This article contains spoilers for the Invincible Season 3 finale.
After eight episodes featuring huge character deaths, multiple Invincibles (Steven Yeun), and so, so much blood and guts, Invincible Season 3 is in the books. Unlike Season 2, which ended with a relatively quieter tag for the finale, Season 3 not only teed up a ton of storylines for the already-in-production Season 4… It also included a mid-credits scene that sets up a storyline Invincible co-creator Robert Kirkman never got to do in the comic books.
Before we get to that closing montage – and mid-credits scene – a bit of explanation about the finale itself. It’s for the most part one, long fight scene as Invincible, Oliver (Christian Convery) and Atom Eve (Gillian Jacobs) take on the vicious Viltrumite warrior Conquest (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Conquest is ostensibly on Earth to prepare the world for Viltrumite, er, conquest, but as he explains repeatedly to Invincible, he really loves destroying and torturing things.
Invincible Season 3 Ending Explained
After Conquest seemingly kills Eve, Invincible, who has had both hands broken, absolutely loses it and bashes Conquest to “death” with his own head. Some might say this is sweet, sweet vengeance for Negan (also Morgan) famously bashing Glenn Rhee’s (also Yeun) head in on The Walking Dead, but it comes straight from the Invincible comics, which came out in 2009. So incredibly satisfying to watch if you want #Justice4Glenn, but also mostly just a nice coincidence.
In any case, Eve is not dead and reveals – as fans who watched the Atom Eve Special learned – that when she’s put in moments of extreme stress, she’s able to get past the mental blocks that otherwise stop her from transmuting living matter, instead of just inert materials. However, eagle-eyed fans will also note that when she transmutes Invincible’s costume later in the scene when they’re about to have sex, it’s made of plants… So she may have broken through these blocks in a bigger way than she realizes.
The final conclusion of the episode, and the arc of the season, is that Invincible visits his half-brother Oliver in a hospital bed. And while Oliver thinks Invincible is going to tell him that killing is wrong… Invincible has decided that if anyone threatens his family again, just as Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown) did in the previous episode, and Conquest this week, he won’t hesitate to kill them.
It’s a surprising move from the show, though again one pulled directly from the comic books, almost word for word. While the large majority of superhero media, from TV shows to movies, to the original comics wrestle with the “should heroes kill?” debate, Invincible has firmly fallen on the side of “yeah, when necessary.” Still, an ominous musical sting played under Invincible’s pro-death penalty statement points to more challenges coming the way of his realigned moral compass. So expect that this debate might not be as open and shut as the finale indicates.
Beyond that, the real eyebrow-raising moments are saved for that montage. So let’s break those Season 4 teases down, one by one.
Return of The Sequids
Last seen in Season 2, Episode 6 “It’s Not That Simple,” the Sequids are incredibly dangerous Martian brain slugs who almost beat the Guardians of the Globe in their last encounter, including Invincible and Atom Eve. They had taken over the brain of an astronaut named Rus Livingston (Ben Schwartz), who was finally freed and brought back to Earth after a horrifying, harrowing ordeal. Unfortunately for Rus, after he returned to his apartment, which had been trashed by Shapesmith (also Schwartz), he threw up a Sequid in the sink – which immediately took over his body, again.
That plotline has been on hold since the aforementioned episode, but looks like it’s coming back in a big way in Season 4. While everything else has been going on this season, the Sequids have been steadily building an army in the sewers, including what looks like hundreds of human workers and others. Given we were told that if the Sequids ever made it to Earth it was game over for humanity… Yeah, that’s bad! “Not long now,” says Russequid. Uh-oh!
Battle Beast Is Back
At the end of Season 3, Episode 4, “You Were My Hero,” the unstoppable Battle Beast was fighting a Viltrumite in the cold, dark reaches of space. We catch up to him here, as well as the scattered remains of the Viltrumite… BB is in suspended animation but is quickly picked up by an alien ship. And a few seconds after that, he wakes up, ready for battle. He wants “more!”
If things pan out on the TV show the same way they do in the comic, the ship was part of the Coalition of Planets, the group fighting back against the Viltrumites. Alongside Allen the Alien (Seth Rogen) and Nolan Grayson (J.K. Simmons), it looks like the Coalition finally has a fighting chance against the unstoppable aliens.
