Invincible’s season 2 premiere is already beating Marvel at multiverses

The multiverse is everywhere: from the Oscars The Flash; they’ve defined Rick and Morty for years, and of course they’re all that’s left of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The return of Invincible for its second season, yet another superhero story has ventured into alternate realities — but this time around, the series is actually doing it right. The first episode, which premiered last Friday, was the only one of this season. Invincible The multiverse of the game is already allowing us to learn new information about characters that we care about.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers for Invincible season 2 episode 1.]

Open the doors of Invincible The start of season 2 is a shocker as Omni-Man and invincible destroy a major metropolis together, killing many people. They are the new rulers on Earth. It’s quite a shock after the season 1 finale, but it’s all quickly resolved when the show reveals that Angstrom Levy, a new character introduced this season, is actually a super genius who’s gathering all the versions of himself from every universe to work together and save the world from the versions of Mark and Nolan that take over Earth.

Image: Prime Video

Invincible’s writing is often clever, but its best moments say more with what the characters leave out than what they actually say. And it’s the same here, with the implication of Angstrom’s plan: The fact that almost every other version of Mark joined his father and helped take over Earth means that our Mark is extra special, and that our Nolan is more complicated too. They’re not just another pair of Marks and Nolans in the infinite universe; they’re different, specifically in a way that we couldn’t really know about without the multiverse coming into play.

This is a fascinating departure for the kind of multiverse stories we’ve seen in other superhero arenas — specifically Marvel’s, which has left the entire franchise stretched too thin. Movies like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of MadnessShows like Loki A lot of movies are focused on showing multiple variations of the exact same person. This is done to give each character their own personality, without explaining why they are unique or special (or even what makes them different). Meeting four different versions of Loki doesn’t make Tom Hiddleston’s more special, it just dilutes him into a few noteworthy characteristics.

Multiverses are a powerful plot device, just like any other storyline or plot device. However, they must serve the story and characters of the show. The plot of a multiverse becomes boring if it is all about the universes, not the characters who live in them. While it is yet to be determined how the remainder of Invincible’s second season will go, the first episode already seems like a more promising version of the multiverse than anything Marvel has put on screen recently.