Had to rewatch to organize my thoughts. Let me just run through all of it.

1. Immediately, at the start, this is not how high school graduations work. There are usually, you know, people who aren’t the students or the principal there. Like parents and other faculty. Why does this detail matter? Because it’s contrived this way to make it so that there are only two groups-the principal caught up in his own speech, and the students blankly staring forward. This comes into play later when Mark “sneaks” back into the ceremony, which also doesn’t make sense given the wide open football field they’re sitting in. Without more active participants in this scene, like murmuring relatives and family videographers sweating in the hot sun at different angles in the wider audience, Mark is able to enter without being noticed. Why does this matter? Because it’s being used to highlight his inconspicuous but frequent absence from things in his normal life, showing how he is failing to “juggle” everything correctly. Except he shouldn’t be able to “juggle” any of it, because it’s implausible he could hide his awkward approach here and at other times. The show even lampshades this by showing him launch his hat impossibly high into the sky, with somehow no one noticing. It basically punishes you for caring about where things are and what people’s perspectives are in any given scene. It also refuses to show you how Mark is realistically hiding his identity.

2. Mark’s friends are somewhat surprised he isn’t on time for his own graduation. This is not how kids or superheros work. Kids would not be surprised that a friend didn’t want to sit through a boring ceremony that means nothing, and Mark is no normal kid. He has been recently used as a human battering ram to kill thousands of people. Him missing his graduation should be so low on the list of concerns that his loved ones has that it shouldn’t even register in their minds.

3. Enter Seismic. He is back at his old nonsense, and Mark undercuts him by mocking his approach, showing that the show is taking a dig at corny supervillain drama. Then he pushes Mark back with some sort of sonic blast that is just powerful enough for him to buy enough time to crack the Washington Monument. Instead of then immediately apprehending him, Mark sort of just idles while things start to unfold. What? We were just laughing at the melodrama of this genre, but now you’re falling into the trope of the uninterrupted monologue and the superhero waiting to make a quip before using their impressive speed and strength to immediately minimize damage? I don’t understand, are we supposed to take this show seriously or not? If nothing matters so much that Mark can just t-pose while a supervillain sets up his moves, do the individual lives that get taken even matter? Are we supposed to think Mark should be traumatized by the civilians that died or that they’re simply a goofy gonzo backdrop for his character drama?

4. Then Cecil chimes in saying that Mark’s running out of time, and I start to think, ah now I see. They’re actually in a training simulator, that’s why Mark wasn’t concerned about damage to the monument or immediately taking action. Surely this is a big misdirect for Cecil to bring up Mark’s lack of focus due to what’s going on for him mentally. But… no, they really do just play it straight that goofy old Mark didnt think to stop the supervillain until after he fucked a bunch of stuff up.

5. Mark ends Seismic with a single punch, and kinda just looks back at the destroyed monument with total non-chalance. Ah I suppose this major act of terrorism has occurred. Oh well, anyone got superglue? Incorrigible ol’ Invincible, when he ever learn? Again, are we supposed to take anything happening seriously or not?

6. We return to this entirely implausible graduation ceremony that Mark is somehow able to sneak into. His girlfriend asks about the smell of sulfur on him (he has just come from apprehending a murderous supervillain who unleashed deadly monsters on defenseless civilians and destroyed a iconic national structure) and Mark makes a silly quip about Seismic. Is he traumatized by collateral damage or not? What number of deaths is his threshold for sorrow, and why is instead he so jovial? Is this show about what superheroes would really be like if Superman went rogue, or is it is own corny fantasy?

7. We now cut to Eve making beer bottles out of things that are not beer bottles. It is important to note here that Eve does not know how to brew beer or make beer bottles the non-magical way, but at no point is anyone affected or worried about her accidentally making poisoned beer or accidentally making a bottle full of loose glass. This is because her power to bend reality does not require her to manually think out all the details needed to make something happen, the magic just fills in the edges to fill her request. This will matter later when her father chastises her for what she does in Chicago, where apparently now her magic is affected by her expertise in what she is doing. Here the contrivance is to make her just as effective or dangerous as she needs to be for her conflict with her father, which is also beating a dead resolved horse from Season One.

