Spoilers follow for Invincible Season 4, Episode 7, “Don’t Do Anything Rash,” which is available on Prime Video now.
The tragedy of Thragg takes center stage in Invincible’s latest episode, its strongest one to date. The last time the show balanced its key elements so harmoniously — its gore, its scale, its emotional stakes — was arguably the Season 1 finale, a defining entry that took the series from good to great. “Don’t Do Anything Rash” launches the show into the stratosphere of stellar contemporary television. And while it’s an outlier in this regard, it’s also entirely worth the drudgery of any and all prior middling entries, tackling the story from an unexpected point-of-view that unveils powerful emotional dimensions.
The Viltrumite War kicked off in earnest last week, with a commendable episode whose climax promised further escalations in the form of the Coalition taking the fight to the retreating villains. However, before we resume the fireworks, the show takes us back several centuries to the rule of Emperor Argall, and the ascension of his right-hand regent — the young, ambitious Thragg — to the Viltrumite throne. Thaedus, still a Viltrum envoy, reads the tea leaves of brewing revolts and opposes Argall’s cruelty in a brief exchange that finally lays out the true colonial nature of Viltrum, via its use of enslaved aliens to mine precious resources. The planet’s foregrounding of authoritarian might makes perfect sense in this context, as a means to keep the wheels of its empire turning. However, these material origins are obscured by Thragg once Thaedus assassinates Argall from the shadows, forcing a changing of the guard.
Once Thragg assumes the throne, he calls for a purging of all weakness and potential betrayal, quickly seeding suspicion among Viltrum’s ranks until the planet engulfs itself in bloodshed. However, despite his nefarious ploy to further harden the planet’s hearts, he is also, himself, deeply hurt by Argall’s death. Dialogue later in the episode reveals that Thragg was raised from birth to be the strongest Viltrumite, and whatever the ulterior motives behind his training, what appears to have stuck most with him is the idea that might is right — a pure expression of fascist instinct, albeit one that still remains rooted in its leader’s emotional impulses. These flashbacks last only a dozen minutes, but it’s hard not to read into them the idea that Thragg loved Argall like a father figure, and his death has left him broken beyond repair.
