Overall, I’d say a vast majority of the changes the show has made have been for the better. It’s adding a lot of much needed depth to a lot of characters that the comics weren’t able to do. That being said, I seriously do not enjoy the Donald plotline the show is adding.

When I was reading the comics, I did like Donald as a character, but he wasn’t someone that I was itching to have explored more. When it’s revealed that he is an android, they pretty much just move past it immediately. They do later give it some depth because its a detail they can’t just ignore forever and I think the way they handled it was great. They just have him talk to William’s boyfriend who underwent heavy body augmentations to stay alive and they bond over how difficult it was to “feel human” when you’re mostly machine, and Donald talks about how hard it will be to come to terms with it but eventually he’ll be alright. It will be a constant struggle, yes, but he will still live and love and experience life more as a human than as a machine. I think that’s as much depth as he needs. But the show is dragging that shit out waaaaay too much for me, personally.

I just don’t see the reason for it. Donald isn’t a very important character even if he is very much liked by the fandom as a whole. There will come a point where he becomes almost irrelevant to the larger story. Is it for an extra mystery for the non-comic book readers to attach themselves to? If that’s the case, most people I’ve seen so far already guessed what he is and don’t seem very interested in getting a clear answer. Is it to add to the idea that Cecil is a morally grey character? If that’s the case, we already know the lengths he’s willing to go. He literally spells it out for the audience in season 1 when he tells a LITERAL DEMON “I’m trying to keep things grey.” I just don’t understand why they chose to create this whole plotline for something so trivial in the scope of the Invincible universe. It feels so jarring to go from Mark and Nolan fighting off the Viltrum empire as they commit genocide to “oh gee, Donald is curious about whether or not he’s real.” Like…I don’t care. It doesn’t seem like a lot of people do to begin with. The comic book readers already know and the show-only crowd figured it out during episode 1. It’s messing with the pacing quite a bit and I find myself getting impatient whenever he appears on screen because now I have to sit through 5-10 minutes of Donald aimlessly wandering around going “am i truly…human??” I hope it ends in the next few episodes.