Five years ago, Mark Grayson got his ass kicked within an inch of his life at the hands of his lying, abusive asshole of a father. Invincible has spent its last two seasons reckoning with that ass-kicking, in ways both overt—see the Powerplex arc of the last two episodes, which saw one of the victims of that attack try to beat his rage and grief directly into Mark’s face—and less. Now, “I Thought You’d Never Shut Up,” the show’s third-season finale, dares to ask: What if there’s a worse ass-kicking—and a badder dad?

Said terrible father figure is, of course, Conquest, the Viltrum Empire’s latest effort to get Mark to fall in line and just conquer the damn Earth already—or maybe just die; they seem pretty comfortable with that outcome, too. Invincible the show isn’t shy about drawing parallels between those two battles, going so far as to essentially recreate the first-season Omni-Man fight’s most brutal moment with this latest installment: Conquest picking Mark up and just deleting dozens of humans (and a dog!) by flying him through them at high speed. This may be the most gory episode of Invincible ever created, in fact, with lots of moments of fast-moving horror interspersed with lovingly lurid shots of destroyed bodies. If this is what the show was paying for with some of those more roughly animated episodes from the first half of the season, well…at least the money’s on the screen now.

That’s to say nothing of the voice talent, as “Shut Up” serves, at least in part, as an acting showcase for Steven Yeun’s old batting practice partner Jeffrey Dean Morgan. I’ll be honest: I was a bit cold on Morgan’s performance in the early minutes of this episode, his slightly soft sneer not lining up with Conquest’s gruff appearance in my head. But the longer the episode went, the more grateful I was for the notes of joy and ugly paternalism bubbling up out of those dulcet tones. Because on the page, this character is pretty thin gruel. A pure sadist who lives to battle and enjoys hurting people and being hurt, Conquest is not actually that much more complicated than the bad guys from the Dragon Ball Z fights that this episode sometimes resembles. Even before he gets to the character’s genuinely chilling “Take it to your grave” monologue, though, Morgan finds the hints of a person lurking beneath the blood-soaked facade. If nothing else, he’s clearly getting such a human kick out of being so unrepentantly nasty—as the character exults in, say, the tactile joys of literally tearing a little boy apart—that Conquest never fully crosses the line into being the pure parody he sometimes threatens to be.

And the fight, which takes up the first full 28 minutes of this 43-minute finale, really is a hell of a thing to watch. Invincible has been beating the shit out of its hero to underscore how powerful his enemies are since basically the show’s second episode, but the violence meted out to Mark here is some truly awful stuff, interspersed with lots of shots of buildings exploding that sell the sense that this is what befalls the mortal world when gods decide to fight. That’s before we get to see Eve cutting loose with her powers for once, or Mark shattering his hand as he smashes it through Conquest’s prosthetic arm. If you’re going to spend half an hour slamming your action figures together, it might as well look cool as hell, and on that metric, Invincible checks the “season finale” boxes in full.

As to deeper concerns, well, that’s where evaluating this episode gets murkier. It’s part of the point of the Conquest fight that there’s very little to him than raw brutality: He’s an instrument of violence that can only be defeated by an equal application of violence, the biggest, bloodiest trolley problem the show has thrown at poor Mark Grayson yet. The actual emotional beats of the fight, then, are familiar to the point of being rote, especially since the episode runs through them twice: Conquest kicks Mark’s ass, someone Mark loves intervenes, Conquest hurts them, Mark gets madder and fights harder while Morgan gets to snack on a little more scenery. There’s nothing deeper here, and it doesn’t get deeper when the show pulls an absolutely bullshit fake-out: “killing” Eve only to have her resurrect all of two minutes later. I’m on the record about hating this kind of shit, but even without that baggage, this is just transcendently lazy storytelling. I might grouse about a particularly gruesome visual here or there, but I don’t mind Invincible going for the occasional shock moment with its visuals from time to time; that sort of gleeful envelope pushing is part of what gives the show its particular identity. But keeping a main character dead for less time than it takes an egg to boil before you yank her back to life, especially in an episode where you’re actually going to try to pull emotion from an actual recent character death? That’s lazy, easy, the dramatic screenwriting equivalent of a fart joke.

Once the dust settles on the fight—with one more front-page photo for Invincible‘s “Gnarly Exploded Heads” photo reel—the episode shifts pretty definitively into “wrapping up the season” mode. Debbie—who gets a strong moment early on when she realizes there’s no point in trying to keep Oliver out of the battle—gets to have a big emotional breakdown in Mark’s hospital room, and Rex’s funeral actually managed to bring a tear to my eye. (But it felt bizarre that nobody voiced what a weird move “I cloned myself from this dead guy’s body, and now I’m taking his name, too” was on Robot/Rudy/Rex’s part, as Rex would have called it out.) Those feelings sections then give way to a big dopey plot montage, as the show reminds us of all the threats still lurking for Invincible to battle next: Sequids multiplying in the sewers, Battle Beast’s body being recovered from space, Angstrom Levy teaming up with his “voiced by Doug ‘Pinhead’ Bradley, so they must be bad guys” techno-surgeon masters, Cecil opting to keep the world’s most dangerous person alive in the interest of securing some kind of future advantage for humanity. And, in what’s clearly meant to be the most chilling note, it’s revealed that Mark Grayson is no longer fucking around on the topic of killing. If you touch someone he loves, you die.

