Invincible Season 3 Episode 6 just did the one thing no other superhero franchise would dare do

Invincible Season 3 Episode 6 kills a baby. Onscreen. And you see the charred remains. 

I know that normally, when you click on an article about the latest episode of your favorite superhero TV show, the standard practice is to make you read on a bit (we call it teasing the click), but that somehow doesn’t feel right for a piece like this.

So yeah. F**k. Invincible kills a baby. Well, Invincible, aka Mark Grayson, doesn’t. The poor kid meets his end at the hands of his super-powered father, Powerplex, during a staged kidnapping. Basically, in the ensuing fracas between Mark and Powerplex, the villain releases so much deadly electricity that he essentially flash-fries his wife and child.

It might be the most harrowing thing I think I’ve ever seen in a superhero movie or show… it’s just horrible. It’s not that it’s violent – their deaths are sort of instantaneous – and Invincible is a show that’s never exactly shied away from brutal bloodletting; it’s more the unflinching banality of their deaths and the sheer pointlessness of it all. 

Wait… what?

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Powerplex wanted revenge on Mark for the loss of his sister and niece, and in his desperation to get what he saw as justice, he lost even more in the very place where his other family members died. He could have walked away, but he didn’t. He chose this for them.

Anyway, musing on the absurdity of revenge aside, it got me thinking about violence in other superhero franchises. Would we ever see anything like this in a Marvel movie or a DCU movie?

Honestly, I don’t think we would. Now, part of that is because Invincible is a cartoon, so you can get away with a level of violence and gore that live-action simply can’t without earning an NC-17 rating, and we know that Disney and Warners love a PG-13 movie so they can sell the most possible tickets.

Yet, beyond boring business reasons, I think there’s another reason why other superhero series just wouldn’t go to as dark a place as Invincible, and that’s because this is a bit of a Rubicon moment for the show.

It probably goes without saying but…

Killing a baby is a big deal; it’s different from murdering thousands in a superheroic brawl – as the old adage goes, a million deaths is a statistic, but one is a tragedy – and horrifying on a primal level. We’re genetically predisposed to protect and nurture kids, hard-wired by millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of cultural conditioning to see their deaths as an unimaginable horror.

There’s no going back now for Invincible. It will, for right or wrong, be known as the cartoon that killed a baby, and I don’t know if that’s an albatross around the show’s neck – a desperate attempt to capture the audience’s attention with sheer shock value – or a strange medal of honor, a reminder that this show is willing to go further and farther than any of its contemporaries to make a point about the realities of superheroics.

Marvel’s Daredevil might break bones, and Peacemaker may blow off his enemy’s heads, but there’s a difference isn’t there between that cartoony mayhem and this. I don’t even think a show like The Boys, which revels in irreverent, shocking violence, would do something like this. 

Why? Well, because Invincible Season 3, unlike other shows that have paid lip service to these ideas, seems really interested in exploring the realities of a world where superheroes exist. It has so much death and destruction because it wants to show how dangerous it would be to live in a world like this and remind us that while our heroes might be… invincible (cue the fanfare), the people they protect aren’t. 

Ultimately, a moment like this was always coming for Invincible. Fans have wondered for years if some of the comic’s darker elements would be adapted for the small screen, and this feels like the show answering those questions with a resounding yes.

There’s no walking back now; things are only going to get darker, and you’re either in for the ride or you’re not. And if you’re not, well – there’s always Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.

Loving Invincible? Then check out our list of the best supehero movies. We’ve also got a list of all the new shows heading to streaming this month if you’re looking for something new to watch or a guide to the best TV shows ever made if you fancy watching something great.