Debbie Grayson Is the Best Part of Invincible Season 2

Late in the second-season premiere of the animated superhero series Invincible, a widow unburdens herself about the husband she lost. "Nolan killed so many people," she tells Olga (Grey Griffin), whose husband was one of those very people. "He almost killed Mark. Said I didn't matter — that I was a pet. Twenty years. Twenty years and I was a goddamn f---ing pet!"

Never mind that Debbie Grayson's (Sandra Oh) husband Nolan (J. K. Simmons), aka Omni-Man, didn't actually die, though that's the story most people believe. The reality is, in most ways, much worse: Nolan originally came to Earth with the primary goal of preparing it for colonization by the Viltrum Empire. He spent 20 years not only posing as Earth's greatest protector, but posing as a loving husband and father. To be sure, Nolan does love his son, Mark (Steven Yeun), deep down; despite himself, he developed a real emotional connection to the boy, and that's what kept him from killing Mark in the Season 1 finale. But Debbie? She's just a pet, a useless mortal who will only live for a tiny fraction of Nolan and Mark's millennia-long lifespans.

How can you possibly hope to find peace when you know that your husband of 20 years not only wiped out thousands of people and almost murdered your son, but considered you pathetically weak and fundamentally meaningless this entire time? That's a big part of Debbie's story in Season 2, the first half of which dropped weekly on Amazon Prime Video this month. (The second half comes next year.) It's a tough, nearly impossible question to answer, and the show has excelled by dwelling on just how traumatizing the experience would be. It makes for the season's most grounded, emotional story.

Debbie has long been my favorite character in Invincible, and Sandra Oh's voice performance my favorite in a star-studded ensemble. The first episode of the show establishes her close relationship with her son, immediately sketching out a compelling portrait of their shifting family dynamics now that Mark is gaining superpowers. Mark training with his father threatens to put Debbie on the outside, but Mark is quick to affirm her: "I love my boring, powerless, everyday, run-of-the-mill mom." "And I love my asshole son," she fires back, Oh's voice conveying affection and an easy familiarity.

From the beginning, it's clear that Debbie will play just as crucial a role in Mark's superhero education as his superpowered father, despite lacking powers herself. In Episode 5, while Nolan suggests Mark disregard the plight of likable crime lord Titan (Mahershala Ali), Debbie says, "Helping someone is never beneath you." In the argument that follows, she points out to her husband that she was the one who taught him about human society and values. "I showed you how to be a hero," she says, and the same is true of her and Mark.

But what also makes Debbie so great is that she's more than just the supportive mom and wife. In Season 1, her mission to learn the truth about Nolan plays out independently of Mark, with Debbie doing her own detective work before confronting Nolan directly about killing the previous Guardians of the Globe ("F--- you, Nolan"). At almost every point, the show checks in with Debbie's perspective, which always brings the bombastic sci-fi storytelling back down to earth. We see her through Mark's point of view, but we also see Mark through hers.

It shouldn't feel unusual for a show like this one to pay special attention to the non-supe mom character, especially with so much of the plot focused elsewhere. But it does. From early on, Debbie feels like the true heart of Invincible, a pattern that continues apace in Season 2. That's particularly impressive at a time when her role could've easily been sidelined, between Mark moving out of the house for college and the general scattered nature of the ensemble in this first batch of episodes.

With Nolan off-planet and absent from the narrative early on, Season 2 does suffer a bit from a lack of strong focus (though I can't agree with those who call it "slow"). There's a lot being set up throughout these four episodes, including a number of subplots related to the Guardians of the Globe: a wholesome romance between Robot (Jason Mantzoukas) and Monster Girl (Griffin); a love triangle of sorts with Rex Splode (Ross Marquand), Dupli-Kate (Malese Jow), and new team leader the Immortal (Marquand); and the infiltration of secret Martian superhero the Shapesmith (Ben Schwartz). That's not even mentioning Atom Eve's (Gillian Jacobs) solitary quest to use her powers for good, or the ongoing scheming of the Mauler Twins (Kevin Michael Richardson), or Mark's biggest new threat: interdimensional traveler Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown), a major villain who hasn't popped up much since the premiere.

