Invincible Season 2 Premiere: Robert Kirkman Breaks Down the Explosive Ending

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Invincible Season 2 Episode 1. Read at your own risk!]

Invincible Season 2's premiere ended with a literal bang. In the first episode, we met Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown), a man with the coveted ability to open portals to other dimensions. He has gathered alternate versions of himself in one place for one simple goal: To make the world a better place. Angstrom enlisted the help of the Mauler Twins to operate a machine that would give him access to all of the other Angstroms' minds, but this seemingly honorable mission is interrupted by Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun). 

As the Mauler Twins beat up Mark before Angstrom's eyes, he decides to put an end to the violence. "I won't build my utopia with blood," Angstrom exclaims before wrenching off his helmet. This led to the machine's explosion, which burned almost everyone in its proximity to crisp. Mark and Mauler survived, but they weren't the only ones. At the end of the episode, an Angstrom that looked more like a brain than a human emerged from the wreckage.

"It's a new version of [Angstrom] that survives the blast," Robert Kirkman, who created the show and wrote the comic book series that it adapts, told TV Guide. "He doesn't really know which one he is." This Angstrom now has the memories of the different Angstroms who were sitting on the machine. "They're all mixed in to where he doesn't know, this one's me and this is the memory from this other guy," Kirkman explained. "So that's why he's a little bit off-kilter."

With this sequence, Invincible Season 2 Episode 1 sets up Angstrom's villain origin story. "Through an error where he was trying to save Mark's life he's been cursed with these horrible, horrible memories," Kirkman said. But the writer emphasized that he's a character with whom viewers are invited to empathize. "Especially with Sterling's performance, there's a sympathy for him," Kirkman said. "Because he's kind of a victim of his own ambitions where he wanted to do something for the betterment of all societies, he wanted to help people across the multiverse."

The Invincible creator also shared about how the opening act fits into Mark's character development in Season 2. "We're trying to use Angstrom Levy and his relationship with Mark — and their impending rematch — to dovetail into this worry [Mark] has of, am I going to follow my father's footsteps?" Kirkman said. "We're using the multiverse in our story to follow the emotional journey of these characters and get a glimpse of what could have been." 

Invincible Season 2 premiered Nov. 3 on Prime Video, with new episodes releasing every Friday.