Mark confronts Angstrom Levy, who's taken Debbie and Oliver hostage as a way to torture Mark. When Mark attempts to intervene, Levy sends him to several alternate dimensions. As Angstrom's behavior towards her and Oliver becomes more erratic and aggressive, Debbie attempts to attack him but Angstrom beats Debbie and breaks her arm, nearly snapping it off.
Mark returns from a different dimension, becomes furious when he sees his mother's injuries, and attacks Angstrom harder than he has yet. Angstrom fights back and teleports the both of them to a dimension where the world has been utterly devastated and they appear to be the only living people. Angstrom threatens to kill not just Mark but his family too, causing Mark to lose control of his anger. Mark reveals that he's been holding back, quickly gets the upper hand in the fight, and accidentally beats Angstrom to death, only to be immediately overcome with remorse when he realizes what he's done. Arguably worst of all, now that Angstrom is dead Mark is stranded in a desolate alternate dimension by himself with no way to return home.
Sometime later, as Mark is still reeling from what he's done and babbling to himself, he's saved by a future version of his friends, the Guardians of the Globe, who've been searching for the right dimension for over 20 years so they could save him and send him back home. They open a portal back to Mark's own dimension and time, but before he leaves, Future Eve confesses to Mark that she's always been in love with him and tells Mark to talk to her past self, urging him to give her some indication of whether he returns her feelings or not.
Meanwhile, the Immortal is still on his sabbatical when he returns to his hut to find none other than the original Kate. Kate confesses that she has let a clone live most of her life for her and was planning to quit being a hero but her feelings for the Immortal eventually prompted her to return. She apologizes for letting him think she was dead and going through all the grief that he's been feeling, but Immortal assures her that it's okay and the two lovers reconcile.
Mark spends a great deal of time wrestling with himself and his guilt over accidentally killing Angstrom Levy. Cecil assures him that he did what he needed to do to protect his family. During a talk with his mother later that night, Mark tells her that he's decided to leave college so he can fully master his powers and learn to better control himself. Eventually he encounters Eve, who encourages him to open up to her. Thinking about what Future Eve said, Mark considers saying something to her but ultimately decides not to and stays quiet.
Allen is brought to the Viltrumite prison where Nolan is being held, and he tries to recruit Nolan to join the fight against the Viltrumite Empire. Nolan contemplates whether he deserves to live after everything he has done on Earth and other worlds, much to Allen's chagrin. Finally Nolan admits that he misses Debbie, hinting at a potential reason for him to go on instead of simply accepting his execution.
Tropes:
- Actually a Doombot: It's revealed that every Kate we've ever seen is not the original Kate. '1' refers to the first (or oldest) clone, and the original Kate, with a '0' on her costume, has always been in hiding so she would never risk death. She had intended to let herself stay dead and change identities, but reveals herself to the Immortal.
- Ambiguous Syntax: Mark's "I thought you were stronger" line can be referring to Angstrom (since the latter claimed he empowered his own body to give him more strength, stamina and durability), or to himself (since he spent most of Season 2 trying to not follow his father's footsteps), or even both.
- Armor-Piercing Response: Mark decides that he should drop out of college, but Debbie insists that he should finish to secure a better future. Mark then asks why he should, in a way that doesn't express pride or arrogance, but fear and concern because of his heritage and responsibilities as a hero, especially given everything that has happened up to this point.Mark: With everything I can do, tell me why I need to go to college. [...] It's too much. I can't do it. I have to get better.
- Bad Future: Future Eve tells Mark that the future where he's been missing has turned into this. Future Robot implies that being stranded in the empty dimension changed Mark for the worse and preventing this from happening is why they used time travel to get to him before that point.Mark: I don't know if I would have survived here.
Robot: You did, but you wouldn't like what you had become. - Bait-and-Switch: The beginning of the episode has an exhausted runner hype himself by saying that after he's finished, he'll feel... (title card pops up)... like a million bucks.
- Bittersweet Ending: Mark saves his family from Angstrom Levy but is horrified that he had to kill him. He also chooses to drop out of college due to his lingering feelings for Amber, wanting to get stronger to take on future threats like the still-invading Viltrumites, and to control his anger and powers better. Meanwhile, Allen finds Nolan, who is slated for execution, and it's implied that Nolan's own desire to see Debbie again may be the spark for him and Allen to start a prison break.
- Became Their Own Antithesis: Lampshaded by Debbie regarding Angstrom. For all his big talk about how Invincible is a threat that must be stopped, she points out that Angstrom is more pissed by the fact that, just for once, their roles in the main universe are completely reversed, with the former being turned into a supervillain and with Mark being The Hero. Angstrom doesn’t take it so well, not by a long shot.