Mark’s decision to embrace murder as a viable solution is supposed to be the capstone emotional moment of the season, a harbinger of dark things to come. But all it managed to provoke in me was a mildly eye-rolling “yeah, no shit, dude.” Ignoring the fact that Mark already mostly had this realization at the end of the Angstrom fight last week, all I can think about is how much effort Invincible has spent to get here. I’ve joked about the show being an increasingly blood-soaked series of convoluted hypotheticals meant to force Mark into killing, but the show successfully convinced me, like, five-guys-who-casually-kill-100-people-to-make-a-point ago that sometimes, in a world this brutally violent, life just has to be cheap. Mark’s unwillingness to come to terms with the violence inherent to his reality isn’t just mildly irritating as a character trait, though: It’s also been a big contributor to the start-and-stop pacing issues that have cropped up throughout the show’s third season. I know some of that is a symptom of the show’s tight adherence to the original comic—although the decision to compress five issues of on-paper battles into a single episode for this finale suggests it can accelerate when it needs to. But the hand-wringing over killing in a show this bloody also feels like it’s being imported from source material that comes from a time when audiences weren’t being deluged with comic books and shows (some created by this program’s own producers!) with heroes who kill as a matter of course. Mark deciding he’s okay with some murders might, maybe, have felt shocking to me reading Invincible in 2009, but it doesn’t now; it’s a far more fatal flaw that it doesn’t feel interesting, either. (If you want to get interesting, look at the character’s face as he’s repeatedly headbutting Conquest to “death”: It seems like, after having two different Bad Dads demonstrate what a useful killing tool his Viltrumite skull can be, our boy finally got the memo.)

Looking back at this season, then, the highs and the lows are both easy to perceive: Invincible remains at its best when it’s going either hard and fast, or really slowing down to make a point. (It’s in the middle distance where the show can feel like a slog; god help this program if it ever tries to make me care what Titan’s been up to again.) Cecil’s backstory—and Walton Goggins’ voice performance, period—set the tone for the show’s ongoing battles between pragmatism and idealism; Eve and Mark’s relationship (and the even sweeter one between Rae and Rex) stopped screwing around with the will-they/won’t-they’s; big, brutal battles like Allen and Nolan’s breakout or the Invincible War put thrilling superpowered action on the screen. And then there are individual moments where the show stopped to take a breath, like that wordless sequence of two criminals trying to make good, or the quiet sight of Oliver skateboarding with his friends. Invincible can do big, shocking action and emotionally affecting human stuff—even if it often has trouble with the latter while its hero is around. Its failure to do so, basically every other episode of this season, feels both like a consequence of its nigh-obsessive devotion to its source material and an occasional lack of focus. This can be the most exciting superhero show on TV—when it wants to be. Let’s hope that desire is in more abundant evidence when season four rolls around.

Stray observations

• • Title card, first thing: Conquest white and grey.
• • Am I the only one who thinks Conquest looks a lot like Richard “Tom Smykowski” Riehle from Office Space? (I would also accept “mega-buff Brian Doyle Murray.”)
• • First genuine “oh fuck” moment of the episode comes early, when Conquest crafts his own space-frozen blood into a little heart bubble as a display of how un-seriously he’s taking this all.
• • Great animation throughout tonight, but those POV shots of Oliver trying, and failing, to keep up with Mark and Conquest nicely foreshadow how poorly he’s going to fare here.
• • “Hey…don’t give up. You can do this! You’ve still got a chance.”
• • Fine, all the ReAnimen are out of commission. It’s still pretty dumb that Cecil suddenly doesn’t have his “debilitate Viltrumites with the nasty sound” device anymore. Even if the Engineering Wing’s still busted, y’all don’t have a Bluetooth?
• • (Also, I only just realized on second-watch that Sinclair’s new ReAnimen are being built from some of last week’s dead Marks. I know we get a close-up on one of the faces later on, but this show’s faces aren’t always that easy for me to read.)
• • Conquest tells Mark (either fucking with him or just wrong) that Nolan’s been executed.
• • How ’bout that shot of all of Oliver’s bloody, broken teeth hitting the ground, huh?
• • Invincible loves to go to the “bone comes out of the leg” well when it’s trying to sell a serious injury. That’s a gnarly well!
• • Okay, so the episode tries to justify why Eve, who’s basically omnipotent, doesn’t use her powers to do really cool stuff, explaining that she has a mental block that stops her from using them directly on flesh. But the fact that she’s able to make the air around Conquest too dense to move in for a few seconds only serves to highlight how many applications of her abilities are just “make a big thing, then hit someone with it.”
• • “Getting mad doesn’t make you stronger. That’s not how it works!” Dear Conquest: Please tell the writers of Invincible this, because it…kind of seems like it does?
• • “I am so lonely. All the other Viltrumites are scared of me. No one talks to me. No one wants to be my friend; they think I am unstable. They send me from planet to planet, committing atrocities in their name. And as I get better at it, they fear me more and more. I am a victim of my own success. ‘Conquest.’ I don’t even get a real name. Only a purpose. I am capable of so much more, and no one sees it. Some days I feel so alone I could cry, but I don’t. I never do. Because what would be the point? Not a single person in the entire universe would care. Take it to your grave.” It would be incredibly easy to make this speech ridiculous, stupid, self-aggrandizing bullshit. Morgan earns his entire paycheck in these 90 seconds of audio.
• • Many of Invincible‘s big gross-out shots are drawn directly from the comic art; I daresay the show managed to out-do the original panel of Conquest’s ruined head.
• • Oh, and Eve’s powers are leaking goo now.
• • Final needle drop of the season: Nine Inch Nails’ “Every Day Is Exactly The Same.”
• • I like Clancy Brown and Bruce Campbell as much as the next nerd, but that stinger, with Damien Darkblood proposing some sort of plan in Hell, was profoundly underwhelming.
• • And that’s a wrap on Invincible season three. Thanks for hanging with me for these weekly recaps: This thing’s a blast when it wants to be, and even when it’s not, it’s been fun dissecting it with you all.