Warning: Slight spoilers below for the Invincible Season 4 premiere
Invincible Season 4 is officially underway, with this week’s release of three episodes bringing with it some major ramifications for what we’ll see unfold over the next batch of episodes. Arguably, the biggest reveal is that Eve (Gillian Jacobs) is pregnant with Mark’s (Steven Yeun) child. This revelation understandably changes everything about their lives in a major way, but this is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s on the horizon, as fans can expect to see Nolan (J.K. Simmons) reunite with Debbie (Sandra Oh) somewhere down the line.
Speaking with MovieWeb about Season 4, the cast and crew behind the Prime Video series broke down some of the things we can expect in the upcoming season. Ever since Season 1, audiences have seen Mark’s struggles with the challenges that his powers bring and how those impact his obligations of doing what’s right, no matter what the cost. Yeun shared of Mark’s outlook:
“I think he just needs experience. I think the tension is that he wants to know [the right thing to do] and he thinks he knows. And he has this heady understanding of what he thinks he knows, and then he gets punched in the f*cking mouth when it happens. And he’s like, ‘Oh, I had no idea.’ And so that’s always fun to play out.”
Eve’s parents have regularly warned her about not getting too close to Mark, knowing the inherent danger that this puts her and the people she loves in. Now that she’s potentially about to build her own family, Jacobs reflected on how this might change Eve’s perception of that advice.
“I feel like Eve’s parents don’t know how to communicate in a way that she’s able to receive. They are stuck in a really bad rut, communication-wise, and I think that they have, if you really look at it, they have concerns about their daughter and her safety and all of that,” the actor pointed out. “But they don’t know how to talk to each other, these people. So I think maybe it rattles around in the back of her head, but her first layer of defense is like, ‘You don’t know me, you don’t understand me, you don’t get me.’ And that every time she tries to show them love or do something nice, she does it in a way that upsets her father even more, and so they are just missing each other communication-wise at all times.”
Mark and Eve aren’t the only ones with fluctuating family dynamics, as Debbie has moved on from Nolan to a much healthier relationship. In this sense, Debbie might not distance herself entirely from Nolan, but the time away will help her process the way events previously panned out. Oh explained of Debbie’s reaction:
“I think sometimes you need a break, and it’s also, almost everyone understands when you have a breakup. When you have a breakup and it’s devastating, and then maybe you get to catch your breath and maybe there’s someone who’s wonderful and lovely who enters into your life.
“In this storyline, and I also do think in life, you still have to deal with what happened. You still have to deal with the betrayal. You have to still deal with how you feel about the betrayal.”
Even though Debbie doesn’t have traditional superpowers, it’s arguably her superhuman emotional resiliency that feels stronger than any physical prowess one could imagine.
“I think that the writing, in a lot of the archetypes that are in the show, Debbie definitely is that. It’s all in the writing … It’s important that she is the character who does stay. The character that has that human capacity of love, of being able to hold multiple things, and also a good moral base for the characters who are discovering themselves, Mark and Oliver, to be able to come back to and then jump back off of.”
Speaking to the writing, the minds behind the series, co-showrunners Robert Kirkman and Simon Racioppa, have been vocal about planning things out well ahead of time. Case in point, they were writing Season 4 before Season 3 had even been released. Speaking to the future, Racioppa opened up about how far out he’s hoping the series can last:
“Robert and I, back even on Season 1, we had a rough roadmap. The nice thing was, just when we were doing Season 1, Robert was just finishing up the comic. I’ve said this before, one of the most exciting things for me about the show, about doing the adaptation with Robert, is that the books have a start, they have a middle, they have an end, and it’s this incredible, single story that you just follow along the way. It’s not like there’s not a chunk you could remove from it.”
He continued, “So we talked early on, we’re like, ‘Oh, my God, wouldn’t it be incredible’ – this was back in Season 1 – ‘if we could get to the end?’ Because the books have such a great ending. We’re halfway there, I guess, maybe, roughly, so we always had an idea of where we go. We’re just hoping that we get to go the rest of the way.”
Kirkman’s breakout hit was his comic The Walking Dead, which was adapted into an AMC TV series starting in 2010. One consistency across all his works is the intensity of the subject matter, and while Invincible might be animated, it never shies away from intense violence. In regards to whether they’ve ever received pushback on the brutality of the violence from Prime Video, Kirkman admitted:
“I think that we’re trying to always make sure that the violence is grounded in story and emotion and character. And as long as we’re doing that, I think everything is okay. I think that if we were ever to go too far with the violence, the thing that would make it go too far is if it wasn’t grounded in story, if it was ever just gratuitous and there for the sake of being there. I don’t think we’ve gone too far. I don’t think we’ve gone far enough.”
New episodes of Invincible land on Prime Video on Wednesdays.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
