Invincible EP on [SPOILER]’s surprise survival: “That’s not something you come back from immediately”

Last week’s episode of Invincible was trauma-inducing. Spoilers past this point, but we watched Dupli-Kate (Malese Jow) get ripped to shreds, Shrinking Rae (Grey Griffin) get eaten, and Rex-Splode (Jason Mantzoukas) lose a hand. And in the cliffhanger, it sure looked like Rex was going to get shot in the head.

Well, guess what? Rex did get shot in the head in this week’s episode… And somehow managed to survive, even beating King Lizard (Scoot McNairy) to death on adrenaline alone. Not only that, but somehow, Shrinking Rae survived being swallowed, though we only see her recovering on life support later in the episode.

“[Rex] gets shot in the head, that's not something you come back from immediately,” EP Simon Racioppa told Bam Smack Pow about the episode. “That's something that's going to affect you onwards and onwards and onwards. And I think you see further, Shrinking Rae will have the repercussions of almost getting crushed alive inside Komodo Dragon's gullet. That's not going to go away in an episode, that's going to come back and haunt her for a long time.”

While Dupli-Kate seems to be dead for good, with all the superheroes attending her funeral and Immortal (Ross Marquand) taking out his mourning on poor Allen the Alien (Seth Rogen), it does seem like the repercussions of this ill-fated attack on the Lizard League will continue to reverberate throughout the rest of this half season.

“We just try to treat things realistically, and sometimes things go poorly for people, and if they do, they do,” Racioppa noted. “So if you were fighting someone with superpowers and they tore you apart, you might be dead. Even in a world that has characters coming back from the dead… We want you to know that our characters in this  world can be fragile and lives can be fragile.”

It’s surprisingly high stakes for a cartoon show, but that’s sort of the whole point, as Racioppa explains. “That gives the show stakes and makes you aware that you're not just watching a comic superhero cartoon, you're watching a drama. And in dramas people sometimes die. People get into bad situations and sometimes they don't come out of it okay.”

At least Rex and Rae are alive – even if this won’t stop haunting them any time soon.

Invincible streams on Thursdays at 3 am ET / Midnight PT on Prime Video.