I liked this episode quite a bit. The big reveal of Titan at the end caught me totally by surprise (although I feel like it was a bit of a cheat… Mark should have been more suspicious, but we as the audience saw the interactions between Machine Head and Titan, which I’m not really sure make sense if Titan was anything other than what he appeared to be… did Titan in fact jump straight from fairly-poor-guy-needing-to-borrow-money straight to crime boss? Or was he already a crime guy and somehow fooled Machine Head by having a cover story?).
Also, I’m entirely sick of Mark’s girlfriend being upset because he keeps showing up late but he can’t say anything. Not saying it’s not a reasonable conflict to pop up, I’m just saying it’s gotten boring. And she knows that Eve is a super and knows that he and Eve are friends and knows that he is being weirdly secretive, but hasn’t put two and two together? Come on. Although I guess “no one ever guesses secret identities ever, or even tries to” is just something you have to accept with superhero stories.
Overall, though, definitely a big improvement over the Mars episode which I thought was a big letdown.
I don’t think Titan was a secret crime boss before he beat Machinehead. I think he’s basically just what he appeared to be, except for the part about not wanting to be a criminal. It’s not exactly unprecedented for someone to move up in organized crime by eliminating their boss. I imagine that there was also a bunch of deal-cutting, intimidation, and maybe a few quiet murders involved, that we didn’t see because the show’s about Invincible, not Titan.
I’m with you on being tired of the “I’m a shitty boyfriend because I’m a secret superhero” trope, just in general. It’s over played. One of my favorite things in Falcon and the Winter Soldier was when Falcon promises his sister he’ll show up for a meeting with the bank about a loan to save the family business - and then actually shows up at the bank, on time.
Does she know that Eve’s a super hero, though? I missed where that was established.
We don’t actually know what Titan did before taking a loan from Machine Head. It’s entirely possible, and consistent with what we saw, that Titan had been a low-end professional criminal before going to work for Machine Head. There’s a bit of Idiot Plotting involved. Invincible has contacts with Not-SHIELD, and other heroes. He could have asked around if anyone knew anything about Titan before agreeing to help him.
My take on Titan’s interactions with Machine Head is that he initially genuinely wanted to just get out of the deal, but when Machine Head made it clear that he would never Titan go, Titan formulated a plan to take Machine Head down and take his place.
I don’t think that was clearly established, but their conversation after Eve’s fight with her parents sure sounded as if they were talking about Eve’s superhero career. I don’t think that was explicit, though. I think it’s clear that Amber knew Eve had had a huge fight with her parents and was thinking about leaving home, but Eve might have been vague, or lied, about the exact issue the fight was about.
Amber said something like “still saving the world?” and Eve said “I don’t even know if I want to any more”. I mean, maybe you could take that as being a reference to generic charity work, but it sure felt to me like A knew E’s secret.
Ah, see I read that as a circumstance where a character was saying something they didn’t know had a deeper layer of humor.
But I’m also trying to remember how Mark & Eve acknowledge each other - is it after the Flaxon attack & she recognizes him in school, or does he already know she’s a hero?
Titan may have concluded that someone will step into Machinehead’s place once he is taken down, and honestly believe that he’d be a more beneficent crime lord than any other option … and he takes care of his own first.
In the comics he’s first seen from the back, and his speech bubbles are very Rorschach-like, enough that I for a moment really thought it was a cameo (that was silly, of course).
As mentioned, he sure looks like Hellboy. He also talks a lot like Rorschach (vocally and syntactically), if you ask me. Miller mentioned Constantine, which I can see in his destruction of the magic book — tricksy long-term planning, something JC would totally have done in his shoes.
I don’t recognize the specific parts of the backstory you mention — demon detective trying to stay out of hell.
Where did you get that from? I thought the whole “save the world” conversation was about more of the kind of relief/community work she was talking about herself.
That’s what he appears to be doing when we first see him - he says something to the bank robbers like “You hired me for protection” or something, not “my boss sent me to…” and also bank robbery doesn’t seem like MachineHead’s style.
That’s how I interpreted it as well. If it wasn’t a conversation to establish this, I think the wording was poorly done as it did imply it.
We had background on how closely to guard your superhero status from regular people, a “will he won’t he” moment on telling GF his status, then a conversation where GF talks to a different super about being busy saving the world? They’re begging us to think GF knows about Eve.
Alan Moore’s Rorschach was based on Steve Ditko’s The Question, but I think Moore introduced the distinctively clipped speech pattern, which Justice League/Justice League Unlimited’s Question then incorporated.
I do agree that Damien Darkblood’s speech patterns are almost certainly inspired by Rorschach, but it’s also possible that the influence was indirect, through the JL/JLU version of the Question.
The trench coat and fedora are just generic noir detective gear (they’re tan, like Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, et al., not blue like the Question, or brown like Rorschach).
I think Damien Darkblood is a pastiche of several occult detectives. I can see elements of:
Aside from the tired romance trope of, “he’s with her when he should be dating HER,” I’m really liking it so far. It’s kinda like ‘Spiderman’ combined with ‘The Boys.’
Aside from it being a tired trope, it bugs me that his dad doesn’t help him out more with giving him cover stories when super heroing interferes with his social life. Would it be that hard just to pretend to be a hardass, unreasonable dad so Mark can be a superhero without all his friends thinking he’s a flaky asshole?
I suspect that his dad doesn’t want him to have normal human relationships. Certainly we don’t really know his dad’s true motivations.
I enjoyed this episode. Lots of interesting stuff going on. Will Eve’s new path work out? Why is Robot cloning (we assume) Rex Splode? Still bored of the Amber/Mark plotline, and the DA Sinclair stuff was nothing particularly new, but lots of fun overall.
We assume that? I thought he’d harvested DNA from multiple sources (although I can’t quite recall why I thought so). My gut feeling is that it’s to do with trying and stopping Omega Man; he may have figured out it was him that killed the Guardians, and perhaps he’s figured out a way to counteract his powers, and is creating the appropriate powerset. But I don’t really have anything hard to go on for that.
I’m pretty sure the only person we saw him extract a sample from was Rex Splode.
I’m thinking he’s trying to become a real boy, and he sees Rex Splode as a likely candidate. He’s going to clone the body and copy his consciousness into it, which is also part of the Mauler Twins’ cloning tech. I’m further thinking this is because of his feelings for Monster Girl - he wants to be able to have a physical relationship with her. After the initial fight between Monster Girl and Rex Splode, they actually seemed to actually get along well, and it seemed like if it weren’t for the physical age difference, they might even have been more than friends. I think Robot wants a piece of that action. At which point, I’m hoping he also has a plan for physically re-aging her…
We also don’t really know anything about Robot. Is he a literal robot? An uploaded formerly human consciousness? A brain in a box?
On another note, “Invincible” sure seems pretty vincible. Like, he gets his ass kicked in every. single. fight. Just, blood everywhere. Fortunately, he seems to have super-healing. Has he actually won a fight yet? He only “won” the first cyborg fight when the cyborg killed himself, and only “won” the second fight when College Hunk guy switched sides.