Ever since Invincible first made landfall on Prime Video, I have been excited to see how the show adapts Powerplex. As a show, Invincible has managed to make several improvements on its comic book counterpart, moving storylines around, and recontextualizing a lot of scenes and sequences.
I was curious to see how this new approach would apply to Powerplex, who doesn’t have as much of a backstory in the comics. It is implied that he was close with his sister, who died when Mark and Omni-Man fought in Chicago, but nothing else was known about his past. The show, however, decided to flesh it out, giving Powerplex more motivation to seek out Invincible.
Powerplex’s niece and his son’s age are new additions to the story
In the comics, Scott Duvall’s tragedy begins when his sister, who is working in one of the buildings that Omni-Man and Invincible crash into during their fight, dies in the resulting damage that the latter causes. However, in the show, his sister has been shown to be someone who raised him after their parents passed away, while also having a daughter of her own. Rather than working at the building that Omni-Man and Invincible crashed into, Duvall’s sister and niece lived in the building and were the exact child and mother duo that Invincible failed to save.
Another change from the comics was the fact that Powerplex’s son was an honest-to-goodness infant, while in the comics, he was grown, and could speak (which given his final fate, I have no idea if it was was good or a bad decision to turn him into an infant). However, it did add more of a gut punch to the scene at the end of the episode and made Powerplex a little more motivated to seek his revenge against Mark. In fact, the character is so well acted and adapted, that I am willing to overlook the PNG-core animation style that has been plaguing the show off late.
Episode 6 was a masterclass in what Invincible can achieve at its best
Invincible as a show has a lot of great moments, and at its best, the show is able to deliver on the action and the emotional gut-punches in the same scenes, as it did with Powerplex’s arc over one episode. While Powerplex is definitely set to return in later episodes of Invincible, fans are rallying behind the character, not because he was right, but because they understood what the character was going through.
Invincible, as indicated by the mid-credit scene of the episode, will be heading towards Invincible War, which was a single-issue event in the comics that sees multiple Marks, under the instruction of Angstrom Levy, mount an assault on the planet, bringing together a host of Image Comics characters to defend it, while also dealing with the ramifications for the war after.
Invincible Season 3 is currently streaming on Prime Video.
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