- Bleed 'Em and Weep: After turning Angstrom into a bloody mess in a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, Mark is obviously horrified of what he has done, so much so that he nearly throws up from the shock, and spends the entire hour in the wasteland in a mental breakdown.
- But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Angstrom is quite annoyed when Mark can only vaguely recall him as "that guy" from that incident with the Maulers. Downplayed somewhat because Mark later brings up more details, including remember how Angstrom took off the helmet and put his own life at risk to save Mark from being beaten to death by the Maulers.
- Call-Back: Mark's final "victory" over Levy is a dark reflection of the beating he took at the hands of his father the previous season, down to using similar camera angles to show how brutal the final sequence of blows is leading up to Levy's death.
- The Cameo: One of the dimensions Mark lands in is home to Omnipotus.
- Category Traitor: In some versions of the multiverse, Debbie apparently stays by Nolan's side when he and Mark conquer Earth for the Viltrumites. This makes her The Quisling as far as Angstrom Levy is concerned, especially when his insanity spirals and he comes to view Debbie and Mark as being guilty of the crimes that their alternate selves committed.
- Creepy Good: When Mark meets Agent Spider, he's reluctant to take him at his word that he's a superhero because he has glowing red eyes and appears to be fighting an old man, even if he's one with a harness of robot tentacles.
- Death by Origin Story: Deconstructed with Angstrom’s alternative selves. According to him, Invincible is bound to become Angstrom’s Arch-Nemesis across every reality, after the former killed people the latter cared about, either out of spite or as collateral damage in his conquest of Earth. This becomes a problem for Angstrom Prime, who after absorbing all the memories and trauma of his alternate versions, is no longer able to differentiate between which memories belong to which universe and concludes that this Invincible is no different from the others and has to die.
- Didn't Think This Through: Levy's plan is eventually revealed to be very simple — to use his Extra-Dimensional Shortcut abilities to soften Mark up enough to use his new Super-Strength to finish him off. What Levy didn't realize (despite his knowledge of how powerful Viltrumites are) is that Invincible always holds back. He pushes Mark beyond his Rage Breaking Point and ends up pulped for his trouble.
- Evil Doppelgänger: We see a number of evil Invincibles in Angstrom's memories, and they're callow and/or sadistic violent killers with none of Mark's kindness or morals. One in particular is shown murdering Angstrom's son right before his eyes.
- Everyone Has Standards: One of the three sapient dinosaurs Mark encounters is openly enraged when his fellows continue going after Mark after discovering Mark is sapient.
- Evil Is Petty: Even before becoming completely unravelled, Angstrom acts in ways to cause Oliver pain and put the toddler's health in danger just to spite Mark. As he and Mark fight across dimensions, at one point Angstrom shoves two random bystanders through portals, with no indication of whether they would survive wherever he sent them to, for no more reason than being within arm's reach when Angstrom was mad.
- The Family That Slays Together: According to Angstrom, there are other versions of Debbie who join Mark and Nolan in their conquest of Earth.
- Future Badass: The Future Guardians of the Globe who come to Mark's rescue after he's stranded in the wasteland dimension. Twenty years into the future they seem like a much more tightly knit unit and way more efficient.
- Go Mad from the Isolation: Implicitly, Mark spending however long it took to escape the empty dimension in total isolation in the original timeline left him a lot worse off. The Future Guardians travel back to prevent that.
- Gory Discretion Shot: The end result of Mark's No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on Angstrom's face is pointedly avoided through various forms of Scenery Censor and the camera stopping just shy of his neck, but the massive blood splatter and bits of flesh on Mark's hands suggest there's not a whole lot left.
- Heroic BSoD: After killing Angstrom in a wrathful No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, Mark is horrified by his actions, as he at first tries to justify them to make rational sense to what just happened, but in the end, he forces himself to admit that he lost control and that he really wanted to kill him, he just didn’t know that he would actually succeed. Even after being brought back to his own universe by future versions of the Guardians, and being reminded several times that he did the right choice, he spends the rest of the episode beating himself up for it.
- History Repeats: The mummy spirit Ka-Hor possessed an archeologist last season but was sealed again by Mark far away from the temple. The archeologist's daughter and an assistant with Super-Strength finds the temple again but, as they find the father's corpse and encounter Ka-Hor, Mark flies overhead, unintentionally burying the temple and the two women with it.
- Hope Spot: It briefly seems like Mark and his own original memories and intentions are getting through to Angstrom, but Levy is quickly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of memories from all the alternate versions of himself and their pain, resulting in him continuing in his quest to vengefully lash out at Mark.
- Intellectual Animal: In one of the dimensions Mark gets sent to, he's ambushed by a trio of theropod dinosaurs, which then start discussing how much they want to eat him in perfect English (with British accents). They're shocked when Mark tells them to back off, and one of them tries to get the other two to stop because "if it talks, it thinks."Egads! It speaks!
