Invincible Season 3 Review: Prime Video's Superhero Cartoon Returns With One Issue

There's an easy way to review "Invincible" Season 3, and there's a hard way. The easy review: it's more "Invincible." If you liked the first two seasons, you'll like this new one — and if you're an adult who likes superheroes and animation, why wouldn't you like "Invincible"?

Prime Video's adaptation of the Image Comics series by Robert Kirkman, Corey Walker, and Ryan Ottley consistently hits the sweet spot between classic heroics and darker deconstructive takes on the genre; it can be as shocking and disturbing as "The Boys" while still having the heart of "Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man." It embraces the weird and wacky elements of superhero comics — pretty much every DC or Marvel character has their "Invincible" equivalent — but it's able to handle its character drama with the utmost seriousness. The action is awesome, the voice cast is one of the best in the business, and each episode makes you want to see what comes next. In the six episodes screened for critics of the eight-episode season, Season 3 offers more of all that, and even if the shape of the story arc isn't quite as clear as the previous seasons, you'll still be hyped to see where things are heading.

The hard way to review "Invincible" Season 3 is to try to talk about anything that happens in it. Prime Video's "Do Not Reveal" lists for each episode of Season 3 cover basically every major plot point — including, oddly enough, some points already revealed in the season's trailer. If everything's a "spoiler," how much can a review say? Let's attempt to talk about where things are heading without giving too much away.

When we last left off in Season 2, Invincible aka Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun) killed the multiverse-hopping villain Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown) by accident while saving his mother Debbie (Sandra Oh). A meeting with a future incarnation of Atom Eve (Gillian Jacobs) has him pressed on whether or not to admit feelings for Eve in the present. Mark also has to be there for his new half-brother Oliver (Lincoln Bodin in Season 2, Christian Convery in Season 3), a purple half-Viltrumite half-Thraxan who's growing up fast. Meanwhile in outer space, Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons) and Allen the Alien (Seth Rogan) are trapped together in Viltrumite prison, on the verge of an unlikely alliance in the face of a shared enemy. If you've forgotten anything else important from the past two seasons of "Invincible," you can read Looper's recap article.

All of these developments have repercussions in "Invincible" Season 3. The new season doesn't introduce a singular overarching threat the way Season 1 did with Omni-Man and Season 2 did with Angstrom; rather, it continues to build a variety of conflicts for its expansive cast of superheroes to work through. One thing that's not a spoiler is that Mark is going to find himself in conflict with the Global Defense Agency director Cecil Stedman (Walton Goggins), who isn't a villain so much as a morally grey figure making tough, often-questionable choices in the pursuit of saving the world.

Invincible has already broken his big rule against killing, so can he really claim a moral upper hand over Cecil? The resulting storyline has shades of "Captain America: Civil War," an attempt to reckon with two equally true ideas that can lead to contradictory conclusions: the powerful need to be controlled by the rule of law for the greater good — but also the law itself isn't inherently good or trustworthy either. Mark is trying to figure out how to navigate these grey areas, while also trying to offer moral guidance to Oliver, whose childish black-and-white view of the world might edge him uncomfortably close to his dad.

Because "Invincible" is trying to cover so many different storylines in just eight episodes per season, individual episodes can get very busy. On the positive side, this means there's always something happening and the show doesn't feel padded. But it can also make things a little structurally disjointed. There are two whole plotlines thus far regulated almost entirely to mid-credits scenes — with one of those mid-credits scenes amusingly taking up half an episode.

For the most part, Season 3's individual episodes don't stand out as much as select scenes within them — a backstory flashback here, a killer fight sequence there. One unusual highlight is the first seven minutes of the season's third episode, "You Want a Real Costume, Right?" This dialogue-free montage about a couple of down-on-their-luck crooks about to get their butts whooped is a great little diversion, and enough to make one wonder if the "Invincible" crew could pull off a whole silent episode a la "Fish Out of Water" from "BoJack Horseman." But episodic experimentation like that isn't really in the cards for a show pulled in so many directions at once.

It seems like a good sign for the final two episodes of the season that the sixth episode, "All I Can Say Is I'm Sorry," is the season's best so far. It introduces a new villain, Powerplex (Aaron Paul), whose motivations are unusually sympathetic and whose self-destructive actions play as tragedy. It remains to be seen what (if any) conclusions the season finale will draw on the story's ongoing moral and political dilemmas, but I trust the show's writers to make a worthy ending. Thankfully, fans won't have to wait as long as they did for the end of Season 2.

The first three episodes of "Invincible" Season 3 premiere on February 6 on Prime Video. Further episodes release every Thursday.