What’s more, once Debbie reaffirms her trust in him, he sits back and lets the attack proceed, leaving one of the men investigating him, Cecil (Walton Goggins) to clean up the mess. He doesn’t like being the target of a murder investigation, not because he’s innocent, but because he wants Debbie to believe that he is. Nolan’s vacation to Rome is a trip down memory lane for him and Debbie, but it culminates in him demanding her trust and approval to satiate his troubled ego before he thwarts a dragon. But when his Viltrumite tendencies finally show, the series manages to create a dramatic beat more complicated, shocking, and darkly arresting than any of the gore in preceding entries. His facial animation allows him to wrestle emotionally between his colonial obligations and the life he’s made for himself on Earth, without the need to express this dilemma in words.
Nolan’s affection, in the Amazon series, appears to be sincere from the get-go - something he only realizes several years into the comic - and the more time we spend with him here, the more we’re made both witness and accomplice to his deceptions. The show jumbles this chronology for a distinct narrative purpose: by delaying the reveal to Nolan’s family, we, the audience, are made privy to a rather difficult dilemma.
Originally, Nolan’s betrayal was made known to Mark and Debbie not long after its reveal to readers in Volume 2, and it also involved the revelation that Nolan never truly loved Debbie at all.
Where the first three episodes stuck to the comics’ initial plot, but replaced its satire with dreary, straight-faced violence, the show now pulls from a number of later volumes (for instance, Mark accompanying NASA astronauts to Mars). The episode marks a few major departures from the comics in ways that finally work. Although, the motivation behind Nolan feeling irritable and off-kilter is particularly alluring. The Graysons’ family dynamic is a welcome improvement, rife with both winking jabs, and arguments where Debbie finally points out when Nolan is being unreasonable or distracted, and she establishes, in no uncertain terms, that she has a life and identity outside of him. Even though Mark and Nolan spend much of the episode apart, the story is built around Nolan’s internal struggle to reconcile his actions - he murdered the Guardians of the Globe, presumably at the behest of his planet Viltrum - with his genuine love for Mark, and for his wife Debbie (Sandra Oh).
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