[DISCUSSION] Invincible - S4E2 - I'll Give You the Grand Tour
As Nolan and Allen's mission takes a dangerous turn, Mark is pulled back into action when a new threat targets Earth. With tensions rising inside the Guardians, Mark begins to question who he can truly trust.
Nolan had some great parents. ::: spoiler comic spoilers Although it wasn't his real father, or the story has changed. Thragg said that Nolan was Argall's son. Though it would be weird, that his mother was hiding the truth. ::: Whole Scourge Virus sequence was peak, I want more of such show only additions in the series.
Viltrumites just made moustache-phobia a thing.
They didn't remove the sex gag :D
tl;dr: Shoulda just sequenced all the dead Viltrumites' genomes to bypass that bottleneck.
Genetics nerd here. Maximixing genomic diversity is indeed the only way to maximize fitness for a species. But just because billions upon billions of your species dies doesn't mean their info dies. Viltrumites (at least) have DNA-like genetic code meaning they have up to a max of a million years to sequence all that diversity.
If they have any familiarity with bioengineering they could either do in vitro fertilizations of the dead's gametes and implanting them en masse in surviving surrogates or just record all sequences in a massive database. Even mildly smart humans' ability to sequence and synthesize DNA is growing faster than Moore's Law. Over evolutionary time this might even lead to higher fecundity (cf: twins, triplets, etc) making Viltrumites stronger via a new dimension.
The only way around this plothole of their societal fear of an inevitable inbreeding bottleneck for me is if their entire society has specialized in only combat and have completely neglected science. Which could be possible but makes the world less realistic for me. While they could surely conquer a more brainy species to do their bioengineering for them, maybe they'd consider that a significant breach of privacy (e.g. the brainy species could create their own army of Viltrumites with an ideology beneficial to themselves).
Laughing my ass off at the "Enterprise" and Allen sex scenes.
Also Allen, did you make me feel bad about your murderous empire?
This episode was also a great contrast to the previous one. Mark is becoming more like Nolan. Nolan is becoming more like Mark. A Viltrumite apologizing is a huge step.