Mark moves into college with Amber and William. Meanwhile, Allen is tasked with outing a mole in the Coalition of Planets.
Tropes:
- Accomplice by Inaction: Debbie was tricked by Nolan, but as far as Theo's concerned that's still reason to hate her since she should have known better.
- Adaptational Early Appearance: The episode is based off of Issue 23 of the comic, which is the first appearance of Lucan. In the episode, Thula and Kregg appear alongside him earlier than they did in the comic continuity.
- Ambiguous Situation: After gently telling Telia to leave the room and let him watch over Allen, Thaddeus proceeds to sabotage Allen’s recovery before apologizing to him. Why he would do this has yet to be revealed.
- Alien Blood: Unopans have purple blood.
- Bait the Dog: Olga gives Debbie a card leading her to a therapy group, and she ends up hitting it off with a man named Theo... at first. When he, in his grief, lets slip the fact that his wife was Green Ghost and that he's very mad at Omni-Man for killing her, Debbie later reveals the identity of her own husband, which leads Theo to immediately disregard all of his sympathy for her despite her being a sobbing, guilt-filled mess who also made it apparent that she was tricked by him and instead blame her for having not known any better, implicitly banning her from the therapy group.
- Body Horror: The failed subjects of the Unopan Super-Soldier breeding project have various disfigurements and deformities like an extra arm or malformed bottom half. Played for laughs with one subject that has two eyes instead of one.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Before Mark and Amber have sex, a Lemony Narrator shows up to give them some privacy before narrating Allen's story in the episode... Before Allen begins to have his own sexy times with his girlfriend. Eventually, after desperately attempting to avoid showing the explicitness, the Narrator gives up after even Allen's alien cat starts licking its own ass in front of the camera and just begins describing in detail.
- Breather Episode: After Allen's horrific beating and subsequent death, the rest of the episode is set on Earth and follows a day in the life of various characters, such as Rudy and Amanda going on a date, Kate explaining to Rex why she hooked up with the Immortal, Deborah attending a support group for the widows of superheroes, and Mark attending college...until he is called upon to aid an alien planet in danger, and in heeding the call, unexpectedly reunites with his father.
- Commonality Connection: Dupli-Kate tells Rex that what she and Immortal have in common is having experienced death multiple times.
- Credits Gag: The end credits start rolling after Allen is seemingly beaten to death by three Viltrumites… halfway through the episode. The customary mid-credits stinger is actually the second half of the episode, with the end credits resuming at the end of the episode.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Allen gets the tar (and several internal organs) beaten out of him by three Viltrumites. To say that it's a one-sided fight is an understatement.
- A Day in the Limelight: The episode focuses heavily on Allen the Alien, along with a sequence showing Monster Girl and Rudy on a date.
- Eye Scream: Allen has his single eye punched out of his head, though it remains attached via his dangling optic nerve.
- Fear Is Normal: Rudy, unsatisfied with his performance against the Giant, practices meditation and active thought to control his fear response. Amanda warns him that people feel fear for a reason, but Rudy deems it an unnecessary emotion.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: Nuolzot takes the form of the comic character Seance Dog to talk to Mark. Mark naturally sees through this and is only angered by the obvious ruse, forcing Nuolzot to drop it before Mark gets violent.
- Grievous Harm with a Body: A Viltrumite chops off Allen's arm then smacks him with it.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Allen is faced with three Viltrumites who he has no chance of escaping, let alone killing, but he is also in range of a space station full of people, his girlfriend included. To that end, he intentionally eggs on the Viltrumites so they'll lose their temper and beat him to death, hoping that they'll leave once they've failed to make him talk. Fortunately, he comes out of it barely alive.
- Immune to Drugs: Discussed. When Debbie warns Mark not to do drugs at college, he just wonders if they'd even have any effect on his body, though she insists it's not worth the risk.
- Kick the Dog: It doesn't matter to Theo that Debbie is just as much a victim of Nolan's lies and deceptions over the years as anyone else. She married him so in his eyes she is complicit in the horrors he has committed.
- After he refuses to co-operate with their demands, the Viltrumites conduct their spectacularly brutal incapacitation of Allen the Alien in full view of the Space Station he's been abducted from, apparently providing a show to the helplessly watching onlookers within (including his girlfriend) as they take turns torturing him. It's also subtly hinted (but NOT confirmed) that Thaedeus himself may potentially be the mole feeding information to the Viltrumites after he sabotages Allen's life support system afterwards.
- Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex: Discussed. When Mark and Amber are about to have sex, she first inquires if Mark has "weird sperm", i.e. the bullet problem. Mark assures her that it's normal, so far as he can tell. She then wonders if Mark might accidentally crush her if he gets too excited, so she decides to be on top just to play it safe.
- The Mole: Thaedeus suspects there to be one in the Coalition of Planets that he assigns Allen to find.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: According to Telia, the Viltrumites are big on racial purity so the idea that Nolan, and possibly other members of his species, are now breeding with other species is unexpected. Allen points out that should have been a subject of discussion instead of questioning/dismissing his claims.
- Special Edition Title: Allen gets his own title card in this episode much like Eve in the Atom Eve special, with a blood splatter-style splash going across the screen to provide a "the Alien" part to the "Allen" title.
- This Is Gonna Suck: When Allen realizes he's up against no less than three Viltrumites (bearing in mind that he can't match even one in direct combat) he lets out a rather understated "Oh fuck".
- Weird World, Weird Food: Allen and Telia have a meal in a diner on a space station orbiting Talescria. Allen is eating a bowl of kanzlok, yellow grub-like creatures that crawl for their lives. Telia is eating the brains of a Cephalothorax creature that is also still alive, and eating the kanzlok that escapes Allen's plate.
- Wham Shot: The episode ends with a Thraxan named Nuolzot arriving on Earth to enlist Mark to help protect his people from a meteor shower. When Mark arrives on the Thraxans' home planet, however, he soon realizes that the meteors were a lie to get him to reunite with Omni-Man, who has become the Thraxans' ruler since the first season finale.Nolan: Hello, son.
Mark: Huh?
Nolan: It's been a while.
Mark:' ...Dad? - Writers Cannot Do Math: Dupli-Kate reasons that, counting her clones, she and Immortal are roughly the same age. Whatever math she's using to reach that conclusion, it's definitely wrong. If Immortal is 2000 years old, and Dupli-Kate is 20 (likely a slight overestimate, since she seems of age with Atom Eve and Invincible, who only just graduated high school), then she would need 100 copies of herself since birth to match Immortal. She is rarely seen with more than five copies out, and never for more than a few minutes at a time, so she falls well short. If she counts them all as having lived her full life despite existing for short periods, then she would probably have shot well past Immortal by now. That said it is clear she's basing her logic entirely off of the emotional connection of their shared condition, so the scale of the actual math is meaningless compared to the feeling of what is implied is what truly matters to her when she said it. However, there is also the fact that she probably includes clones which are KIA during their missions - the main reason she relates so closely with Immortal - since to her, they matter just as much as she does, and considering how many of those she must have lost during her career would likely ramp up that number at least past the 60 mark.
