“Hopefully, people understand that Mark is a different character each season,” agrees Racioppa. “I mean, he’s the same person, but he evolves. He’s changing. He takes the wrong path, he has a thought that turns out to be incorrect. He pulls himself back, but he’s not a perfect hero—he’s a kid, he’s 21 years old.
“Mark suddenly has all these powers, all these responsibilities. He’s going to make mistakes, and he’s going to be influenced by the things that happened to him. He should feel like a changeable character who’s just trying to put one foot in front of the other and figure out how to handle himself in this universe. And Dinosaurus affects that.”
To say that Mark has changed over the first three seasons of Invincible is an understatement. When we first met him, he was a mostly normal teenager who just so happened to be the son of Omni-Man, a benevolent hero in the tradition of Superman. But after his own powers began to manifest, and he took on the moniker Invincible, Mark learned that Omni-Man came not to protect Earth but to conquer it in the name of the Viltrum Empire. Since then, Mark’s had to battle not just his father, but a whole legions of Viltrumite invaders.
And yet, for Steven Yeun, the ideological confusion Mark experiences when listening to Dinosaurus is one of the more relatable parts about the Prime Video series.
“You come to an age where you find out things aren’t as they said, and you deal with it. And I think we’re going to want to watch Mark deal with it,” he says with a laugh. “He grew up being shielded from the complexities of the world. He has all of these ideals and traditions. And then, all of a sudden, it’s ripped from him.
“That can leave you pretty cynical, so I think all that is working through Mark at the moment.”
