Invincible Season 3’s Finale Is One Of IMDb’s Highest-Rated Episodes Ever

Spoilers ahead for “Invincible.”

“Invincible” season 3 has come and gone with just as much critical praise and fanfare as the show’s two prior seasons. According to one specific rubric, it even hit a new high for the show. At the time of this writing, the “Invincible” season 3 finale“I Thought You’d Never Shut Up,” holds a near-perfect 9.9/10 audience score on IMDb. That’s just a small notch above the penultimate episode of season 3, which holds a 9.8. Both episodes have eclipsed the IMDb score for the season 1 finale, “Where I Really Come From,” which remains one of the most iconic episodes of television from the past decade.

Hitting a new stride (at least in the eyes of some fans) in its third season is a huge accomplishment for “Invincible,” and it bodes well for the show’s future. Prime Video has one of the best reputations for renewing streaming shows long-term, in part because of Amazon’s varied business interests. The massive scale of the company takes some of the pressure off of its streaming arm, while competitors like Netflix continue to cancel many series after one or two seasons.

“Invincible” has already been renewed for a season 4, and it could run well beyond that. There’s still tons of material from the comics to adapt, and the show has introduced more and more original material as it’s gone on. The season 3 finale alone established multiple threads that will continue to develop later on, including the fate of the villain Conquest (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).

Making TV is hard, and it only gets harder when the expectations go up. “Invincible” season 3 balances a ton of different storylines for a wide range of characters, all the while bringing to bear some of the most stunning animation in the whole series. What makes the finale so impactful, though, is that it collapses that massive story to focus squarely on Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun) himself, where he is at this stage of his journey, and what he’s been dealing with for the last two seasons since his father, Omni-Man (J. K. Simmon), nearly killed him and left Earth.

Season 3 gets the best of both worlds by delivering an enormous climax in episode 7, which covers the “Invincible War” story arc in which Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown) attacks Earth with an army of evil multiverse Invincibles. Then, episode 8 pares things back to what’s mostly a simple one-on-one duel between the real Invincible and Conquest, with some clutch assists from Oliver (Christian Convery) and Atom Eve (Gillian Jacobs).

In addition to featuring some of the show’s best action sequences ever, the season 3 finale is also deeply resonant, drawing on the season’s larger themes and emotional arcs. It forces Mark to fully confront his own capacity for violence — something he struggled with throughout season 3 — even as he comes to recognize his inability to be the hero he needs to be on his own. Conquest, meanwhile, is basically a walking dark night of the soul scene, and his confrontation with Mark brings out the best in the show.

One of the big questions of “Invincible” season 3 is whether or not it’s possible for Omni-Man to ever be forgiven for all the death he caused on Earth. It’s clear from his scenes with Allen the Alien (Seth Rogen) this season that he regrets his actions and feels deep shame, but that’s not really enough when you’ve murdered thousands of people.

In the “Invincible” season 3 finale, Conquest shows just how far the Viltrumite philosophy of supreme power trumping all can push a person. He’s a force of pure destruction, and at the end of the episode, he even confesses his own internal conflict (of sorts). “I am so lonely,” he whispers in Mark’s ear, pinning his broken body to the ground. “No one wants to be my friend, they think I am unstable.” It almost feels like remorse, until you realize that he’s still completely bought-in on being the monster he’s become. “I am a victim of my own success,” he adds in one of the show’s true brain-breaking moments.

It’s this blatant thirst for blood, this total absence of respect for life, that Mark is positioned against in his war against the Vitrum Empire. Were Conquest not so uncompromisingly brutal, he might not have been able to draw the distinction between the kind of violence perpetrated by evil tyrants and the kind Mark wields to stop them. It’s rare that a show nails every bit of character work, action, style, and writing at the same climactic moment, but this is that elusive exception. It’s no wonder that the fans have reacted so strongly on IMDb.

The first three seasons of “Invincible” are now streaming on Prime Video.