Greater Delights Await
In one of the best casting coups on the show, the creepy, Cenobite-esque Technicians who fixed up Angstrom Levy, as first seen in Season 3, Episode 7, are voiced by Doug Bradley. You might know him better as Pinhead from the Hellraiser series. And in this teaser of coming attractions, we get to hear Bradley say something extremely Pinhead.
After revealing that Angstrom has a new arm thanks to them (Invincible accidentally amputated it last episode), Angstrom asks what they want in return. “Angstrom Levy, you have witnessed what our ambitions have done to our world, and what we have had to do to ourselves to survive here,” a Technician explains.
Angstrom thinks they want a new home, but the Technicians have other ideas. “That is only the beginning of the delights we will achieve together,” the Technician says. Now, the classic Hellraiser line is “We have such sights to show you” while the 2022 remake employed “greater delights await.” But come on, if you weren’t Leo Dicaprio pointing at the screen meme at that line, what are we even doing here?
In any case, to explain what the Technicians are up to is to spoil one of the great plot twists of the Invincible comics. Suffice it to say that they will tie into the action, and we have not seen the last of either Angstrom or the not-Cenobites.
Conquest Of The Planet Of The Marks
Despite Invincible demanding Cecil Stedman (Walton Goggins) show him Conquest’s dead body, it turns out that the dead body was a fake. In fact, Cecil has Conquest locked in a massive, underground chamber as the Viltrumite’s body reconstitutes itself.
Donald (Chris Diamantopoulos), Cecil’s right-hand man, protests that this is a mistake. And if you’ve read the comics, you know that Donald is correct: you cannot hold a massively powered Viltrumite like Conquest with mere Earth materials, no matter how secure Cecil makes the facility. Unfortunately for Cecil, as well as the world, in this case, Invincible was correct: Conquest should have been killed.
Invincible Season 3 Post-Credits Scene Explained
That brings us to the mid-credits scene. While everything else we’ve explained above happens in the comic books by Kirkman, Ryan Ottley, and Cory Walker, this scene is completely new. And in fact, it’s something Kirkman always wanted to do in the comics, but never found room for. Oh, and there’s a fantastic, surprise voice actor involved.
Right after the end credits begin, we cut to Damien Darkblood (Clancy Brown), the demon detective we haven’t seen since Season 1, Episode 4, “Neil Armstrong, Eat Your Heart Out.” In case you forgot – it aired back in 2021, after all – Damien was investigating Omni-Man, then set up by Cecil and sent back to Hell. As he was sucked down to the inferno, he threatened vengeance on Cecil… And that’s (potentially) what we’re seeing here.
Now missing his trenchcoat, Damien creates a summoning circle, which calls a demon lord voiced by none other than Bruce Campbell. And Damien hails to the king, baby, by bringing “the great beast… welcome news.” Damien explains that he has the means to restore the demon to his former glory, and the “infernal throne.” The key? A “surface dweller of great power, likes of which this planet has not seen for eons.” And furthermore, Damien explains that “his blackened heart will be bound to your service.” And how will they do that? By conjuring “him” to Hell.
In the comics, Damien Darkblood was even more of a blink-and-you-miss-him character than he was on the TV show. But as Kirkman explained to the Cartoonist Kayfabe podcast in 2020, there was originally more planned.
“The thing that I really regret is I never had an adventure where the superheroes went into Hell,” Kirkman explained. “There’s been so many superhero comics where it’s like, they got to go fight Mephisto or something, and I was like, ah jeez, I never got around to that. And the Damien Darkblood character was there so I could eventually do a story like that, and I never got around to it.”
Part of the reason for this may be that the initial storyline and reveal of Omni-Man as a bad guy was supposed to go nearly double the length that it did in the comic. It ultimately came to a head in issues 12 and 13, versus the planned 25. That meant there just wasn’t as much room for Darkblood to be investigating Omni-Man, because… Well, there was nothing left to investigate. So credit to Kirkman and company for letting that planned story play out on the TV show in a way we never saw in the books.
The big question here is: who is Damien Darkblood referring to? Is it Invincible? Omni-Man? Cecil? We’ll know more when Season 4 of Invincible premieres on Prime Video.
