Omni-Man has been a hero for most of the Invincible series.
A lot of people consider Omni-Man to be the best Invincible villain, but surprisingly, he’s only been a villain for the first 12 issues.
After that he began his redemption arc which started when he went to a big planet where the aliens have a very short life span.
It was there that he learned that it’s not about how much time you have, but rather it’s about what you do with the time you DO have. He even had a child with one of those aliens.
After that he reconciles with Mark and does various things to make amends, one thing led to another, and through all that, Omni-Man has been doing his best to be a hero.
One of my favorite things about Invincible is how it treats the idea of redemption- it doesn’t treat morality like stats in a video game, there are no “morality points”. It’s not a question of “oh, this guy did 5 evil things, but he also did 6 good things, and this good act outweighs these evil acts, so therefor he can be redeemed”. It’s all character based; it’s a personal question for them, just as it is for people in real life- can the people who have been wronged find it within themselves to forgive? Can the person who did wrong make the choice to be better?
Mark and Debbie forgive Nolan, and we see him make the decision to change- does that mean he’s “redeemed”? For those characters, yes. For us, as an audience, the answer is probably “sure” because these are our protagonists, these are the characters we care about- but he still did all of those horrible things; they were all his decision. Would the rest of the world make that same choice, to forgive? The families of all those people in Chicago, or on that cruise-ship, or the people killed in that avalanche, or the loved ones of the Guardians? Almost certainly not- and though the story doesn’t linger on that, it doesn’t go out of it’s way to discount it, either. He wasn’t possessed by Parallax, or by Onslaught, or whatever comic-book thing they could come up with so that it wasn’t really his fault. You could make the argument that thousands of years of Viltrumite teaching serves that function, but it doesn’t mean that that person wasn’t still Nolan- and that’s okay, because we understand how he came to that mindset, as well as the struggle that led him away from it.
When I first saw the train scene, that was a moment that really gave me pause, because it was so sadistic, so over-the-top, that I thought “man, people are not going to want to forgive Nolan for this”. Maybe thats the point? Maybe that’s how we always should have felt, and Kirkman really wants to drive the point home.
IF they are able to stick the landing with his character, and really chew on that question of forgiveness and change, then I think they can still do it. But they’ve given themselves a tougher challenge going about it the way they’ve done it, and I hope they manage to pull it off. Because I really think the development of Nolan as a character is one of the best parts of the comic series, and I’d hate to see it not work for people on screen. There have been some oddly clunky moments in the series that make me worry, to be honest, but I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.