This review contains spoilers for Invincible Season 1, Episode 7, titled “We Need to Talk,” which is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
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Amazon Prime’s Invincible has been uneven at times, but its strengths outweigh its weaknesses. This has been true for individual episodes, like the fifth (“That Actually Hurt”), whose storytelling and character work eclipse last week’s sixth entry (“You Look Kinda Dead”). In that vein, this week’s seventh chapter, “We Need To Talk,” feels like a definitive portrait of the series, as it approaches its season finale next week. It combines, within a single episode, elements and subplots that don’t really work, with a central story about its lead characters that lands so precisely, and so spectacularly, that the missteps almost cease to matter.
Things finally reach a boiling point for the Grayson family, now that Debbie (Sandra Oh) knows that Nolan (J.K. Simmons) killed the Guardians of the Globe. Although, before the couple’s inevitable confrontation, the episode takes a few brief moments to set the stage through Debbie’s eyes. She sighs at her empty bed, and at the hole Nolan punched in the wall the previous night, before approaching him as he stands at their window. Their eyes meet in its foggy reflection. They’ve become disconnected, and these scenes from a rocky marriage precede Debbie giving Nolan one last chance to come clean, or to give her some kind of explanation that makes sense.
The Nolan-Debbie plot has been the show’s biggest departure from the comics. Instead of having all this information suddenly sprung on Debbie, her detective work makes her an active part of the plot, and it gives her the chance to reckon with her husband’s actions, and to work through her denial and disbelief. The other side of this coin is Nolan himself, who ends up in a complicated position. In the comics, his relationship with Debbie was revealed to be a ruse, but in the show, you can feel him wrestling between his violent Viltrumite duties and his genuine, loving human relationships. He’s constantly, painfully conflicted — like when he practices his confession to Mark (Steven Yeun) on a lonely mountaintop — and his facial animation this week makes him especially intimidating. He still stares silently, but he feels like he’s about to explode.
And explode he does, on a number of occasions. After Donald (Chris Diamantopoulos) takes Debbie to the GDA for her protection (and to use her to track down Mark), Nolan returns home and sniffs out a handful of invisible SWAT agents. He dispenses with them in gloriously gruesome fashion, ramming a gun through one of their faces, and slamming another into the kitchen countertop so hard that he splits him in two. He even crushes Donald’s torso with his bare hands. The show’s ultra-violence works best when it’s purposeful, and here, it makes Nolan downright terrifying. All the while, the question of Mark’s allegiance to his father looms large at the GDA, as both Cecil (Walton Goggins) and Nolan try to find him first.
After the events at Upstate University last week, William (Andrew Rannells) drops Mark and Amber (Zazie Beetz) back home. Mark makes a last-ditch attempt at winning Amber back by finally coming clean about his secret identity. Although, in a nice surprise — and another nice departure from the comics — Amber seems to have figured it out already. The chickens have finally come home to roost for both Mark and Nolan, whose super-powered dilemmas feel like reflections of one another. Their dishonesty, with the women in their lives, has gone on far too long, and their relationships may have been damaged beyond repair.
Not knowing where to turn, Mark seeks out his former teammate Atom Eve (Gillian Jacobs) at her rural hideaway, from where she’s been helping people in secret. Theirs is a much more low-key story, which largely involves sitting by a waterfall, but their conversation is charged with frustration and tension. Mark feels trapped by his failures, while Eve’s lingering feelings for Mark underscore her own outburst at him, once they begin mischaracterizing each other and things finally boil over.
However, the episode falters somewhat during its more action-packed subplot about Robot (Zachary Quinto) and the Mauler Twins (Kevin Michael Richardson), who, it’s revealed, have been cloning Robot a new human body. This story is filled with heady sci-fi ideas about consciousness, which coalesce in a particularly haunting moment, when the “real” robot’s memories are copied from his mangled body into a child clone of Rex Splode (Jason Mantzoukas). We see things from both bodies’ points of view at once, through overlapping images, which raise questions of the authentic self. It feels like something out of The Prestige.
