Invincible season four is here, and we couldn’t be more excited. This season on Invincible, the stakes are higher, the war is bigger, and the trauma is more palpable. And, as ever, in our favorite violent animated series, the scars of the past still have a major impact on the present. In celebration of Invincible season four, we sat down with co-showrunners Robert Kirkman and Simon Racioppa to discuss how they balance keeping the tension high, the emotions real, and the audience leaning forward in their seats. Check out our full interview below.
Nerdist: I want to start things off with what I consider a bit of a hardball, if you will. Who’s done more psychological damage over the course of the series? Mark’s dad or Eve’s dad?
Robert Kirkman: That’s a good question. Well, I mean, kind of a toss-up, which is weird. I mean, I have to say Mark’s dad, but the fact that it’s so close is alarming.
So this season is definitely going to escalate things from the Invincible War previously to the Viltrumite War. We saw the toll that battling Conquest took on Mark and Eve, but how are you folks planning to escalate the stakes here? Give us a hint of what’s coming down the pipeline now.
Robert Kirkman: I mean, the Viltrumite War. We’ve introduced the Viltrumites, various different Viltrumites over the course of the first three seasons, and you’ve seen little drips and drabs of the empire and some inner workings and things, but not much at all. And so they’re still very much at the end of season three, an unknown force that is a real part of the show, but there’s a lot of mystery to it. And so coming into Invincible season four, we’re really pulling the curtain back and introducing Thrag and some other Viltrumites and really showing you how they tick as a society, why they are the way they are, why Nolan is the way he is. You get a lot more insight into them as characters, which makes them more well-rounded, and I’m going to say relatable in a weird way. So you understand them more, and it puts you in a better light as far as, like, okay, I know what these opposing forces are. I know what the stakes are. Let’s get this war underway.
Simon Racioppa: And then also just the consequences for our characters on an emotional level, what they have to go through. How are they going to come out at the end of this? Are they going to survive not just physically, but survive emotionally, mentally? It’s a war. War has casualties, and maybe you make it back alive, but maybe not all of you comes back. So that’s really important to us to treat it like a real war. There are consequences to actions that maybe are invisible to the eye, but are there mentally and will continue to have effects on our characters for seasons to come.
Speaking of consequences, something that really stuck with me, especially after ending of Invincible season three, going into season four is this idea of struggling with death and rebirth. Mark is struggling with his no-kill policy, whether or not to violate that boundary that he tries to hold for himself. Eve, having been effectively torn apart and brought back together by her abilities now struggling with what is this new status quo? So can you talk a bit about that where they are entering this season?
Simon Racioppa: Obviously, you’ve seen the promise of Invincible is that we never forget the season before. We never forget everything that the characters have gone through. Robert does this in the books so excellently. It’s not like it’s a new season. We’re back to the status quo. Everything’s fine. No, Mark has mental damage still from season one that is still affecting him and changes who he is here. And especially obviously, the events of season three are the freshest in his mind, and those affect him going forward.
It’s like he’s suddenly now potentially and probably one of the most powerful people on the planet; he’s going to be asked to make decisions that affect not just his friends, his family, but the entire earth, other planets, other alien races… The race of his father’s heritage, he’s going to make decisions that affect the Viltrumites.
He’s 21 years old. No one should have to make those decisions, and yet he does. So it’s about him maturing, being forced into these situations. And then like you said, there’s fallout, there’s repercussions, there’s a cost to be paid for all of this. Nobody gets out of war clean. And I think that’s true for our show and our characters, too.
That’s one of the things I love about Invincible is that the past is not just immediately forgotten. The stuff that happens in season one still matters. For you folks as creatives, are there any lessons you’ve taken from Invincible season one, two, or three that sort of informed how you approached season four?
Robert Kirkman: Yeah, I mean, I think that … I don’t know. I mean, we’ve given a taste of certain elements and things like that. And I think that in a lot of ways, season four is paying off a lot of things that we’ve built. Our first episode kind of pays off a long-running Sequids storyline. The Viltrumites War itself pays off a lot of the long-running Viltremight storylines that have been going on behind the scenes. And I think that overall it’s just … I don’t know. I mean, I feel like the thing that I’ve learned the most is that every now and then, you should give the audience what they want. You should keep track of what it is that you’re building to and try to deliver as often as you can because, I think, too often shows hold things in reserve too much. And I think that you’re going to lose the audience if you do that too frequently.
Simon Racioppa: And then I think for me, it’s just about treating everything, again, what we were saying, treating everything realistically, trying to ground the emotional aspects of the show and what characters are going through, and making sure those have resonance. Because, and we talked about this in the writers’ room a lot, if these things don’t matter to Mark, they’re not going to matter to the audience. If Mark isn’t scared about what he has to do, then the audience won’t be scared for him. And that applies across basically all our characters, all of our emotions. So if something’s not a big deal for him, it’s not a big deal for the audience. So we sort of try to calibrate the show under those circumstances. I mean, a war is a big deal, so it has to have real consequences that don’t just disappear when he comes back to earth, if he comes back to earth.
And I think that’s … I like to think that something we spend a lot of time on, which makes us a little different than a lot of other superhero shows, is that we don’t do these hard resets. We don’t prepare to wrap things up neatly because next season’s going to be a whole different threat with a whole different thing. It’s like we perpetuate everything that’s come before it, and we don’t forget, and we don’t forgive, and people bear the scars and the wounds of events from years earlier, because in real life, that’s how it works.
My last though, sort of speaking to the emotional resonance you were discussing, is that I love the use of needle drops in this show. It always really enhances my experience, really, I think amplifies the writing as well. What’s the discussion like with the rest of the production team? Are needledrops incorporated at the scripting level, or is that an ongoing discussion with the music supervisor or composer? I’m really curious about that.
Robert Kirkman: I was just going to say it’s an ongoing conversation with all of the above. And to the credit of the team on the show, I will say that the majority of my contributions to the needle drops is, “Yeah, that works. That sounds great. I really like that.”
Simon Racioppa: They’re often put in the script at the stage of, not what the needle drop is, but the place of it. So it’s like, probably this is where we could kick in a really emotional needle drop just to help highlight these scenes. And then we have an incredible music supervision team who come back with great suggestions, options, and all that. And then it’s a discussion between Robert and me and our directors, and we try to just find the vibe we’re going for to communicate the moment. You’re trying to add a layer to the characters or whatever you’re seeing, and you want something that either highlights something or maybe goes in a totally opposite direction, just makes you look at the scene in a different way. So it’s this great collaborative effort. It’s tricky, but it’s like when you get it right, it’s the best thing.
The official synopsis for Invincible shares, “While the world recovers from the global catastrophe of last season, a changed Mark struggles with guilt as he fights to protect his home and the people he loves, setting him on a collision course with a powerful new threat that could alter the fate of humanity forever.“