Invincible is not really a superhero show

*This review contains spoilers for the series

Look up Invincible right now, glance at the thumbnail, and you would be forgiven for filing it away as another animated superhero series for kids. I am here to tell you that that is wrong and to talk you into watching it. Fair warning: I am going to spoil it heavily.

Invincible plays it straight for about 20 minutes. Superhero team, world in danger, the usual. Then the first episode ends, and Nolan, the most powerful man on the planet, kills every member of his own team. No explanation, just the credits. It turns out he is a Viltrumite, an alien sent to soften Earth up for an empire that conquers planets. Debbie, the wife he built a life with, and Mark, the son he raised, were part of the cover. By the end of season one, Mark has powers of his own and stands between his father and the planet. Nolan beats him almost to death, then asks what he will have left after five hundred years when everyone he loves is gone. Mark, barely conscious, says, “You, Dad." Nolan looks at his bloodied hands and flies away.

What the later seasons do with that is the reason I keep recommending the show. On paper, Mark is the main character, and he is. But Nolan is the one I find hardest to look away from. Here is a man who is effectively immortal, raised and trained to see other worlds as things to be taken, who spends 20 years on Earth pretending to be a husband and a father, and somewhere in those 20 years, the pretending stops being pretending. He develops the one thing his upbringing had no use for: feelings. And in the end, those feelings are what make him turn on his own people. That is the question the show is really chewing on. Not who would win a fight. What actually makes a person human? Invincible's answer is that it is the capacity to care about someone else and to be hurt because you do. Vulnerability is not the weakness in the system; it is the whole point.

None of this makes Nolan a good person. He is not. He kills a horrifying number of people on Earth, partly to make a point to his son, and the show never lets him off the hook for it. What it does do, and this is the uncomfortable part, is make you feel something for him anyway. That is a very human trap to fall into. We look for the good in people. We build relationships at the times someone lets their guard down. We forgive far too easily. The show knows that about us, and it uses it.

The show is just as interested in the damage Nolan leaves behind. Think about what it would do to you to have your role model, the person you measured yourself against, nearly kill you, and to still love him while he is doing it. That is Mark's whole arc to carry. And then there is Debbie, who has to sit with the fact that her marriage, her ordinary domestic life, and the man who slept beside her were built on a mission to end her species. The show gives her grief room to breathe. It does not rush her towards forgiveness or strength. It lets her be wrecked by it, because that is the honest response. That honesty is also why the violence lands the way it does.

Many mainstream superhero films treat destruction as spectacle. Cities come down, the fight looks great, and somehow nobody you care about really bleeds. Invincible refuses that. It shows you the bodies. It shows you who has to clean up, who does not get back up, and who is still shaking weeks later. Violence here has a cost. After a while, you stop wincing at the gore itself and start wincing at what it means.

So why watch Invincible? For the story and the relationships at its centre, it even asks for some patience. Mark gets most of the focus, and the early episodes take their time building. Honestly, to feel things I’ve felt, you must watch the series. Watch it for what it understands about people: that the strongest thing about us was never the part that could throw a punch.

Sharar Chowdhury is learning how to be a manager and believes "I'm confused" is not a complete sentence. Send him emails atsharar672@gmail.com.