Damien Darkblood! Invincible season 4 finally brings back its most mysterious superhero

Like an out-of-shape superhero wriggling back into their old spandex suit, Invincible is bursting at the seams with heroes, villains, and other super-powered individuals who don’t fit neatly into a good/evil binary. With new characters showing up in nearly every episode, old ones often fall by the wayside, but in Invincible season 4 episode 4, the animated series finally circles back to someone who hasn’t played a significant role on the show since season 1: Damien Darkblood.

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for Invincible season 4, episode 4.]

Voiced by Clancy Brown, Damien is a demon detective on a quest to redeem his soul. In Invincible season 1, Cecil Stedman (Walton Goggins), the director of the Global Defense Agency, hires Damien to investigate the mysterious murder of the Guardians of the Globe. But when Damien gets too close to the truth and starts asking uncomfortable questions, Cecil banishes him back to Hell.

Aside from a brief post-credits teaser in season 3, we haven’t seen much of Damien since then. But in season 4 episode 4, “Hurm,” Invincible finally checks in on the character.

“Hurm” opens in Hell, where Damien and a team of demons are about to face down a powerful enemy named Volcanikka (Indira Varma). In the battle for control of the underworld, Volcanikka and her army of lava monsters are winning. Damien just barely survives the fight, and he drags his allies’ severed body parts back home, where a diminished Satan (Bruce Campbell) works to revive them.

As a last resort, Damien casts a spell to summon Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons), but his son Invincible (Steven Yeun) shows up instead. So Damien and Invincible team up to stop Volcanikka and save the world. (Long story short: It turns out the Devil and his friends are actually the good guys, keeping an even scarier evil trapped in the underworld.)

Image: Amazon MGM Studios

Unlike most stories in Invincible, which tend to end in death and heartbreak, this one turns out surprisingly well. The good guys win and Volcanikka flees, promising revenge. (She appears to be immortal.) Invincible also gets the boost he needs to get through a serious crisis of self-confidence, just in time for a major new challenge that appears in the episode’s final moments.

Even better, at the end of “Hurm,” Damien gets sent back to the surface world to keep an eye on humanity and report back to Satan, which hopefully means we won’t have to wait another five years before we get to spend some time with the demon detective again.

New episodes of Invincible season 4 air Wednesdays on Prime Video.