[Editor’s note: Our recaps of episode two and three publish later today.]  

Mark Grayson is doing fine. He’d probably tell you that himself, if he weren’t so busy being fine: spending his time training his already considerable superhuman strength and speed, or playing catch with his little brother, or trying to figure out the superheroic messiness of his romantic life. Heck, he hasn’t killed a human being—smashing them into fine red paste while screaming expletives and soaking himself in their blood—in months! Unless you count those reanimated dead guys he smashed without a second’s thought. Or those clones he ripped apart with his bare hands. Or the implied threat of murdering his boss if he can’t live up to Mark’s clearly trauma-informed ethical standards.

Mark Grayson is doing fine.

Which is to say: Welcome back to Prime Video animated series Invincible and its frequently queasy, but often exhilarating, whiplash between superhero power fantasy and ultra-violent horror. After a first season that layered comic-book sitcom antics over a slow-burn game of toying with audience expectations, and a second that went deep (and occasionally a bit too slow) on processing the fallout of those big reveals, this third-season premiere shows our title hero in the best shape of his life—physically, at least. But it also demonstrates the show’s abiding interest in the ethical use of overwhelming power, as Mark’s ever-mounting list of personal traumas pushes him closer and closer to a break with his less ethically rigid handler, government agent Cecil Stedman.

These confrontations, prompted by Cecil’s skullduggery in employing people Mark has personally watched murder human beings in cold blood to do his dirty work, ably leverage something that’s always been one of Invincible‘s greatest assets: a top-notch voice cast led by Steven Yeun. When this show first started, Yeun felt a little out of place at times, as a one-or-two-note teenager just hoping to make his papa proud. Three seasons in, though, he’s found far more room to work inside Mark’s head, especially after said superpowered dad shoved that invulnerable skull through the instantly destroyed bodies of dozens of human beings in a bloody massacre back in the season-one finale. (Invincible: a TV show in which very bad things happen, all the time.) Now, that distinctive cheer has taken its rightful place as a clear and obvious defense mechanism, and Yeun has become a deft hand at letting us know just how far off-kilter Mark is starting to tilt.

Walton Goggins, meanwhile, continues to give a typically impeccable turn as Cecil, who’s always been the show’s most interesting character: a mortal man working in the realm of gods whose only true power is that he will do or say anything in order to keep the human race safe from its far-too-powerful, far-too-numerous foes. That moral ambiguity could make Cecil a stock villain in lesser hands, but Goggins has never let the character slip over that line: He’s so good at sounding reasonable, and even gruffly kind, about the terrible things he does that he’s impossible to completely write off.

When this third-season premiere opens, Cecil’s operating entirely in proud papa mode, encouraging Mark to push his limits further and further before Earth’s latest cosmic deadline comes to pass. (Invincible’s various aunts, uncles, and cousins in the Viltrumite Empire are still expecting him to impose their people’s fascistically paternal breed of control on the planet and they’re going to be pretty pissed when they find out he’s been slacking on the “job.”) Mark’s regimen of lifting the heaviest thing anyone can think of gets interrupted by a typical superheroing job—for a value of “typical” that involves stopping a pair of time-traveling twins from stealing the Declaration Of Independence, anyway—that gets messier once the show’s abundant superhero drama intrudes. The upshot, plot-wise, is to reintroduce Malese Jow’s Dupli-Kate and Russ Marquand’s Immortal back to the wider heroing community. The upshot for viewers, meanwhile, is a reminder that Jason Mantzoukas’ Rex Splode is one of the unlikely secret hearts of this show, a brash self-proclaimed asshole who takes absolutely brutal hits on a daily basis and never stops fighting. Oh, and we get some visuals of Mark with even more blood on his hands, ripping through disposable clones of Kate’s enraged brother Multi-Paul like so much sanguine tissue paper. (This season’s time-to-exploded head count: 11 minutes, five seconds. A new record!)

But if the emotional content of “Who’s Laughing Now?” still hits hard, those action sequences—and the big set piece later on, where the world’s heroes face off against the underground bug army of less-funny-than-he-used-to-be joke villain Doc Seismic—also highlight some spots where it feels like Invincible may have lost a step in its transition to a third season. The show’s battles have always relied on a degree of kinetic force to sell the sheer violence of this world, but it feels like the show has lost some of that oomph as it moves into its middle age. Similarly, there’s something that looks a little bit off about the faces, which are so important to an animated show this interested in depicting the nuance of human misery. The writing, and the performances, are all top-notch—Yeun and co-star Gillian Jacobs, for instance, continue to have great chemistry as potential love connectors Mark and Eve—but there’s a stiffness in both action and drama scenes that leave the whole thing feeling cheaper than the show’s previous two seasons.