All of this stuff feels promising, but it hasn't built to a climax or intertwined significantly with the Graysons' drama yet. Even Mark's story, while strong and rooted in complex psychology, drifts around a bit, only really locking into place during his reunion with Nolan in the mid-season finale. Debbie's story, though, is all killer, no filler — a refreshingly pure character-driven arc based around the struggle to reconcile the man she loved for 20 years with the abusive monster she sees now.

Part of this story's strength comes from the show's continued willingness to show Debbie as an imperfect person, not some paragon of supportiveness and healthy processing. She may put on a brave face for Mark, but she's clearly coming undone: drinking too much, refusing help (at first), and taking out her barely repressed anger on clients at work. (To be fair, they sometimes deserve it.) She occasionally says the wrong thing, like when her efforts to convince Mark that he's not like his father only confirm to him that there's a comparison to be made. One of the most heartbreaking moments of this season is seeing Mark's hurt expression when he tries to comfort a sobbing Debbie and she holds him at arm's length, perhaps momentarily triggered by his resemblance to Nolan.

Like anyone, regardless of age, Debbie needs taking care of sometimes — which makes it so moving when Mark volunteers to make her dinner during the premiere, recognizing that she's as messed up by what happened as he is. While Mark is busy assisting the Global Defense Agency and juggling college life with saving alien civilizations, Debbie is dealing with her own obstacles to progress. Instead of villains of the week like Doc Seismic, her conflicts are uniformly psychological and interpersonal — joining a spouses-of-superheroes support group, for example, only to be coldly admonished by a man whose wife was killed by Omni-Man. "I didn't know who he was," she insists to Theo (Daveed Diggs) mid-sob — but he has nothing to say to her except "You should have," seemingly confirming all of Debbie's most negative beliefs about herself.

It's Nolan's tailor and friend Art (Mark Hamill) who offers Debbie the change of perspective she needs in the last episode, summing up Debbie's appeal as a character: "I always thought you were the strong one, to handle your life the way you did. Nolan has superpowers. He's indestructible. That's not strength; that's having it easy… You're the real reason we're all still alive and not slaves, or worse. Nolan was always off fighting something, and you made things work without him. Now it's just official: You don't need the bum. You never did."

By the end of these four episodes, Debbie has made some real progress, rejecting Cecil's (Walton Goggins) monetary aid and throwing out Nolan's sci-fi novels to start anew. But it's still a complicated, tenuous sort of peace: Debbie isn't aware that Nolan has already started a new family on another planet, and that her son has been tasked with taking up the mantle to prepare Earth for colonization. There's a promise of much more pain on the horizon — and even setting aside alien invasions and half-insectoid stepsons, she'll be dealing with these traumas for the rest of her life.

When I re-watched the Season 1 finale for this piece, I was struck again by the moment when Nolan changes his mind about killing the son he's already beaten to a pulp. It's his love for Mark that stops him from striking the final blow, of course, but it's Debbie who taught him how to love in the first place — as shown in a devastating flashback to Mark's baseball game. We see Debbie reminding Nolan that this is what having children is all about: taking joy from their joy, letting it remind you that life can be special and meaningful despite all the stress and pain we accumulate throughout adulthood. "This is humanity," Debbie says, complicating Nolan's view of humans as stupid, fragile time-wasters.

That's what Debbie (and Oh) does for the show, more than just offering endless support to the godlike immortals with whom she shared a home. She's a symbol and source of humanity, a lovable and realistic character whose emotional directness makes her personal journey toward inner peace feel as high-stakes as any alien invasion. Amid the wide-ranging galactic drama and regular bursts of nauseating violence, Debbie keeps Invincible rooted in the stories of the people left behind: their losses, their delusions, but most importantly, their capacity for love. She's the best part of Season 2, but she might also be the key to the whole series.

The first four episodes of Invincible Season 2 are now streaming on Prime Video. Season 2 returns in 2024.