Welcome to the Heavy Spoilers show. I’m your host, Paul, aka the guy who’s dying to find out if he’s immortal or not, and in this video, we’re breaking down episode 6 of Invincible.
The entry is packed with tonnes of callbacks to the comics as well as some big deviations that never happened in the source material. There’s also a big thing being teased through the immortal, and it could hint at Nolan’s secret coming out soon. We’re going to break it all down, but this is a spoiler warning for the show and parts of the comic up until this point. If you enjoy the video, then please drop a thumbs up and subscribe to videos like this every day.
With that out of the way, thank you for clicking this. Now let’s get into Invincible.
Ok, so first up, I want to add in some Easter eggs that we missed last time. Firstly, this is one of the coolest callbacks I’ve ever seen, and in the show, we watch as Mark attends Reginald VelJohnson High School. Now the actor Reginald VelJohnson plays Principle Winslow, and the reason this is crazy is because he also played Carl Winslow in Family Matters. To make things even weirder, Principle Winslow in the comics looked exactly like he does in the show, and in the show, he looks like Reginald VelJohnson making for one mind-blowing Easter egg.
INVINCIBLE EPISODE 6 BREAKDOWN
In episode 1, we were also introduced to Martian Man and saw him with a young girl at one point. Omni-Man, of course, killed the character, and it doesn’t look like things have gotten better for said girl because last week you could catch her in the homeless shelter.
Yaaay, what an uplifting storyline!
At the end of episode 3 in the Supermax prison, we could also catch Duplikates brother Multi-Paul, but whether he’s going to be in the show more, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Episode 6 primarily centres around the Mad Scientist, DA Sinclair.
In the comics, he first showed up in Issue 20, which just so happened to follow on immediately after the Titan crime boss one. This happens way later than a lot of stuff in the series, such as the first chapter in the Omni-Man arc, showing that they’re re-ordering a lot of things.
This episode is very much a compression of Sinclair’s entire arc, and in the comics, he first showed up in issue 20, which is where we discovered he’d been reanimating the dead in order to become killer robots known as Re-animen. The end of issue 22 was when he decided to start using live test subjects, and he was absent for over a year in the comics, not returning until issue 36. 37 was where the arc culminated, but they’ve kind of pushed everything together from these issues into one big story.
The arc about first creating the re-animen from corpses is just hinted at, and instead we jump immediately into DA kidnapping live test subjects from Upstate University. This was one that Mark actually was attending in the comics when Da started his criminal activities, but for the show, he’s still in high school.
Elsewhere Mark, Monstergirl, and Black Samson are rushed into the ER after they were brutally beaten by a battle beast last week. The doctors are almost killed when trying to operate on her, and I feel that this is somewhat of a callback to Spider-Man 2, namely the Doctor Octopus scene in the hospital.
The robot is the only one who can operate on her, and we learn that he has studied her physiology. In issue 15 of the comics, the character actually took a skin sample from her, which explains this moment.
None of these operation scenes were present in the comics, and in fact, it was Bulletproof that was almost killed by Battle Beast.
To add more, Mark’s recovery is far greater, and whereas in the source material he just ended up with some cuts and plasters, here he’s out for six days. Now personally, I love this extra character development, and it helps to show how much of a bad father Nolan is. After seeing that he was present when the fight was going on, we know that he has a much darker side to him, and all of the characters around him are becoming victims of it.
From here, we see the continuation of Cecil’s suspicions, and he keeps up the lie that Damian Darkblood is the one who’s suspected of killing the Guardians. As we know, Nolan placed their blood in his office in order to frame him, and while Cecil and Co. study Mark’s blood in order to find a weakness for the Viltrumites, they have to pretend that Omni-Man is in the clear.
However, the conversation that Cecil and Nolan have is very much laced with the subtext that the former is asking the latter why he did it. Nolan gives the answer that he’s a demon, and that’s why. Though this isn’t to be taken literally, Omni-Man, of course, has a devilish side to him, and the pair also discuss Viltrum. Teenagers listen to their parents there, representing the amount of order that exists on the planet. I can’t talk about the big things without spoiling too much, so I won’t, but Viltrumites are very encouraged to join the world-betterment committee when they come of age, and they are taught to instill Viltrum’s ways onto other planets.