Robot claims he’s thought long and hard about this dilemma, and the Maulers say they think about it often too. But during the preceding six episodes, this cloning subplot has only been presented in the form of breadcrumbs. It’s been more mystery box than character drama. As far as the audience is concerned, the characters have only briefly mentioned these existential questions, when they ought to have been central to a plot this lofty. Even the moving death scene of Robot’s “original” body feels slightly deflated in the process. Robot and the Maulers may finally have more screen-time this week, but their subplot still feels tacked on to the rest of the story, since their ruminations are swiftly replaced by an action sequence.
Similarly, the episode doesn’t spend much time on the actual fallout of this plot. Sure, the real Rex is suitably upset by this violation of his autonomy, but when Robot shows up to Guardians HQ in human form, it’s smack-dab in the middle of other, bigger events surrounding Nolan. The idea of adults trapped in children’s bodies, and Robot being attracted to Monster Girl (Grey Griffin) in this form, is a particularly thorny one to navigate, but the episode seems to hand-wave it away by having Monster Girl be the one to end the discussion, claiming she needs time to “process” it. However, the episode doesn’t focus on any kind of processing on her part either.
Each time the show cuts back to the Robot plot, it can’t help but feel like it’s robbing attention from Nolan’s story, which grows increasingly intense with each scene. Cecil fires an enormous, Earth-shaking laser at him from outer space, which Nolan then flies towards and wrecks from within. It’s a fantastic spectacle, as is Nolan and Mark’s battle with the GDA’s Lovecraftian kaiju, and Nolan’s subsequent stand-off with a teleporting Cecil (who, unfortunately, still has one of the show’s most drab and lifeless vocal performances).
Many of the episode’s action beats feel evocative of Dragon Ball Z, especially when a resurrected Immortal (Ross Marquand) charges at Nolan in a fit of vengeful rage. With the world’s eyes and cameras on him, Nolan murders The Immortal yet again, punching a hole right through his chest before tearing him in half. The moment isn’t just physically wince-inducing, but it feels like an emotional knife-twist for Mark, who watches on in horror.
It wasn’t meant to be this way. Nolan had intended to explain himself to Mark on his own terms, but his actions came back to haunt him — in a very literal manner — before he had the chance. As the episode comes to a close, Mark and Nolan float above all the destruction and bloodshed below. For the first time this season, there’s no post-credit scene, and no music playing over the end titles. Only haunting silence. The stage is now set for both an action-packed finale, and a difficult conversation between father and son.
This Saturday has brought with it a buffet of deals. We have some discounted bedding items at Amazon, great cookware appliances at Best Buy, along with a huge Pro Day sale happening over at GameStop, which sees a ton of their products marked down to reduced prices. What’s more, the Apple M1 sale continues at Amazon, and we can’t forget the insane looking Gold RGB Ram over at Newegg.
Apple MacBook Laptops and Mac Minis with M1 Chip
Amazon is offering the best prices right now on the late-2020 Apple MacBook Air and Pro laptops and Mac Mini desktops with the new Apple M1 chip. If you haven’t been catching up with the latest and greatest, Apple put in their very own CPU/GPU combo in their latest batch of Mac Minis and 13″ MacBook laptops. Reviews show that this new chip is a speed demon offers better performance while generating less heat and consuming less power than the Intel chips that Apple has used in previous models. The best thing about this whole thing? There’s no ridiculous price markup!
Immortals Fenyx Rising released very late in 2020 and without franchise name recognition, you could have easily missed out on it. However, it ended up being a very solid Zelda-like with acrobatic combat and a silly tone. If you didn’t grab it initially, GameStop has the game for just $30 during its Pro Day sale, and it’s only available at that price today.