- Kick the Dog: Out of sheer pettiness, Angstrom Levy pulls on Oliver's arm until he starts screaming, and after Debbie calls him out on his bullshit, he snaps her arm like a twig.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Tragically subverted. In one of Angstrom's memories an alternate Invincible murders Angstrom's son right in front of him while mocking Angstrom for thinking he could hide. Angstrom threatening to kill Oliver to further enrage this universe's Invincible is heavily implied to be him trying to invoke this trope, but since this Invincible and the evil Invincible are completely different people Angstrom's anger is aimed at the wrong guy and the Invincible actually deserving of it remains a Karma Houdini.
- Lawyer-Friendly Cameo:
- Since the show couldn't get the rights to Spider-Man, they instead used a parody called "Agent Spider" and his enemy "Prof Ock".
- In one universe Invincible meets a man who dresses like a bat, but only his cape is seen.
- Let's You and Him Fight: Inverted; flying through a portal, Mark crashes into Prof Ock while he's in the middle of fighting Agent Spider, who implores Mark for assistance. Mark is reluctant, because Prof Ock looks like an old man and Agent Spider has glowing red goggles. That is, until Prof grabs him by the neck with one of his tentacles and throws him.
- Loophole Abuse: Viltrumite law dictates that traitors must be "whole" (i.e. combat-ready) before facing execution, but General Kregg spends a couple of minutes beating Nolan while he's helpless because no one will mind a few bruises.
- Love Confession: Future Eve confesses to Mark that she loves him, and has since his relative present, urging him to tell the present version of herself how he feels, one way or another, so that she at least knows and can find some closure. Mark can't bring himself to talk to her about it, however, at least not so soon.
- Mama Bear: Debbie, a normal human without any superpowers, attempts to attack Angstrom, a violently unstable metahuman, to protect her sons.
- Misplaced Retribution: Angstrom is overwhelmed by the memories of thousands of other Angstroms that suffered under their Marks and sees main universe Mark, the only known heroic version of himself, as responsible for everything the other Marks did and tries to kill him and his family.
- Mood Whiplash: Harrowing scenes of Levy threatening Debbie and Oliver are intercut with sometimes comedic scenes of Mark in other dimensions such as teasing Batman about his uncreative name, creating a sharp contrast.
- Moving the Goalposts: Levy starts off proclaiming that he has no intention of hurting Debbie and Oliver to saying he won't harm them if he doesn't need to, and finally during the end of his fight with Mark he declares that his feud with Mark won't be over until he kills Mark's family too.
- My God, What Have I Done?:
- Mark hits this point after beating Angstrom Levy to death, with him even contemplating if this is the first step towards being as evil as his multiversal counterparts. Unlike them, however, Mark is able to talk himself down from justifying it and takes responsibility for his actions. Cecil later tells Mark that killing, even for pragmatic reasons, is always a difficult choice... and one that sometimes can't be avoided.
- In the stinger, we see Allen chatting with Nolan in prison, where Nolan reveals he's been experiencing this ever since he left Earth. Feeling genuine guilt for the first time in his life, he finally comes to a conclusion...Nolan: I think... I miss my wife.
- Noble Bigot: The dark-brown dinosaur still refers to Mark as an "it" after finding out he can talk, implying he still doesn't consider Mark his equal, but he makes his stance plain to his fellows that any creature capable of speech deserves far better than being hunted down and eaten.Dinosaur: Back, you brute! If it talks, it thinks!
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Mark finally snaps after Angstrom threatens to kill his family, beating the man's face until he's just pulp and a lot of blood.
- "No More Holding Back" Speech: After hitting his Rage Breaking Point, Mark tells Angstrom that Angstrom has no idea how much Mark holds back in his daily life and his fights, and then proceeds to utterly dominate their fight.
- Pistol-Whipping: Mark comes out of one of the portals holding a sniper rifle by the barrel and proceeds to hit Angstrom with it.
- Portal Cut: Threatened when Angstrom generates the initial ring of a portal surrounding Debbie's legs to make Mark back off.
- Pragmatic Adaptation: Instead of actually meeting Spider-Man, Mark encounters an Expy called Agent Spider. The Batman cameo is kept, but Mark doesn’t outright say his name.
- Pyrrhic Victory: Subverted. Mark remarks that Angstrom Levy has won in a way, since Mark is stranded in the desolate alternate dimension with (apparently) no way to survive and no way home. However, before he's there for too long the alternate/future versions of the Guardians find him and supply him with a way to get back home. Although it's worth noting that apparently in a previous version of events before the Guardians changed it via time travel, Mark was stuck in that dimension, presumably for a prolonged period of time... and it did bad things to him.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: When meeting with the Spider-Man Expy. Mark is confused on who's the hero and who's the villain and points out that the Expy is wearing a mask that has glowing red eyes as a reason why he was hesitant on seeing him as a hero.