Nolan clearly hates that his son disobeyed him, and he’s willing to see him suffer because of it. Potentially, this shows that he wants Mark on his side, and he’s allowed him to see that if he doesn’t listen to him, bad things will happen.
Mark pretends he’s been hit by a car, and after making things right with Amber, we jump to him and his best friend William. Throughout the entry, William discusses a guy he has a crush on named Rick, who we later learn was kidnapped by Sinclair. Rick and William actually end up dating in the comics, so I appreciate that there’s some foreshadowing of them liking each other throughout.
Cut to Mark’s room, and we see him packing. On the wall, we can catch the Seance Dog poster, which resembles Doctor Strange slightly. Now I forgot to mention last time that this is actually playing on Science Dog, a character that somewhat shows up in Issue 25 of the comics. They’ve changed him up quite a lot for this, making him magic instead of the way he was originally.
Atom Eve arrives, and she states that she’s realised that the capesh** isn’t the best way to save people and that she can make an actual difference by helping people on a tangible level.
In the comics, the character actually went to Africa, but it was mainly to find solitude, whereas here they’ve changed it up.
Though she builds an African-looking tree house, she still remains in what looks like America and helps at home rather than abroad. In Issue 22, she flew into an African village and changed the landscape into luscious greenland, but here she stops a forest fire and a rock slide and creates crops for some farmers.
Either way, it adds a lot more to the character, in my opinion, and showcases that you can be a hero in ways other than just fighting bad guys.
COMIC BOOK EASTER EGGS IN INVINCIBLE EPISODE 6
In Issue 20 of the comics, a similar conversation happened where Eve talked about how everyone underestimated her. She’s a character that can control reality, but she’s been reduced to simply fighting bank robbers and aliens because that’s the role she’s found herself in.
It adds way more to her, and we get the idea that she’s actually in it for the right reasons, whereas most of the other teen teams were after the glory. We see an interaction that she has with her father, who says he wants nothing more than for her to have a normal life, but she disobeys him and continues to be a hero. This idea of standing against one’s parents is very much something that I think is foreshadowing the arc that Mark will go on with his own father, and I believe that he will wrestle with siding with or against him as we go further into the season.
As soon as Mark leaves, we see Debbie drop the fascade, and Nolan realises something is up, which is when he checks his costume. I kind of have a bit of a problem with this storyline, as I dunno why Omni-Man would’ve hid the costume here when the guy is able to travel to the sun in a second and there’s so many places on the planet he could’ve put it to not arouse suspicion.
Speaking of aroused, William gets that when he checks out Rick’s butt, and we also see a tour of the campus. It’s littered with missing posters, namely one for Doug Cheston, who was, of course, kidnapped at the start of the episode. There’s also a house party, which becomes a plot motif later on.
The group goes to a lecture that is interrupted by DA Sinclair, which is pretty much ripped directly out of the comics, namely issue 20 once more. However, they add more to it as this is where Sinclair meets Rick and realises he’s an alpha male. Later on, he spies on him, and this plot line didn’t appear until two issues later, when he smacked him on the head in his room.
Amber and Mark spend some uninterrupted time together, and they decide to both attend the university. However, the peace is disturbed by the arrival of one of the Re-animen, and it lets us know that no matter how much Mark tries to have a normal life, things like this will always disrupt it.
Whereas Nolan was happy to sit and have dinner with his wife, Mark’s duty and responsibility simply won’t allow him to, and he sacrifices his image to Amber in order to be a saviour. The action scene is ripped right out of Issue 20, and these robocop-inspired enemies are some of the most memorable foes that Mark encounters.
During this fight, William too discovers that Mark is invincible, which alters things slightly from the source material as he figured it out by putting everything together.
The Re-animan goes mad upon seeing his reflection, and he impales himself in order to end the living hell he’s trapped in.
Elsewhere, Robot visits Monstergirl with a rare blue flower from the Artic. I might be reaching here, but I think that this is a reference to Batman Begins, in which Bruce had to retrieve one in order to continue his journey.
Now Robot somewhat gives the game away a bit here as he shows he has drones and several bodies. Samson also realises that he has an attachment to Monster Girl, hinting at his being more than just an android.