The deal applies to four different versions of the game: Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PS4, and PS5. The Xbox version supports Smart Delivery, giving you the Xbox One or Xbox Series X version depending on which system you put it in. While the digital version is also sold on the website, it’s not part of the sale, so those with Xbox Series S will have to pay full price.
However, if you are getting the game on a PlayStation console, we strongly recommend selecting the PS4 version. That’s because the game comes with a free next-gen upgrade if you play it on a PS5, essentially giving you both versions of the game. If you pick the PS5 version on the GameStop website, that game will only work on PS5.
Immortals Fenyx Rising feels like a very clear iteration on the ideas Nintendo introduced with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with a similar flow to combat and magical abilities, as well as free-form climbing that makes traversal much less annoying than in some other open-world games. However, it’s more than just an homage, with an interesting approach to storytelling via Greek gods and a much lighter tone than we see in Zelda.
Because the game’s on Switch, it’s a good choice if you have finally done all you can in Breath of the Wild but don’t want to stop playing that sort of adventure yet. It makes smart use of the next-gen systems, as well, including some subtle haptic feedback in the DualSense’s triggers on PS5.
In celebration of the 31st anniversary of the launching of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers aimed the observatory at a “celebrity star” that is “waging a tug-of-war between gravity and radiation to avoid self-destruction.”
As reported by NASA, this star, called AG Carinae, is one of the brightest stars in the Milky Way and is surrounded by a glowing halo of gas and dust that is the result of it “living on the edge.”
The image captured of AG Carinae, which you can see below, is a “composite of separate exposures acquired by the WFC3/UVIS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. Several filters were used to sample narrow wavelength ranges. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic (grayscale) image associated with an individual filter.”
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, STScl
The expanding shell of gas and dust surrounded this star is roughly five light-years wide and was created by “one of the more giant eruptions about 10,000 years ago.” This expelled material is nearly 10 times our sun’s mass.
This is typical activity for a rare breed of star called a luminous blue variable, a star that “lives fast and dies young.” They only live for a few million years, which is a short lifespan when compared to the roughly 10-billion-year lifetime of those like our sun.
AG Carinae is also up to 70 times bigger than our sun and “shines with the blinding brilliance of one million suns.”
These outbursts occur only once or twice in a luminous blue variable’s lifetime and only happen when the star is in danger of self-destruction as a supernova.
The red material in the image is glowing hydrogen gas laced with nitrogen gas, while the blue highlighted material are “dust clumps illuminated by the star’s reflected light” that are shaped by stellar wind.
Fun Facts About the Hubble Space Telescope
At the end of the article, NASA shared some info about the Hubble Space Telescope, including that it launched on April 24, 1990 and has made more than 1.5 million observations of about 48,000 celestial objects in its lifetime.
It has made more than 181,000 orbits around earth, which equals over 4.5 billion miles, and its observations have produced more than 169 terabytes of data. This data has led to more than 18,000 scientific papers, with 900 of those published in 2020.
Get to know Ben Barnes, Jessie Mei Li, Freddy Carter, Archie Renaux, Amita Suman, and Kit Young a bit more during this game of “Most Likely To,” where they reveal which one of them would be caught in various Shadow and Bone-like scenarios. Shadow and Bone drops on Netflix on April 23.
No Mourners. No Funerals. If those words mean something to you, then you’re probably already a huge fan of Shadow and Bone. The epic fantasy saga has finally made it to the screen in Netflix’s stunning fantasy epic. But after an action-packed eight episodes, you might have some questions about the fate of Mal, Alina, the Darkling, and the Crows. So we’re here to solve the mysteries, answer your queries, and break down that epic finale.
Throughout the series, General Kirigan has been at the core of the struggles of Ravka. Though he was introduced as a potential savior, Baghra later revealed that rather than being a reluctant hero trying to fix the mistakes of his ancestor the Black Heretic, Kirigan and the Black Heretic are one and the same. Yep, Ben Barnes’ sexy Grisha leader is actually a centuries-old madman and probably the most powerful Grisha who has ever lived. And he was the one who created the Fold. So if that was the case, why would he want Alina to help him destroy it? Well, the show hints that under that fancy black kefta, Kirigan might have a little regret for what he created. And he does have an allegedly noble goal: to protect Grisha from the oppression they’ve faced at the hands of the human world. But as it’s revealed in the finale, even with all of that said, he doesn’t really want to destroy the Fold at all.
