather than civilian redshirts, builds on various story threads and becomes a reflection of Mark’s limitations as a novice hero, a teenager torn between world-saving antics and personal commitments.

Invincible Season 1, Episode 5: That Actually Hurt Images

This emotional crescendo becomes possible thanks to episode five’s unique structure. Throughout its first half, it cuts back and forth between ostensibly unrelated scenes of Mark and Titan (Mahershala Ali) — two characters who only met briefly in the first episode — as if to set hero and villain on a collision course.

Mark’s big battles to save the city make him constantly late for school, his job, and his dates with Amber (Zazie Beetz). There’s only so much leeway Amber is willing to give him, especially since he hasn’t told her about his secret identity, so their relationship grows increasingly frayed. It’s a simple superhero problem typical of the genre, and it begins to feel intentionally rote each time Mark texts Amber from the middle of a fight scene (while having bottles and debris thrown at his head), or each time he dispenses with a gimmicky villain without breaking a sweat. Mark has become powerful enough to treat these villains as an inconvenience; crime-fighting is an obligation, but his mind is usually elsewhere, and so even his heroic antics begin to feel ironic and detached.

itan treats even these bit-players as human, and vulnerable, rather than as disposable.

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This clashes wildly and purposefully with Titan’s vignettes, as the hoodie-clad Black enforcer (with a retractable rock exterior resembling the X-Men’s Colossus) reluctantly moves from job to job in dilapidated neighborhoods. In one scene, he burns down a poor residential building, but has sympathy for its desperate residents. In another, he steals an expensive item, but empathizes with the minimum-wage security guards enough to let them escape. In stark contrast to the preceding superhero battles, Titan treats even these bit-players as human, and vulnerable, rather than as disposable.

There’s something much more complicated about Titan’s story when compared to Mark’s relatively binary “punch the bad guy, get the girl” classic adventure tales, which always end with him returning to his affluent neighborhood. Soon, it’s revealed that Titan is working for a crime boss, Machine Head (a hilariously auto-tuned Jeffrey Donovan), and that his motivations are far more sympathetic.

Mark has the option of volunteering at the community center that Titan and his family rely on for meals.

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Mark is finally roped into Titan’s more sincere storyline, not as an adversary, but as an ally to the unwilling henchman, who seeks Invincible’s help to bring down Machine Head and free himself from his grip. Mark’s realizations here — of the real hardships faced by Titan, and the more complex underlying causes of crime as it intersects with race and poverty — evoke the famous 1970 Green Lantern/Green Arrow story by Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams in which intergalactic policeman Hal Jordan is forced to reckon with real-world issues like racism and addiction, which had gone largely ignored during his fantastical antics in the preceding decade.

Fittingly, Mark is summoned by Titan soon after returning from outer-space — “Let me show you what you don’t see from up there,” Titan tells him — and his simple, distinctly 1960s identity-crisis story (in the vein of Spider-Man) slowly becomes subsumed by a more serious, ’70s-esque comic tale of societal woe. A particularly poignant indication of Mark and Titan’s divide is that Mark has the option of volunteering at the community center where Amber helps out, while Titan and his family seem to rely on that same center for meals.

Mark’s parents, Nolan (J.K. Simmons) and Debbie (Sandra Oh) take more of a backseat this week, but this chapter offers enough hints of their respective stories that they aren’t forgotten. Debbie, for instance, continues to investigate her suspicions about Nolan’s involvement in the murder of the Guardians of the Globe. However, where Nolan and Debbie’s subplot truly shines is the way it intersects with Mark’s story and his Titan conundrum.

How Invincible Became a Modern Superhero Icon

In the two scenes where Nolan and Debbie discuss what Mark should or shouldn’t do — one scene involving Mark, over dinner, and another in his absence — the dialogue concerns their differing opinions on Mark’s role as a superhero, but the subtext is imbued with razor-wire tension thanks to the various bits of information Debbie and Nolan hide from one another. For instance, while Nolan distrusts Titan and believes helping individuals to be a waste of time for someone as powerful as Mark, Debbie wants Mark to believe in the good in people, as if she herself is searching for ways to justify trusting Nolan despite her suspicions. The visual storytelling in these more subdued scenes is particularly deft, using animated rack-focuses to subtly shift the narrative’s point of view so that a given moment keeps only one character in focus, highlighting both their isolation and their secrets.

The other subplots do still feel a bit tacked-on without much room to breathe, between Cecil’s continued stiltedness, Eve’s sudden parental issues, the new Guardians’ inability to get along, and Robot’s mysterious involvement with the Mauler twins. However, all these story threads finally collide in an engaging close-quarters fight scene — a far cry from the action’s usual cityscapes and outdoor settings. A litany of fancy bad guys arrives for a visually inventive sequence with a number of emotional peaks and valleys. The supervillains are led by the show’s most intimidating non-Omni-Man presence yet: Battle Beast, (Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Michael Dorn) a hulking, mace-wielding interdimensional cat-man warrior who looks like something out of Hindu mythology (particularly Narasimha, lord Vishnu’s fearsome lion-headed avatar).

The result is well-liked characters being gravely injured, in a manner that finally imbues the show’s violence with weight and consequence. But as much as the images on screen try to be stomach-churning, the most unsettling fallout comes in the form of Mark’s belabored breathing, like he’s been broken from within. He even catches a glimpse of what appears to be his father gazing down at him from afar without getting involved — an emotional betrayal as shattering as any broken bone.

By the end of the episode, Mark has failed both as a boyfriend and as a superhero, the GDA has yet another secret operation going, and his parents’ marriage tumbles towards an inevitable implosion. And to make matters worse, Titan’s complex story of keeping his family safe becomes even more complex, leading us to wonder whether Nolan or Debbie had been correct in their guidance. For the first time in the series, Mark doesn’t seem so invincible after all.

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Invincible: Season 1, Episode 5 Review - "That Actually Hurt" - IGN
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