- Sanity Slippage: Throughout the episode Levy becomes more and more unravelled, extreme, and aggressive. He's insane from the start, but he initially does a good job of keeping it under wraps and remaining composed, but the stress of the encounter with Mark makes him plunge deeper and deeper into insanity.
- Sapient Eat Sapient: When he reveals he can speak, two of the sapient dinosaurs Mark encounters keep trying to eat him. The third, however, defies this and is enraged his fellows would consider it, and tells them to back off.Dinosaur: Back, you brute! If it talks, it thinks!
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The Future Guardians travel back in time to rescue Mark from the empty dimension, as in their timeline it took far longer to find him and he wasn't the same when they did.
- Shout-Out: Mostly coming from Mark's dimension-hopping travels thanks to Levy.
- One of the alternate dimensions Mark is sent to has a very clear Spider-Man Expy battling a Doctor Octopus Expy. The former is even voiced by Josh Keaton! Said Spider-hero even mentions that he's also been dealing with multiverse-related problems recently.
- During the flashes though the countless dimensions Mark is forced to traverse, we see him talking to someone who is heavily implied to be the actual Batman.
- Mark comes out of one portal wielding a Dragon's Breath Sniper and proceeds to hit Levy with it. A fun little nod to the fact that there was a crossover set
sold on Fortnite's shop. - Mark ends up in the middle of a zombie apocalypse and spends some time with a very familiar set of survivors.
- Shut Up, Hannibal!: After having enough of listening to Levy's excuses and rationalizations while both her and Oliver are being threatened and held hostage by him, Debbie lets him know that as far as she's concerned, Angstrom is just pissed that for once in the multiverse, he's the villain, and Mark's the hero.
- Talking to Themself: Before the Guardians arrive to rescue him from the desolate alternate dimension, Mark engages in some of this and is clearly not doing well mentally speaking.Mark: You've really done it this time, Mark Grayson. [deep sigh] Just keep on ignoring the fact that you killed someone. That's helping you keep it together. Although I don't think talking to yourself is the best thing right now... but it's not like you've got anyone else to talk to, right? So inside your head, outside your head, what's the difference?
- These Hands Have Killed: Invincible focuses on his blood soaked hands after killing Angstrom and feeling immense guilt over it.
- Title Drop: Mark says the episode title after killing Angstrom.
- Too Dumb to Live: Angstrom frequently antagonizing Mark with portals to other dimensions is one thing. After threatening his mom and brother one too many times just to push him further, he's finally had enough by the end.Angstrom: This doesn't end until you and your family are dead.
Mark: STOP! THREATENING! MY FAMILY! - Villain Ball: If Angstrom merely wanted Mark dead, he had ample opportunities to make that happen by simply stranding Mark somewhere he could never come back from, a fact he contemplates briefly by wondering how long it would take Mark to starve. But since he's unstable and vengeful, he wants to personally beat Mark to death and the portal travels were just meant to soften him up, allowing Mark to turn the tables when Angstrom gets careless.
- Willfully Weak: Deconstructed. When he cuts lose on Levy, Mark claims that he's always been holding back and easily overwhelms Levy with a renewed burst of strength and speed. However, given Levy is enhanced, it's not possible for Mark to judge how much damage he can really take and he's no longer holding back enough to avoid unintentionally killing Levy. At least, that's what Mark tells himself after the fact.
- Wham Shot: As Immortal comes back from fishing, he finds Kate in his hut. The original Kate, with a '0' on her chest.
- Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Discussed an eventually enforced; Levy points out that with his powers, killing Mark would be exceedingly easy. All he needs to do is send him to an alternate universe with an extremely hostile environment and wait for Mark to be killed by it. However, killing Mark in such a way wouldn't be satisfying enough, he has to kill Mark with his own, bare hands.
- Would Hurt a Child:
- Angstrom threatens to kill Oliver as a way of further angering Mark. And he repeatedly hurts him by hanging him by the arm and leg, and makes his head hit the floor when he throttles Debbie.
- At least one alternate version of Mark is shown murdering Angstrom's son in cold blood.
- You Are Better Than You Think You Are:
- Mark tells Angstrom that he was once a good man and even tried to save his life. Though Angstrom briefly recalls this truth, all the memories of his alternate, vengeful selves soon eclipse that and Angstrom spirals further into insanity.
- Cecil tries to assure Mark that he did the right thing and isn't his father just because he killed Angstrom. Good guys don't usually break the arms of innocent civilians, after all.
