Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun) and Invincible are the same in flesh, but not always in action. After the world found out how much of a genocidal maniac his father Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons) is, the young superhero had to deal with civilians being afraid of him when he was trying to help, Cecil Stedman (Walton Goggins) being wary of Invincible fighting for the Global Defense Agency (GDA), and his own self-doubt over whether he might one day become his father. After the first three episodes of Invincible season 3, it’s clear that those closest to the titular hero might need contingency plans in the event he goes rogue. And that includes the woman he loves.
The show has previously hinted at Mark’s struggles with doing what’s right without doing what’s lethal. Let’s not forget he ended season 2 in a more brutal way than his father ended Season 1, pummeling multidimensional terrorist Angstrom Levy (Sterling K. Brown) to his death because he threatened to hurt Mark’s family. He rationalizes the murder even while criticizing Cecil in the Season 3 premiere for allowing Darkwing (Lennie James) and D.A. Sinclair (Ezra Miller) to work for the GDA after killing people themselves, demonstrating the kind of moral double standard that could sprout into bloody vigilante justice.
Let’s also not forget that Levy showed us an alternate reality future in which Invincible teams up with his father to enslave Earth, a future that isn’t totally ruled out as one that may come to pass. Add in the fact his younger brother Oliver channelled his father’s genetic predisposition for duty-bound murder when he slaughtered the Mauler Twins in Season 3's third episode, and it’s no wonder Cecil implanted a device in Mark’s brain to subdue him at a moment’s notice and has an army of robots ready to take him down.
All that taken into consideration, Earth’s best chance at stopping an evil Invincible could be the overpowered Atom Eve, who Mark falls in love with in Season 3, and who also fights against him in his tyrannical alternate-reality future. Invincible may be able to destroy almost anything he comes in contact with, but Gillian Jacobs, who voices Atom Eve, says her character is more powerful than what we see in the show.
“My character and her powers are so immense that [Invincible series creator] Robert [Kirkman] says they struggle to find ways to not make her just instantly win,” Jacobs told Kotaku. “So, in one version of it, I think she could take down anyone, but they always come up with really interesting things that happen in fights so that can’t happen.”
Nerfing Atom Eve’s powers makes total sense. Eve can materialize anything she thinks of. She created a treehouse from thin air in minutes, rearranges someone’s body on a molecular level, and creates a force field against intergalactic weapons she’s never seen before. The writers do give her limitations for fixing large-scale calamities and healing people by restructuring their molecules, but those are built into the limits of her imagination. She couldn’t build structurally sound homes for the homeless because she didn’t have that architectural expertise in her mind, something she opted to rectify. If she’s willing to take college architecture courses to learn how to build, she could also go to medical school and become truly unstoppable, learning how to shut down someone’s vital organs or rearranging their brain chemistry to make them go insane. But perhaps, when it comes to reaching Mark, there’s a more straightforward approach.
“She might be able to just get [Invincible] through talking. Maybe she could destroy his mind from the inside,” Jacobs says.
That is a hell of a contingency plan for a superhero who, we’ve already seen, finds certain sonic frequencies nothing short of debilitating. As of now, she has nothing to worry about with Mark/Invincible other than scheduling dates and taking down bad guys together. But the time could come when she needs to be more than invincible.