WARNING: The following contains spoilers for the sixth episode of Invincible “You Look Kinda Dead,” streaming now on Amazon Prime.
Super fights make for cool action scenes, but they don’t exactly demonstrate the height of civic responsibility. Invincible, even better than most superhero series, shows off just how cool such violent showdowns can be, but in its latest episode it shows what the alternative could be as well.
Atom Eve has a eureka moment that leads to a promising alternative: You don’t need to punch a bad guy to save the world. Villains like Killcannon, crime bosses like Machine Head and even random threats like the Reanimen in the latest episode prove how useful it is to have super strong knuckles ready to neutralize a threat. But the world is also more complicated than bad things only ever happening as a result of bad people, and following her latest epiphany Atom Eve gets that.
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During her charity work alongside Amber in the previous episode Atom Eve felt a rewarding sense of achievement which made her realize just how much she could be doing with her powers. As she explained to her parents, she possesses a startlingly powerful ability to control and rearrange the atoms in inorganic materials as she sees fit, allowing her to make and remake materials with a wave of her hand. Realizing just how much she could be doing for the world she foregoes college, packs up her bags and flies off to foreign lands while her dysfunctional father shouts at her to come back.
In a matter of moments Atom Eve manages to make a new home for herself in a secluded treetop, and not long after she begins providing for others as well. Rather than fighting super villains she stymies the flow of a mudslide, extinguishes a forest fire, and perhaps most miraculously of all, creates a field of verdant crops grow from soil that laborers sweat over. By the end of the day she is exhausted as she collapses into bed, but she smiles to herself with a sense of achievement that fighting Doc Seismic didn’t seem to give her.
This is exactly what superheroes should be doing. While supervillain fights and bank robberies would assuredly crop up, with such fantastic abilities its a wonder that natural disasters or famine are ever an issue in superhero universes. It is every bit an injustice to let hungry people starve as it is to let a gunman rob a jewelry store, and yet it’s all too rare to see super abilities used to solve the former problem while there is an abundance of instances where they’re used to solve the latter.
As sensational and thrilling as being a fan of the superhero genre can be, there is something disturbing in the thematic undertones infused throughout most of its stories. That undertone is one defined by extreme violence, where brutal force is often the only solution to the world’s problems and its only the strongest and most brutal who can protect a state of such justice.
But Atom Eve offers an alternative to that status quo. Reality is more complicated than superhero fiction often makes it seem, and integrating that reality into a story only proves all the more engaging and important to a story’s message. Fans absolutely deserve to tune in to see superheroes kick a few butts. It’s just a nice change to see them also feed a few mouths.
Invincible stars Steven Yeun, J.K. Simmons, Sandra Oh, Seth Rogen, Gillian Jacobs, Andrew Rannells, Zazie Beetz, Mark Hamill, Walton Goggins, Jason Mantzoukas, Mae Whitman, Chris Diamantopoulos, Melise, Kevin Michael Richardson, Grey Griffin and Max Burkholder. The series is produced by Skybound, and executive produced by Robert Kirkman, Simon Racioppa, David Alpert and Catherine Winder. New episodes are released Fridays on Amazon Prime Video.
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