After setting up an emotional foundation in its debut – Mark and his mother Debbie living in the emotional crater of Omni Man’s betrayal – the second episode of Invincible’s new season finds itself at a standstill. For the aforementioned characters, that’s occasionally a good thing. They’re stuck in place with nowhere to go. For everyone else? Not so much. A few supporting storylines develop, but mechanically, and with little room to breathe, leaving “In About Six Hours I Lose My Virginity to a Fish” (a title much funnier than the actual episode) in something of an emotional limbo, despite its strong emotional core.
Invincible has always been an amalgam of existing superhero mythologies, mostly as parody or satire, but this week it mostly performs straight-faced imitations of popular heroes, opening with a scenario that’s as Spider-Man as it gets. Mark’s friends and his girlfriend Amber wait for him at their graduation ceremony (à la The Amazing Spider-Man 2) because he’s busy fighting crime as Invincible atop the Washington Monument (Spider-Man: Homecoming). This works to show us how scattered his life has become and how much he needs a break, but it’s a tad uncanny to watch the series simply mirror existing scenes from pop culture without much insight, or much comedic subversion.
The episode comes within inches of this when Invincible (upon the orders of Cecil at the GDA) ends up in the eerie Midnight City – a cursed neighborhood resembling the blood-red Gotham from Batman: The Animated Series – in order to arrest Darkwing, a Batman parody. But this proves to be yet another straightforward scene with little purpose beyond depicting Mark’s current crime-fighting routine. A trip to a stand-in for Aquaman’s Atlantis, An encounter with an Aquaman stand-in, from which it derives its title, is at least slightly more tongue-in-cheek when it erupts into violence. The fact Mark needs to be in two places at once, and is forced to split his time between a Vegas date with Amber and this underwater battle, is at the very least concise, but it’s hardly novel; this has been Peter Parker’s struggle for about 60 years.
That being said, Debbie’s story feels like the episode’s focused emotional core, despite the character being limited to a handful of scenes. The pain and embarrassment of Nolan/Omni-Man referring to her as his “pet” clouds her perspective. When she shows a home to prospective buyers, the couple’s argument takes on sinister undertones, and it’s hard to tell whether this is an objective telling, or something we see from Debbie’s warped perspective. It’s a potent storytelling moment, filled with uncertainty and made all the more powerful when Debbie breaks down at home afterward, releasing her frustrations on a cabinet of wine glasses.
Elsewhere, three intersecting subplots unfold, though only one of them is particularly interesting. At the USSA (Invincible’s NASA equivalent), astronaut Rus Livingston (Ben Schwartz) – or rather, a Martian disguised as Rus, as of an easily forgettable subplot last season – struggles to fit in at his job and gorges on uncooked frozen pizzas in his apartment when he learns of the fallen Martian Man, a Guardian of the Globe who made Earth his home and won people’s adoration. While he’s spurred into action as The Shapesmith, a shapeshifting “human” who gets in the New Guardians’ good books by helping them fight the sniveling Lizard League, the episode offers eerie hints at what’s become of the real Rus back on Mars, now that he’s being puppeteered by psychic, squid-like beings.
The Shapesmith is adorably good-natured, especially in the moments that we, the audience, recognize as hare-brained attempts to convince the Guardians that he’s definitely human and not at all an alien (he was “born on Earth,” he assures them). But this story ends up truncated by other related concerns: The Lizard League gets an entire sequence about the group’s internal politics and power struggle, as though they aren’t simply a spoof of Marvel’s Serpent Society – once again, the new season can’t seem to separate its send-ups from its serious stories – while the Guardians’ own drama takes up a chunk of the screen time too.
As unimpeachably funny as Jason Mantzoukas usually is, his role as the superhero Rex Splode seems to have flatlined. He’s the same juvenile supporting character he always was, and his jealousy over Dupli-Kate’s (Malese Jow) fling with new Guardians leader The Immortal (Ross Marquand) doesn’t engender nearly the same sympathy as the scenes involving Shapesmith, Mark, or Debbie. He’s grating at best, and the show is yet to provide a solid reason for us to really get invested in him.
There’s yet another supporting subplot too, one that sort of works – the episode tries to pack a lot into 40 minutes – involving Atom Eve (Gillian Jacobs) skirting around bureaucratic red tape to build a local park, albeit to disastrous results. She’s in way over her head as a superhero, which leads to further skirmishes with her short-tempered father, in a tale of domestic frustrations that aptly mirrors Mark and Debbie’s story. However, by hopping between so many different characters seemingly at random, “In About Six Hours I Love My Virginity to a Fish” seldom affords the likes of Eve the requisite time for their stories to grow and have lasting emotional impact.
What’s more, Invincible is so over-stuffed at the moment that it relegates an important story from last week – the question of what happened to apparent season villain Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown) after his accident – to a brief post-credit scene in an alternate universe. At this stage, several of the episode’s subplots have immense dramatic potential, but they feel like puzzle pieces scattered across the floor, as the writers struggle to assemble them into something resembling a larger whole.