Invincible: Atom Eve Recap: The Atom Family

Just in time for the most atomic-pink weekend in entertainment history, Prime Video released a surprise special episode of Invincible for San Diego Comic-Con, revealing the origin of the show’s pink-clad matter manipulator, Atom Eve. In typical Invincible fashion, there is deep familial tragedy at the core of Samantha Eve Wilkins’s character, building on the show’s core theme of toxic parental expectations disintegrating the family unit — quite literally in the case of Samantha’s siblings.

Written by Invincible co-creator and co-showrunner Robert Kirkman and Helen Leigh, a writer on Kirkman’s Outcast series for Cinemax, Invincible: Atom Eve is a very faithful adaptation of Atom Eve’s comic-book origin, elevated by the incredible action storytelling of the show’s animation team. Samantha isn’t the birth daughter of Adam and Betsy Wilkins, but a genetically engineered creation of the U.S. government, one of a small batch of superpowered children grown in a homeless woman’s womb. Dr. Elias Brandyworth (Stephen Root) was the scientist responsible, but he had a crisis of conscience and rescued the woman before she could give birth to Samantha.

The episode follows Samantha from early childhood to adolescence, a time that is largely defined by the alienation she feels due to her emerging superpowers. Her ability to see the atomic structure of the world makes her zone out from the people around her, but eventually her parents learn that their daughter’s behavior signals great genius and preternatural understanding of chemical elements. They send her to a special school, and Samantha makes a friend across the street, but the upswing is reversed when she realizes what she can really do.

Samantha’s father’s antagonism toward his daughter doesn’t get enough development, and understanding why he is so threatened by Samantha’s “weirdness” would give the domestic plot a stronger emotional foundation. The Grayson family dynamic is very well defined — we get a cute flashback of them at the end of the episode — but the Wilkins dynamic is more basic. This could be an intentional way of emotionally distancing the audience from the parents, like Samantha, but it makes those relationships less interesting.

The story is at its best when it’s in discovery mode, like the psychedelic moment when Samantha first uses her powers to change the molecular composition of an atom, turning her textbook to glass. The visuals zoom in at a microscopic level to show her pulling the electrons from one molecule to another, a tiny change that has a huge impact. It’s a scene that shows the viewer the world as Samantha sees it, providing valuable context for understanding how her powers actually work.

The episode really takes off once Samantha starts exploring the superhero lifestyle, starting with a late-night soar through the city. She starts off by floating on a pink disc, but gradually has more fun with her powers, creating a huge slide and little floating platforms before emitting the triangular bursts of energy that enable her to fly and eventually become her preferred mode of transportation. There’s a real thrill in this sequence, boosted by the propulsive needle drop of Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon,” and Samantha’s intuitive use of her powers makes it feels like she’s coming into her own for the first time, tying the action to her identity.

Atom Eve also takes to the violence of superheroing very quickly, immediately becoming a world-class fighter when she encounters her first supervillain, Killcannon. While it’s cool that Atom Eve starts kicking ass right away, this could have been an opportunity to show how green she still is, which would elevate the stakes when she heads into a much bigger battle. But as she says, she is literally made to be a superhero, so maybe every aspect of being a superhero will be totally instinctual.

Invincible really highlights why animation is such a better avenue for superhero action than live action, and this episode gives us two flavors of superhero fight: It opens with a bright, PG brawl between the Guardians of the Globe and a gang of lizard-themed villains, full of quips and devoid of the blood and viscera expected by viewers of the show. Those come later, when Samantha faces off against her mutated siblings, led by Phase Two (Jacob Tremblay). It’s a phenomenal action sequence that really takes advantage of body horror, like when one of the siblings is smeared against the hood of a car and then reassembles its slimy parts.

The siblings owe a lot to Akira’s Tetsuo in the ways they can manipulate their bodies, flinging their arms like tentacles and absorbing nearby wreckage in their flesh to create weapons. It looks awesome, and it forces Atom Eve to up her game significantly if she wants to survive. There are some spectacular displays of her power — turning a swinging tire into a parachute, creating two launchable buzzsaw gauntlets, making a chunk of the highway disappear, shielding herself in neon-pink armor — and the fight gets even more intense as the combatants end up in moving traffic. The storyboarding here is appropriately chaotic as Atom Eve deals with more and more threats, but each action beat is depicted with dynamic clarity, making the flow of the fight especially smooth and satisfying.

The show continues to have a stellar voice cast with this episode welcoming Stephen Root, who imbues Brandyworth with the regretful affection he does so well, and the late, great Lance Reddick as Erickson, the villainous government suit hunting down Samantha. Tremblay does double duty as both Phase Two and the Lizard Prince, and as the former, the extreme angst in his voice reinforces Phase Two’s resentment and jealousy toward his sister, who has all the power without the fatal deformities.

In her first TV voice-acting credit, Jazlyn Ione has some challenging material to perform as 12-year-old Samantha. She captures the exhilaration of being a young superhero as well as the profound sadness and anger Samantha feels as she learns more about her past and is pushed to embrace the full extent of her power. Ione taps into the kind of rage that Steven Yuen channeled at the end of Invincible’s first season when Atom Eve breaks past her subconscious barrier and gains control over living matter, wiping the memories of Erickson and his scientist. Ione sells it well enough to change how viewers will perceive Atom Eve moving forward. The Viltrumites might be strong, but Atom Eve has god-level power.

The most exciting thing about this episode is that it sets a precedent for future episodes dedicated to fleshing out the Invincible supporting cast, and Robert Kirkman wants to do more. Battle Beast and Monster Girl are his top candidates for future specials, and it would be great to see those take some bigger creative risks, which I think is very possible given those characters’ roots in cosmic sci-fi and monster horror genres. The tone of Invincible: Atom Eve is very similar to the main series, but these standalone episodes are the perfect place to shift the perspective and tell different kinds of stories in this universe.

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