We later see him with the Maulers, and they are half way through the cloning process, having already duplicated most of Rexplode’s internal organs. After realising that Robot will likely double-cross them, they go and dig up the immortal in order to have some insurance. This is actually how the episode ends, and it’s a big deviation from the comic book. In that, they actually brought him back to life before any of the cloning plots, and this was requested by Robot. After the ending of Episode 3, I thought that this would be the direction that they would be heading, but it’s nice that they switched things up, and it does allow for things to differentiate from the comics.
At Art’s, Debbie and he discover that Nolan was the one who killed the Guardians due to the marks in his outfit having the signatures of their weapons and abilities.
This is a big change from the comics, as neither discovered this on their own, and I actually think that because of this, Nolan will kill Art. This isn’t something that happened in the source material, but obviously he doesn’t want this to get out, and the fewer people that know, the better. I think that Nolan will struggle when it comes to his wife, and it might be something that he has to make a tough decision over.
If he did kill her or even harm her, then this is something that his relationship with Mark would never recover from. To make matters worse, it really looks like a lot of the people close to him in his life are going to be taken away when Amber meets Kyle.
Now that this is a brand new character, I think it might be based on Gary from the comics, who predominantly appears in Issues 40 and 41. He creates somewhat of a love triangle between Amber, Mark, and Eve and very much adds another dynamic.
At one point, Amber and Gary hang out, and he gets called by his boss and told to go to work. He says no because he wants to spend time with Amber, and this very much juxtaposes how Mark constantly rushes off. It makes her question her feelings for him, and though we don’t know how the relationship is going to develop, it does seem like it might be following a similar sort of route.
Mark attends the party but has to bail out before he can repair the damage because William has decided to go into the sewers. Like issues 36 and 37, Will is strapped down to the operating table, and we discover that Rick has been made into a monster.
His helmet is removed, and he looks extremely similar to Peter Weller in Robocop. He’s in a trance, but when William gets erm…personal, he recalls his life and frees himself.
William goes wild on the DA, and Invincible breaks his jaw for his crimes against humanity.
Mark returns dishevelled, and Amber lies awake, feeling down about him. However, Eve returns to her bed feeling happy for once, and we watch as Nolan returns home.
Whenever you walk in late at night and find your wife in the dark drinking wine, you know it’s going to kick off, and it does.
Debbie comes straight out with it and says she knows he killed the Guardians, but he denies the allegations and gaslights her. Nolan puts a hole in the wall and closes out on him with this hole surrounding him, metaphorically symbolising the one he’s dug himself into.
This hole-digging symbolism is carried across to the credits scene when we watch Matt, who you may remember from the start of episode 2. His father opened episode 1, and the pair travelled to London for the follow-up.
He and his friend believe that if they dig up the immortal and drink from his skull, they’ll get his powers because one of them read it on Reddit.
However, they’re stopped by the Maulers, and full spoilers ahead from this point onwards in regards to the immortal and robot.
In the comics, as mentioned, the Maulers brought the immortal back. Upon awakening, he of course remembered that Omni-Man had murdered him and went after him, which put a time limit on Nolan’s actions. With just two episodes left, I can see it being the case, and thus he will be pushed to move forward with the big reveal.
As for Robot, in the comics, when the Maulers moved his mind into the Rex clone, he betrayed them and said that he was sending them back to jail. The character used a drone to do this, but if they now have The Immortal on their side, then it might turn the tide and stop this from happening.
Either way, it’s going to be interesting to see, and what another great episode! In the comics, the culmination of the Mars arc happened immediately after the re-animen one, so we will likely be getting that next week.
INVINCIBLE EPISODE 6 REVIEW
Now obviously, I’d love to hear your thoughts, so make sure you comment below and let me know. If you enjoyed this video, then please drop a thumbs up and make sure you subscribe to the channel for breakdowns like this each and every day.
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If you want something else to watch, then make sure you check out our breakdown of the What If Trailer, which will be linked on screen now. We break down the entire thing, so it’s definitely worth checking out if you want to know more.
With that out of the way, thank you for sitting through the video. I’ve been Paul, and I’ll see you next time. Take care, Peace.
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