The fate of the world is at stake in the premiere of Invincible season 4 — so Mark Grayson kills an innocent man. The reasons why are complicated (and spoilery), but with no other options available, the show’s teenage superhero protagonist makes a difficult choice that haunts him for the rest of the season. In the episodes that follow, Earth’s other superheroes debate whether Mark/Invincible (Steven Yeun) did the right thing. They all agree murder is bad, but at a certain point, you have to put down the worst threats for good. Otherwise, they’ll keep coming back… right?

In a weird way, this pragmatic line of thinking also explains the biggest problem with Invincible right now. Robert Kirkman’s animated Prime Video series quickly established itself as an ultra-violent riff on the superhero genre that didn’t pull any punches. The mind-blowing season 1 reveal that the Superman-inspired hero Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons) was actually a spy sent by fascist aliens to prepare Earth for invasion set the tone for an epic saga starring his half-human son, Mark. But in the years since, each new season has seemed more interested in expanding the world of Invincible than in telling the story that captivated audiences in the first place. And while some of those stories have been great (especially anything involving the Gillian Jacobs-voiced superhero Atom Eve), the result is a series that........

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