Invincible Season 3 Episode 2 recap: Cecil finally pushes Mark too far

Invincible Season 3 Episode 2 features two moments fans have been waiting for: Mark vowing to kill Cecil if he comes anywhere near his family again, and Mark and Eve finally getting together.

The first part was inevitable after Episode 1. Mark seemed to be getting along great with Cecil; he was training hard, and Cecil was pushing him to be the fastest, strongest, and best superhero on Earth. They finally had a good rhythm together.

It all went wrong by the end of the episode. Cecil sent in Dark Wing II and a huge squad of D.A. Sinclair’s ReAnimen to help Invincible, Eve, and the rest of the Guardians fight Doc Seismic. They won, but Mark couldn’t condone working alongside murderers.

In the closing scene, Cecil took Mark into the White Room. “It’s for my protection… from you, Mark,” he said. Before we get back to that, Season 3 Episode 2 digs into Cecil’s origin story – and it is a doozy.

Invincible Season 3 Episode 2 tells Cecil’s story

The episode opens with Cecil in the field, years before his appointment as head of the GDA. He’s younger, more agile – and, notably, he doesn’t have any scars.

He walks into a shop and pulls a gun on the clerk. She begs him to leave, but he isn’t interested in her. He walks through to the stock room… and there’s nothing there. He lets his team know that the “tip was a bust,” before discovering two large canisters of green gas.

He’s confronted by two villains: Knuckle Buster and Force Fist, who serve the Order of the Freeing Fist. They want to free the gas into the streets, killing thousands. “The survivors will inherit a new world and learn that life is a gift not to be wasted,” she tells Cecil as she batters him.

He can’t stop them, even after backup arrives. They still execute their plan (the gas basically turns them inside out like the Simpsons in that Treehouse of Horror episode), forcing Cecil to sacrifice himself. He survives with a bit of help from the GDA, but he keeps one piece of his original skin. “It’s a reminder that I messed up and to never let it happen again,” he says.

Later, Cecil tries to get Director Radcliffe to the saferoom after the Lizard League attacks the Pentagon. Suddenly, Knuckle Buster and Force Fist arrive to help them. “They were too good to waste, so I fixed them,” he tells Cecil.

“They should be in prison or dead,” he says, before expressing his gratitude… by shooting them in the head.

Cecil is put behind bars for murder, incarcerated with some of the scariest and most vicious villains in the world. He makes it work for him: years later, his cellmate calls him “boss” and there’s no violence in the prison. This is when Radcliffe makes an appearance, explaining that he’s stepping down as director and wants Cecil to replace him. “I don’t waste talent, I fix it. This place was your rehabilitation,” he says.

“You can be the good guy or the guy who saves the world. You can’t be both.”

Mark vs Cecil

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We cut back to Mark and Cecil in the White Room. Cecil may sound calm, but he admits: “You’re scaring the sh*t out of me right now.”

In anger, Mark lays waste to all of the ReAnimen around him. “Is that all you got?” he asks. “Why did you have to ask that, kid?” Cecil replies, before turning the lights on – and there are hundreds of ReAnimen.

Mark attacks Cecil, but he pushes a button before he can reach him, sending an agonizing signal to his brain (recreated from the lobster in Atlantis). It’s blaring through a secret earpiece that Mark will never be able to remove, installed in case of emergencies after Omni-Man’s betrayal. “Be reasonable, go home,” Cecil tells him, but Mark says they’re “so far past reasonable” and tries to fly away.

Cecil follows him by teleportation, eventually arriving at the Guardians’ base. He crashes through the roof, begging Rudy to remove the earpiece. He also tells them about Cecil enlisting the help of Dark Wing II and other murderers. Mark refuses to leave, so Cecil keeps pushing his big red button.

The Guardians defend Mark and start fighting the ReAnimen. Rex blasts Cecil’s remote out of his hand – inadvertently causing Mark more pain, as it had a ‘dead man switch’ (meaning it can’t be turned off anymore). Mark screams in pain until Robot can turn it off – and he goes crazy, slicing ReAnimen in half while turning their whole bodies into mush in an instant.

“You arrogant little asshole. Look at this goddamn mess. Everywhere you go, destruction follows… because of your ego. You’re a hypocrite waltzing off to help your mass-murdering dad, but god forbid everyone else screws up and then tries to make good. Don’t you ever, ever threaten me again,” Cecil warns.