8. In general Eve’s friction with her father makes no sense, as does his belief that the things she generates are “fake.” I understand the trope of the headstrong father, but this is not a convincing rendition of it. And again, Eve seems to arbitrarily generate failures to support his views.

9. Speaking of Chicago, that is not how people work. The construction supervisor who takes umbrage with Eve’s actions is mad that she “scared” her workers. This makes no sense, this was not “scary” in the normal sense of the word, and it would absolutely not be the first grievance out of this person’s mouth. Being mad about code violations makes sense, being mad about taking work away from the union, many things could be said. But opening with “you spooked my dudes” is just not organic dialogue.

10. When the concerned mother voices her distaste for the city’s aid, the construction supervisor throws up her hands and leaves. This is not how construction sites work. This is not how job sites work. This is not how anything works. Why does it matter? Because it leaves Eve with no hostile supervision to then do what she does next.

11. Eve is not a city planner and has never designed an empty lot with a stable soil foundation. But she also has never built a huge tree fortress by hand, yet her treehouse has not fallen in on itself. Are we to believe that everyonce in a while if she doesn’t explicitly think in her mind “I want this thing I am creating to be safe in the long term” that anything she creates could just fail due to her lack of knowledge in that field? It’s ludicrous and so easily abusable that it could be used endless to cause pointless drama for another 200 seasons of any show.

12. Now we cut to Mark and his mother. Although I don’t think this confrontation is as contrived as Eve’s argument with her father, it does feel like it’s something we’ve lost ground on, a symptom of new television seasons making us earn our way back to breakthroughs we already had in the prior one. This surprisingly does NOT happen with Mark’s girlfriend, who is now extremely sane and level about Mark’s split responsibilities. This was a good thing, because the drama of “oh being a superhero is making you ignore me and you are losing yourself to the job” is such obvious and well-trodden drama that the audience is just dying waiting for it to come to its natural resolution so that something actually novel can happen, and so that character relationships can starting developing normally again without artificial restriction.

13. Now we get to the astronaut/Martian storyline. Back in last season, a Martian infiltrator was able to make its way back to Earth in the guise of an astronaut on an expedition that Mark was protecting. This is played very seriously, the potential harm that could be done by importing this type of creature is underlined in the episode, and the reveal that one is indeed going back to Earth is made to feel quite ominous. Well fuck all that, because now it’s a joke storyline. The xeno-foreigner cannot blend in because of le epic culture gap! Look how He struggles to be a real human! This massively dangerous and magical infiltrator is actually just harmless Martian Borat! So all of the tension and stakes that were set up to be something have instead been used to do a bit that is as old as the earliest movie about aliens among us. Does the show hate us for paying attention?

14. So now the Martian thing wants to blend in by being a superhero, and is just a goofy lost little boy instead of a malevolent force of pure elimination. Ok.

15. Mark again tangles with someone who accuses of him being like his father, and in the spirit of sitcoms with bad communication skills, he kinda just lets the other guy believe he’s an asshole.

16. Mark’s mom shows up to yell at Cecil about I guess the concept of people being superheroes, and she gets mad at him for calling superheroing a “job.” Her husband was Omni-Man. This makes no sense. I get the writers are trying to show that she does not like Mark being consumed by his role, but it is most certainly his job, and she would have no reason to think that label was wrong. Again, like with Mark and his mom, I can see how his mom and Cecil have some legitimate emotional tension, but it is so artificially stretched and inflated to create conflicts that it shouldn’t.

17. Then Mark’s mom sees Donald, who is supposed to be dead, and the headstrong woman who just took a powerful government official to task for controlling her son is suddenly too timid and befuddled to demand answers. This is not how people work. She would not just be ushered out by a man she was confident enough to browbeat moments prior.

18. Atlantis arc lmao