Instead, his plan was to use Morosova’s stag to control Alina’s powers. Thanks to the Durast David, he was able to meld the amplifier to Alina’s skin and use a strange device to connect it to him. Then, on the trip into the Fold where the pair were meant to destroy the dangerous wasteland, Kirigan instead expanded it, demolishing the shores of Novokribirsk and in turn his competition. It was a violent play to terrify the delegates aboard the skiff and to take total control of Ravka and the surrounding territories. But thanks to the agency and power of Alina Starkov, his plan only managed to destroy Novokribirsk before she put a stop to it.
So how did she manage to break the Darkling’s control? Well, earlier in the series it was established that whoever killed an amplifier was the one able to wield its power, but the reality of the situation was actually different. While that does work in practice, there’s a deeper connection between the amplifier and Grisha, one of agency and choice. In the moment that Alina decided not to kill the Stag and to instead try to find another way, she was chosen by the creature. That choice allowed her to break the Darkling’s connection and control. It’s an interesting bit of lore that isn’t concretely introduced until the most recent novel in the series, Rule of Wolves, but it’s a powerful moment that redefines Alina and her powers.
With her connection to the amplifier far more powerful than the Darkling’s, Alina is able to beat back Kirigan and save the Skiff. But while it seems like a happy ending for those who survived, it might not be the end of the story for the Black Heretic.
Why Did the Crows Switch Sides?
One of the biggest changes from the original Shadow and Bone book was the inclusion of the group of young thieves from Ketterdam known as The Crows. Kaz, Jesper, and Inej were introduced on a mission to kidnap Alina, but during the finale, they became unexpected allies to Alina and Mal. While it’s hard to call Kaz Brekker “a good guy,” he is a character defined by survival. And, in the end, allying with Mal and Alina was a choice that would help him and his team live to see another day. With the Darkling on a shadow-making spree, the trio needed a way out and the best way was the Sun Summoner. Plus, the fact that Inej is a woman of faith and believes in Alina and her power to change the world also probably helped push Kaz in the right direction. Once the crew escaped off of the skiff, Alina paid Kaz off with a piece of jewelry given to her by the Darkling. It’s a smart nod to the fact that Kaz didn’t make a choice based on morals. And that while it might have helped Alina and Mal survive, the former is very aware of the fact that Kaz would have captured and sold her if it had been an option.
With the combined might of the Crows, Alina, Mal, and the Squaller Zoya, it seemed like the Darkling might have been defeated. Thrown into the darkness of the Fold, the show wanted us to think he’d been consumed by his own creation and the terrifying creatures known as the Volcra. But as he walked out of the Fold in the final moments of the finale, it was clear that not only is the Darkling not dead but he has a new power. Ben Barnes’ regal villain was followed out of the Shadow Fold by creatures made of pure darkness. In the books, these horrifying beings are known as Nichevo’ya. The creatures are creations of the Darkling and can be manifested at will as a near-immortal army with an unending supply of soldiers.
Where Are Alina and Mal Going?
While the show doesn’t explicitly state this, we know they’re getting out of Ravka and are headed for freedom. While the show hasn’t gotten a second season yet, if it does then it’s likely it will take from the second book in the series, Siege and Storm. In that story, Mal and Alina escape Ravka and go on the run to Novyi Zem, but are being hunted by The Darkling and those who want to wield Alina’s power. So even if they do end up somewhere else in the (theoretical for now) next season, expect them to face down the Darkling sooner rather than later!
What did you think of Shadow and Bone Season 1? Let’s discuss in the comments. And then vote in the poll below too!