Just as he’s about to scold the rest of the team, Mark pins him against the wall by his neck. “I will never work for you again. We are done, and if you ever come near my family again, I will kill you,” he says. Mark asks Rudy to remove the earpiece from his head as the others look upon the carnage in his wake.

It’s not the right time for Mark and Eve

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Mark tells Debbie and Eve what happened and how he promised to kill Cecil if he approached them again. Oliver asks why he didn’t just kill him, and Mark explains, “We don’t kill. I had to make sure he took me seriously. That’s all.”

Oliver is eager to help, but Mark tells him: “Don’t be in a rush, trust me.”

Outside with Eve, Mark starts to see Cecil’s point of view: Mark could be a grave threat, so he took – what he believed to be – a necessary precaution. Before they can dig into the knottiness of that, the conversation pivots to what happened the other night between them.

Eve explains why it upset her so much: somewhere in the future, a version of her is still miserable about Mark. She thinks that’s humiliating. “A high school crush isn’t enough,” she tells him, but he says it’s more than that. She promises to always have his back, but that’s all she can do right now.

The Guardians break up

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As they mop up blood, the Guardians start arguing about Cecil. Some of them don’t like being treated as weapons (“useful, until we’re not”), while others think Mark needed to find out what happened “when you don’t think things through.”

“All he had to do is follow orders, like we do,” Dupli-Kate says, but Rae says Cecil will never care about any of them. The Immortal doesn’t want to hear it; after all, Mark just proved why Cecil had to put that thing in his head. “It’s a privilege and an honor to work here,” he says.

Rex quits with Rae, Amanda, Rudy, and Bulletproof, leaving the Immortal, Dupli-Kate, Samson, and Shapesmith. “They’ll be back,” Immortal says, but Samson isn’t so sure. Before they leave, Rudy tells Samson that he wants to protect himself; if he isn’t allied with Invincible, he could put himself in danger. “You always were a cold fish, man – but I’ll miss you,” Samson says with a smile.

Mark tells Rick and William about Sinclair and the ReAnimen (remember, he was the first ReAniman before Mark saved his life). “I thought you deserved to know,” Mark says, before wondering if he should have killed Sinclair. “If you killed him, you’d be just like him… the world doesn’t need more people like that, it needs more people like Invincible,” Rick tells him.

Debbie goes out for a meal with Paul, her colleague who asked her on a date in Season 2. She tiptoes around the truth behind Mark and Oliver; she says they’re special needs but “not in the conventional sense.” We also get a brief scene with Eve starting college.

Dark Wing II joins the Guardians of the Globe

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Back at Guardians HQ, Cecil asks the remaining members if they’ll allow Dark Wing II to join them. Thankfully, the Immortal agrees.

Donald admits he’s a bit concerned about Dark Wing becoming a Guardian again. “People change, Donald. Bad guys reform, good guys forget what they’re fighting for. It’s just how it works,” he says, before we get a flashback of Cecil’s first day as the director of the GDA.

Everyone seems too afraid to speak to him, murmuring behind his back – apart from Donald, who shakes his hand straight away.

This was a momentous day for another reason: it was the day Omni-Man arrived on Earth. Cecil breaks protocol by meeting him. He isn’t hostile: he introduces himself and welcomes his help with protecting the planet. Secretly, he tells Donald and his team that he suspects Nolan is hiding something.

Back in the present day, Cecil assures Donald that everything will be okay with Dark Wing, before borrowing a line from his old boss. “We can be the good guys, or we can be the guys who save the world… we can’t be both,” he says.

Now is the right time for Mark and Eve

In Episode 2’s post-credits scene, Eve finds Mark waiting for him on the bridge. He tells her that he wants more from their relationship. “When Cecil attacked me, I thought I was going to die. When I was lying on the ground with that sound drilling into my head, the only thing I could think about was you,” he says.

“About how if I died, I’d never get to see you again. That’s how I know, Eve, that what I feel for you isn’t some stupid crush. It’s real. It’s always been real.”

Eve tells him he needs to be sure… and then, she agrees to give it a try. Better than that, they kiss!

Before you watch the next episode, check out our Invincible Season 3 review and make sure you’ve got the show’s release schedule bookmarked. You can also read our breakdown of the Invincible cast, Mark’s blue suit, and how Season 3’s title cards are teasing a terrifying storyline.