Omni-Man is still ready to fight in “Invincible” season 2 finale preview

"This guy isn't just this bloodthirsty lunatic," creator Robert Kirkman tells EW.

Even after committing one of the best heel turns in pop culture history, Omni-Man’s story isn’t over yet. At the end of Invincible season 1, the eponymous hero’s alien father (voiced by J.K. Simmons) revealed that he was never a benevolent Superman so much as an advance agent of an intergalactic empire. Viewers watched him brutally murder his former friends in the Guardians of the Globe before beating his own son Invincible (Steven Yeun) within an inch of death.

But now, as season 2 of Invincible nears its end, Omni-Man is showing a different side. He’s certainly still violent, but at least he’s taking his rage out on his armored jailers rather than the population of Earth. In the exclusive clip above, you can see Omni-Man (or Nolan Grayson, as he was known in his secret identity back on Earth) fight back from his prison cell.

“They didn’t tell you who I was, did they?” he says to an unlucky prison guard, before crushing his face.

In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Invincible mastermind Robert Kirkman (who co-created the original comic series with artists Cory Walker and Ryan Ottley and now oversees the animated adaptation) says that he’s not sure Omni-Man’s ongoing story should be considered a “redemption arc.” For one thing, the violence of Omni-Man’s rampage against Invincible and the human race was actually even more gruesome in the show than it was in the comic. But even so, the story is working to present a more complicated view of its original villain.

“As viewers get to the end of season 2, they should be seeing different angles of Omni-Man, different traits in his personality that they may not have necessarily recognized in the first season,” Kirkman tells EW. “This guy isn't just this bloodthirsty lunatic, and I hope that by the end of the season, you may get the sense that a lot of what you were seeing in the season 1 finale might've been him trying to overcompensate for the reluctance he was feeling about doing those things. He was pushing himself to go further to try and convince himself that he was still the Viltrumite he thought he should have been.”

Omni-Man’s villainous turn at the end of season 1 was Invincible viewers’ first taste of the Viltrumite Empire, a race of superpowered beings (roughly analogous to the Kryptonians from Superman or the Saiyans from Dragon Ball Z, if they had survived destruction) that wants to conquer the whole universe. Season 2 has introduced more Viltrumite characters, like Anissa (Shantel VanSanten), who have none of Omni-Man’s reluctance or family feelings, and are thus even scarier.

“As we get a clearer picture of who the Viltrumites are and what they're actually about, we'll understand infinitely more about Nolan,” Kirkman says.

A recurring theme in Invincible season 2 has been the difficulty of normal humans existing alongside Viltrumites. Invincible had been working on building a healthy relationship with his human girlfriend Amber (Zazie Beetz), but that came to an end after Anissa made clear how easy it would be for her to kill Amber at a moment’s notice.

Meanwhile, Debbie Grayson (Sandra Oh) has been reeling from her husband’s betrayal, but also found new purpose this season when Omni-Man’s new infant son Oliver entered the picture.

“The series as a whole exists in two worlds, and the core aspect of the story is watching Mark bounce back and forth between the two different worlds,” Kirkman says. “More than anything, we're just trying to show how dangerous that could be. That elevates who Debbie is as a person, that she's been able to straddle both worlds for so long, even though we are finding her at a real low point in season 2 because of everything she's experienced. But the prospect of having to raise another potentially superpowered kid is something that gives her a spark, something to be happy about again. It’s almost like being adjacent to that world is something that's really important to her, whether she necessarily realizes it or not. But yeah, I think that we are really trying to show the realism of just how absolutely dangerous it would be to interact with these people.”

Invincible streams on Amazon Prime Video. The season 2 finale premieres this Thursday.

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Related content:

• Robert Kirkman says Invincible season 2 'is going to feel much bigger than season 1'

• Invincible recasts Ezra Miller's role in wake of actor's controversies

• Invincible unveils star-studded season 2 teaser and announces a standalone origin story episode

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.