The season 4 finale of Invincible was a bit of a wind-down rather than a blockbuster after several huge fights earlier this season. Nolan gets glared at by Debbie. Allen has to corral the planetary alliance. Mark returns to learn that Eve was pregnant when he left and has now gained weight, a comic-based but somewhat odd turn.
During the course of the Invincible finale, Mark keeps having horrific flashes of both the Earth and everyone he loves getting brutally murdered by the missing Viltrumites, until a final hallucination in the end where he thinks he sees Thragg again. Only this time, it really is Thragg.
After punching his face a few times, where the Viltrumite leader doesn’t even flinch, Mark is presented with a pretty simple choice:
1) Let the 37 surviving Viltrumites infiltrate human society on Earth with the intention of breeding as many new half-Viltrumites as they can to repopulate their race. A “half” Viltrumite is as strong or even stronger than full ones, as Mark shows.
2) Or they kill billions and enslave the rest and reproduce anyway, where you can understand the implication there.
Mark initially rejects the proposal outright, as you imagine he would, but ultimately gives up and “agrees to the terms,” letting Thragg begin his plan of secret global Viltrumite sex.
It’s a bit of an odd situation as Thragg is almost being…merciful here. Thragg could have already killed Mark once before this, and he could still just kill him now and do the plan anyway. And mass enslaving the human race to reproduce without assimilation sure feels like a pretty Viltrumite thing to do at baseline, as having 37 Viltrumites repopulate the race with a Nolan-type “normal” lifestyle seems like it would take eons. Though I suppose with how long they live, they have eons.
Did Mark do the right thing by agreeing? The idea was that he could have said no outright, then contacted Cecil and the rest of the resistance to come aid the planet. But there is nothing to indicate that Cecil has some secret means of stopping 37 Viltrumites (Mark’s power-crippling sound thing was implanted in him), or that the galactic resistance is even able to stop those Viltrumites, as entire worlds were having trouble squaring off with one at a time. It would take two weeks for anyone to reach them, and as we saw, it took Mark and his crew about 15 minutes to blow up the entire Viltrumite homeworld.
On top of all of this, we have seen absolutely nothing to indicate anyone at all can take on Thragg. He nearly kills Nolan effortlessly and Mark attempting to hit him hurts Mark more than it does him, as he’s simply an immovable object, leagues beyond even Conquest. At least right now, there’s nothing anyone can do to stop him short of maybe Space Ranger shooting him point-blank with his super ray while he’s napping. Even then, it would probably just clean the plaque off his teeth.
Mark made the right call here, not just because he doesn’t really have a choice to begin with, but he’s bought something incredibly valuable: Time. Even if yes, the deal is that they can never hunt down the Viltrumites or else they’ll go back on the deal and start razing the planet, that’s…kind of where they already are, or thought they’d be, as they expected to return to Earth and have that already happening. Buying time here means having a long time of Viltrumite “peace” where they can figure out some way to extract themselves from this mess without the death of Earth.
I have not read the comics, I don’t know what happens, and don’t tell me, but I’m really eager to see what the solution may be. We’ll find out a year from now.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.