Invincible Season 3: Robert Kirkman on How Cecil Stedman’s Backstory Explains Everything

This article contains spoilers for Invincible season 3 episode 2.

Prime Video animated superhero epic Invincible contains some of the most powerful characters ever seen on television. Based on the comic series from Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Ryan Ottley, Invincible‘s roster of crime-fighters (and crime-doers) belong in any “who could beat who up” comic book store debate alongside the heavy hitters like Superman and Homelander.

Atom Eve can manipulate reality on the atomic level. The Immortal is functionally, well, immortal. Father-son pair Mark and Nolan Grayson a.k.a. Invincible and Omni-Man possess so much raw Viltrumite strength that they invariably end up conquering the world in many of the multiverses Angstrom Levy peeks into. Despite this collection of indomitable übemensches, however, the Invincible character who possesses the most power might be just some guy.

Cecil Stedman (voiced by Walton Goggins) does not have super strength. He does not have super speed. He cannot fly. All Cecil Stedman has is the gray matter between his ears, an ugly scar on his face, and a portable teleportation device that costs taxpayers $1 million a pop. And yet, Cecil commands the ultimate fear and respect of the super-powered world in his position as the director of the Global Defense Agency.

How did one lowly human being come to be Earth’s most important bureaucrat? Invincible season 3 decides to let viewers in on the answer. And in the process it also reveals that the sentiment guiding Cecil’s shadowy hand also just happens to be the perfect theme for the entirety of the Invincible saga.

Cecil Stedman’s full backstory is depicted in “A Deal With the Devil” the second episode of Invincible season 3’s three-part premiere. There we see a younger Cecil stopping a terrorist attack from the Order of the Freeing Fist and losing damn near all his skin in the process. The Pentagon’s surgeons get him back in shape but they leave one bit of mangled flesh on his chin at his request, a reminder of the time he almost failed.

According to Invincible showrunner Simon Racioppa, taking some time to delve into Cecil’s history served an important purpose in grounding season 3’s ongoing arc of his struggles to corral a young and headstrong Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun).

“We’ve seen Mark’s backstory and upbringing. It felt only fair to show you a little bit more about Cecil if they were going to get into the sort of disagreement over things,” Racioppa tells Den of Geek. “You want to know where Cecil is coming from, too.”

Where Cecil is coming from turns out to be very similar to where Mark is coming from. Just as Mark faced the horror of Cecil turning former villains D.A. Sinclair and Darkwing into useful government assets, so too did Cecil have to deal with his GDA predecessor, Radcliffe, deploying The Order of the Freeing Fist as personal guards for the agency. The revelation drives Cecil to attempt to kill the villains like Mark attempted to kill all of Sinclair’s ReAnimen. Unlike Mark, however, Cecil was successful and sent to super-jail.

“I think that clarifying Cecil’s position of seeing the potential in seemingly bad guys was very important,” comic and show creator Robert Kirkman says. “It’s very important to understand what went into Cecil’s mindset and how that was formed. As we are solidifying Mark’s mindset moving forward, and even though he and Cecil are at conflict, I think you can see some similarities emerging as to as to how they might be seeing the world.”

Cecil’s storyline serves not only to mirror Mark’s but also to offer a worldview that he, Mark, and many other characters on Invincible will have to confront time and time again. “You can be the good guy or the guy who saves the world. You can’t be both,” Radcliffe tells Cecil after he kills the Freeing Fist goons. Cecil repeats those sentiments to Donald Ferguson (Chris Diamantopoulos) at episode’s end before he heads off to meet with the dangerous Nolan Grayson for the first time.

“It really is kind of a calling card of the series,” Kirkman says of Cecil’s mantra. “Whether or not Mark’s going to make it through the show without completely becoming a villain remains to be seen. But I think that you’ve already seen that lines have to be crossed in order to keep the world safe. You’re putting characters in a position where they’re making decisions that are very difficult for a single person to make: questions of life or death on massive scales. That’s something that weighs on Mark and is going to be weighing on all of these characters. And they’re definitely going to be having to, at times, get their hands dirty.”

For his part, Steven Yeun believes his character isn’t fully ready to grapple with that complicated moral dilemma just yet.

“I feel like Mark would have a difficult time with that statement,” Yeun says. “He’s still very young, and maybe he doesn’t understand the world from the vantage point that Cecil sees it. That is the beauty of the show. It’s confronting these difficult situations. There’s good intentions, and then there’s reality and then sometimes there’s cynicism, and then there’s idealism that is necessary too.”

Given the outsized nature of their power and influence, Cecil and Mark will always have the hardest decisions to make. But figuring out how to operate in a dangerous world isn’t easy for any characters on Invincible.

“I think that’s why you’re seeing Eve in the tree house,” Gillian Jacobs says of her character’s new, isolated home. “Because she’s really haunted by what she did in Chicago, how much worse things could have gone. She thought she was doing the right thing, but she didn’t know what she didn’t know. Maybe the journey of the show for her is is confronting that, but she’s not there yet.”

And then, of course, there’s Nolan Grayson. The full-blooded Viltrumite once known as Omni-Man desired to be neither the hero nor the guy who saved the world. But his actor feels the tension of the show’s central theme all the same.

“That almost encapsulates the world to me. What’s more important: being perceived a certain way or doing what is right?” J.K. Simmons says. “Obviously, each character has his or her own version of what’s right. But that’s a big moral question that I think all of us can reflect on. Do you want to be perceived a certain way? Or do you want to be a certain way?”

The first three episodes of Invincible season 3 are available to stream on Prime Video now. New episodes premiere Thursdays, culminating in the finale on March 13.

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