There are things to quibble about in “What Have I Done?,” the penultimate installment of Invincible‘s third season. There’s the way the show telegraphs a major character’s death so clearly that he might as well skip off to his final battle with a target on his back; the slightly uneven pacing that gives the episode a longer, slower denouement than viewers might be expecting; and some of the genuinely goofy shit they make Sterling K. Brown say, as his character tries to Dragon Ball Z fight Mark Grayson to death at the episode’s climax. And yet, this is such a blisteringly fast-paced, brutal episode of television—Invincible slipping its leash at last—that it’s hard to hold those more surface-level flaws against it. This is Invincible at full-tilt, an expansive, brutally violent, emotionally harrowing take on superhero tropes, and its feels petty to fault the series much when it’s finally decided to take off the brakes.

We pick up—after a brief cold open establishing that Brown’s Angstrom Levy really was stronger than Mark thought—surprisingly quickly after last episode‘s big reveal. Levy, see, has assembled his collection of evil Invincibles via his reality-hopping powers, and now he’s ready to unleash them on Mark’s Earth for no reason other than to make him suffer. At first, I wondered if Invincible wasn’t screwing with some perspective tricks here, at least partly because obliterating major cities with an alt-Mark army feels like a move the show can’t easily walk back. But no, this is really happening, as Earth’s superhero population rallies to try to keep a crew of half-Viltrumites with nothing on their minds but wanton killing from wiping out the planet.

The Evil Marks are, obviously, one of the big draws of tonight’s episode, even if Steven Yeun can’t always quite find useful ways to distinguish each one’s voice. The sketchy bits we get of each Mark’s motivations are tantalizing, giving shading between, say, the solemn psychopath flying around in a version of Omni-Man’s suit and the remorseful killer who’s just looking to get his mom back by kidnapping her from Mark’s now-doomed Earth. The clear standout is the gleeful fanboy who cuts his way through the Guardians Of The Globe, having a great time as he deploys his best Ben Schwartz impression to mock Shapesmith’s (not quite) death or geeks out over getting to kill his heroes after being deprived of the experience by his dad in his home timeline. The episode doesn’t try to dive into why these various Marks went bad and, really, it doesn’t need to: We understand that they’re horrific threats, on both a physical and a moral level, and that’s enough to make the danger of their presence work. One Mark going bad was a nightmare scenario for every sane human on the planet; 18 is an apocalypse in the making.

Just as thrilling is the way Invincible expands its scope to meet that threat. In past seasons, the show could sometimes feel like there are only a dozen or so superheroes in its entire world (most of whom had dated or slept with each other at one point or another, and all of whom seemed to be teenagers), so seeing all sorts of unnamed but cool looking heroes deploy themselves to fight in the Invincible War is exciting. Besides giving a sense of how many fronts the fighting is happening on, the montage approach also allows the show to cut to the highlights, whether it’s Oliver throwing himself into the fray, Darkwing sacrificing himself to take out a Mark, or—in the most immediately affecting consequence of tonight’s episode—the final heroic sacrifice of Rex Splode. The show’s resident Gambit clone even gets to deliver his version of “Remember It,” detonating his own skeleton to take out an evil Mark targeting the Teen Team. As mentioned above, Rex’s death is so thoroughly telegraphed that the leadup can’t help but feel a bit goofy, but Jason Mantzoukas has achieved such a good grasp on the character—nailing his “asshole with a heart of gold” vibes right to the end—that his decision to die for his friends still hit hardest of anything else in the episode.

Once the Invincibles are cleared out (after badly wounding Eve and then inevitably turning on Levy), “What Have I Done?” loses some of its momentum—a shame, since it’s still got at least one climactic fight, and 20 minutes, left to go. The final battle with Levy, with him pelting Mark with giant deluges of drones, is a far less exciting or inventive affair than either the Mark-on-Mark fights or the dimension-hopping one with Levy at the end of season two, while the character is now so completely crazy that not even a talented actor like Brown can find any human emotions left in him to work with. The result is to go from 100 miles per hour to, like, 20, mostly so the show can push Mark one step closer to accepting the fact that he maybe, just possibly, might have to kill some people some of the time. We get a much more harrowing confrontation in the aftermath of the fight, when last episode’s Powerplex (still Aaron Paul, reunited briefly here with his Breaking Bad co-star Jonathan Banks) attacks Invincible in the midst of clean-up efforts. This carries weight, not because Powerplex is a physical threat but because the world (Mark included) is now just a bit more inclined to listen to his accusations against the hero. That nastiness is balanced with the welcome return throughout the episode of Walton Goggins’ Cecil, who remains the show’s best character in a crisis or out: Goggins’ calm and humane delivery of the character’s genuine disinterest toward continuing his feud with Mark while the world’s on fire is a pool of cool calm amidst the chaos.

Taken as a whole, “What Have I Done?” is just a bit of a mess: It feels, structurally, like something of this magnitude might have deserved two whole episodes to cover, with a resolution that feels like it lingers several minutes too long. But when the episode is racing through its greatest moments, it’s some of the best superhero material Invincible has ever done: an apocalypse-level threat with horrifying human stakes, and a wide lens look at the show’s whole superhero universe. Invincible, with so much comic-book serialization in its DNA, can meander at times, so these moments where it just jams the accelerator down and lets the bodies fall where they will are irresistible and thrilling. Not that we can expect the series to give Mark (or us) much of a break as it barrels into next week’s finale: Conquest, the latest Viltrumite “overseer,” is finally here, just in time to confront a Mark Grayson who’s desperately in need of something to hit. Time to see who’s getting out of season three alive.

Stray observations

• • Lots of inside jokes with this week’s casting: I called out Banks (as G.D.A. agent Brit) in the review, but we also get Doug “Pinhead” Bradley as the Cenobite-esque alien surgeons who turn on Levy at the end and—in the episode’s most obvious casting gag—Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Conquest, who might be in for a bit of nine-years-delayed vengeance at the hands of a Steven Yeun character.
• • Lots of close-ups of the state Mark left Levy in last time; the animators have been putting some horrific shit on the screen this year.
• • Title card comes early this week, flickering over to the black-and-yellow color scheme of one of the more overtly dickish alt-Marks.
• • “The help he needs because the fight with my dad killed his sister and niece, or the help he needs because my fight with him killed his wife and son?”
• • Seriously, Rex all but claims to be one day from retirement. “For the first time in my whole, miserable life, I’m kind of in a good place!” Jesus Christ, dude.
• • Several good Donald moments, as he’s fully adjusted to his whole “difficult-to-kill cyborg” existence. “That’s what I do.”
• • Several of the episode’s superheroes popped up at Guardians Of The Globe tryouts back in season one, including the guy who is very clearly a not-legally-actionable version of One-Punch Man‘s Saitama.
• • Some very good dark comedy throughout the Evil Invincibles rampage, the best bit being the one who tries to lure in Debbie by playing injured in their house, then gets irritated because they were “really looking forward to killing her again.”
• • “My entire goddamn skeleton, dickhead.” And then the Billie Eilish needle drop. Got me!
• • Most of the alt-Invincibles are played for sociopathic laughs, but the one (very Mark-like one) who quietly remarks “I miss William” was genuinely kind of sad.
• • I honestly really could not care less about what happens to The Immortal. Worst regular character on the show.
• • “Look kid, we’ve had our differences. But we’re still on the same side, we’re still trying to save lives, and we’re still the good guys. So if you need someone to talk to….”
• • No stinger this week.