Elsewhere, Invincible gets a bit bogged down, too, in the inevitable serialized nature of its status as a comic book-based show. Besides giving us a survey of how close Mark is to snapping—again—the show also has to check in, in no particular order, on his dad Nolan (J.K. Simmons) and alien buddy Allen (Seth Rogen) in space jail, his mom Debbie (the indispensable Sandra Oh) and her efforts to raise her adopted alien son Oliver (who now has superpowers of his own), and Mark’s old friend William, who tries to keep him from completely blowing his budding romance with Eve by revealing to her that her future self told him to shoot his shot. Each of these individual scenes is perfectly fine in the wider context of the series. But as the material for a premiere, it can feel a bit like going through the storytelling motions. It’s less a propulsive kick-off than a check-in on your favorite soaps.

Things pick up, at least, once Doc Seismic reveals his master plan to kidnap all of Earth’s superheroes so that he can punish humanity for cruelly stealing rocks from the ground and turning them into buildings. (It’s a recurring, and persistently effective, conceit of this show that a joke villain is only a joke until they have a gun pointed at your head.) The resulting confrontation gets to show off plenty of new heroes, even if it’s only for a moment—and, more critically, display that Mark is genuinely out of step, and dangerously hair-triggered, when it comes to working with zombie supersoldiers or formerly murderous vigilantes. Even with the fights lacking that particular distinctive punch, this is still the stuff Invincible exists to dig into, beneath all of the arterial sprays and silly quips. And when Cecil points out that Mark doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on when adjudicating which murders are the “right” kind to come back from, it’s hard not to see his point. Part of what makes the Cecil character fascinating is that he’s almost never wrong, because his version of the world exists in such a flimsy soap bubble of security. (Even alongside all the current active threats, it’s never hard to remember that Mark not being a genocidal psychopath is considered a multiversal outlier ’round these parts.) This show has made it clear, for multiple seasons now, that this superhero origin story could turn into a supervillain origin one quickly: Mark Grayson might be doing fine, but it remains to be seen how long he can stay fine once he declares war on the man who runs the world.

Stray observations

• • Mark’s getting some of his exercise sparring with the Giant (a.k.a. the transformed wannabe astronaut eight-year-old from the show’s season-two premiere).
• • Every season of Invincible has a different gimmick for its main title designs. This one shows the black-on-blue logo from season two suddenly distort into Mark’s more distinctive blue-on-yellow.
• • Rex would like to know if Mark’s very expensive weights set is the reason Cecil hasn’t shelled out for a new coffee maker for the Guardians Of The Globe HQ.
• • There’s a creepy guy at the GDA speaking into a high-tech ring who’s apparently spying on Cecil’s operations. I assumed, on first watch, this was going to tie into the ReAnimen, but it never pays off in this episode.
• • Mark’s trying really hard to take it easy on future-Declaration thief Fightmaster. Rex’s advice: “I’d give up, buddy. I just witnessed this guy bench-pressing the moon.”
• • Speaking of the Declaration, Oliver can apparently recite the guys who signed it from memory. Oh, and he can fly now, kicking off another round of impromptu superhero parenting from Debbie.
• • The Guardians Of The Globe are back together, cueing some cheesy monologuing about “family” from Black Samson—but apparently not so reunited that Amazon is going to pay Ben Schwartz to toss in a few lines as Shapesmith.
• • William’s boyfriend Rick is still having heart pain from being partially ReAniman’d.
• • “Are you asking me out?” “Yeah, I’m just doing a terrible job at it.”
• • One enjoyably consistent thing about Doc Seismic is that his dialogue (and Chris Diamantopoulos‘ voice performance) makes it clear that he really is a complete loon with no redeeming traits.
• • I don’t want to harp on the animation too hard, but once you start looking for it, it gets fairly distracting to notice how many still frames are on-screen here for extended periods.
• • Rex might be naked, beaten, and trapped in some kind of arachnid egg sac, but he can still issue a hearty “Eat your own dick!” to a mocking supervillain. This is followed by his victory cry: “We won, my dick’s out, and I don’t care!”
• • Welcome to our weekly recaps of Invincible season three. As a longtime fan of the show, I’m genuinely excited to see just how dark this shit can get.