My two favorite moments across all Invincible seasons so far have been the Omniman fight at the end of S1 and the Conquest fight at the end of S3. To me, they might be the best superhero fights ever brought to screen, in part because of the unforgiving and realistic portrayal of carnage, but also because they successfully produced a feeling of jeopardy and shock through its backdrop of high-character stakes and moments of dramatic, unique, and emotional dialogue.

For example, both fights see the Viltrumite aggressors go off on their diatribes about the futility of resistance, and Nolan’s internal struggle with his son came through perfectly. In the S3 Conquest fight, we had this dynamic battle, starting with Conquest’s supreme arrogance and ending with his confession about his profound loneliness, all of which made for an unexpected and memorable conflict. It's worth reading Conquest’s speech again:

“Pay attention! I am so lonely. All the other Viltrumites are scared of me. No one talks to me. No one wants to be my friend— they think I am unstable. They send me from planet to planet committing atrocities in their name. And as I get better at it, they fear me more and more. I am a victim of my own success. Conquest. I don't even get a real name, only a purpose. I am capable of so much more, and no one sees it. Some days I feel so alone I could cry, but I don't. I never do. Because what would be the point? Not a single person in the entire universe would care. Take it to your grave.”

I loved that, but felt like some of this magic was absent from Season 4. I struggle to think of moments of emotional dialogue, and character interactions could be one-dimensional and lacking personality. I had this same feelings with combat, with its frequent space battles missing opportunity to showcase interesting carnage or battle choreography. Some swagger definitely returned when Thragg entered the fray, but too often it was a set of basic fighting animations, with last-minute punches and kicks that fly in off-screen to save characters in trouble.

So some of that jeopardy and high-stakes atmosphere felt off to me. You never really believe anyone you care about will die, or that the problems they face are hopeless or insurmountable. Death and its consequence are missing in general, and often handled inconsistently, with characters taking incomprehensible damage yet never dying, with a main cast that is always spared when they could easily be dispatched for good.

Thragg choosing to let Nolan and Mark (and everyone else in that space battle) live comes to mind, and you’ll also see a 15-year-old girl in a robot suit going toe to toe with various Viltrumites without receiving a scratch, which seems at odds with everything else we’ve learnt about their strength and ruthlessness. When I see characters get obliterated, I’ll always assume that five minutes later they’ll be up and about again, and 9 out of 10 times that will be the case. Arguably, it’s only Mark’s recovery after his battle with Conquest that is treated with the realism it deserves.

There’s also inconsistency with the power scaling. For most of the series, the Viltrumites are shown as essentially impenetrable, yet during the Talescria battle and Viltrumite civil war scenes they have the durability of paper, each one easily decapitated, ripped in half, or gutted with a single punch. That really undermined those events for me, and the action felt somewhat generic.

Later, we see Viltrumites take hundreds of savage hits with nothing but a nosebleed, or choose harmless grapples and tosses as their choice of “attack.” I also remember Nolan killing a massive alien instantly in S1, but now see him struggle against a bug half the size with Oliver. He can lift a mountain in one episode, but can barely handle a piece of spacecraft debris in another. Maybe you'd consider all this to be nitpicking, but for a show whose entire story and identity is built around battles and strength, it really is all over the place.