Warning: This article contains spoilers from the Invincible season 3 finale, “I Thought You’d Never Shut Up.”

“Conquest. I don’t even get a real name, only a purpose.”

This speech, delivered by Jeffrey Dean Morgan in his newly revealed role as the ultimate Viltrumite weapon, isn’t in Robert Kirkman‘s Invincible comics at all. But for the Amazon series, particularly in the great battle between Conquest and Mark (Steven Yeun) that lasts nearly the entire season 3 finale, the co-showrunner says he wanted “a really fun moment” that would allow his Walking Dead buddy to “break your heart a little.”

“You’ve spent this entire episode going, ‘This is the baddest dude I’ve ever encountered. I think he might kill Mark. This is really bad. I don’t like this guy. I’m scared of this guy,'” Kirkman tells Entertainment Weekly in a Zoom conversation with Morgan. “And then to give him this moment of extreme vulnerability, and Jeffrey… I hate gushing, but just the softness that comes out of his voice in that scene. You really get a genuine moment of emotion out of him, which…I don’t know. Every time I watch the episode, it’s so moving to me and it makes me love Conquest even more.”

Kirkman sees Invincible, the show, as a second draft of the comics, and the same goes for Conquest’s arrival. Debuting in the final moments of the penultimate season 3 episode, this seemingly unstoppable Viltrumite and Mark punch each other across the entire globe in a brutal brawl that does not disappoint. Kirkman and Morgan together break down the episode, starting with the moments that aren’t in the source material.

Kirkman and co-showrunner Simon Racioppa adapted certain comic book panels with direct 1:1 recreations, though they also sought for “those little spots” to make something feel more emotional, interesting, or devastating. Morgan’s casting played into that. “I want to make sure that Jeffrey has the opportunities to sink his hooks into the character, so that he can bring the audience along with him,” Kirkman remarks.

Conquest’s speech was one such moment. While pinning Mark to the ground, Conquest confesses through whispers in his ear that he’s, essentially, depressed. He’s lonely because even his fellow Viltrumites are afraid of his power and fear his mental instability. “I love that scene, too,” Morgan comments, revealing he delivered this speech in one take. “We did another one just because I was like, ‘I didn’t trust you’…. I just thought it showed another layer of Conquest.”

The other finale moment not directly taken from the comics that Kirkman points to is the blowing of a heart-shaped blood bubble. It occurs after Conquest takes a few hits from Mark, but instead of feeling the pain, he embraces the joy he feels from the fight. Some might call the blood bubble psychotic. Kirkman, however, calls it “playful.”

“Very early on in the fight, you’re like, ‘I don’t understand what’s happening right now. I don’t understand the motive of that. This guy is a complete enigma to me,'” the creator explains, “which I think puts people on their heels trying to figure out what the character is.”

Morgan says they leaned into the meta nature of his casting. As Negan on The Walking Dead, the actor once bludgeoned Yeun’s character to death with Lucille, his signature baseball bat swathed in barbed wire. As Conquest, Morgan once again beats a Yeun character — at least to near death. “I think we have to embrace the fact that there are some things there, in the meta of it all, that people are going to enjoy,” Morgan remarks. “And we have to enjoy it. And we did.”

The star took his cues from the animation and script to craft the voice. He points to how Conquest is always hovering above Mark, while talking down to him with this booming voice. “And yet he was never yelling at him,” Morgan points out. It added to the strange intimacy between Conquest and Mark, he adds. “Even when they were a half a mile away, there was something about him… It became personal. There was just an intimacy there that I wanted to really play.”

The fight itself was gnarly to behold, even for animation. At various points, Conquest nearly rips Mark’s brother Oliver (Christian Convery) in half with his bare hands, Conquest tears through Atom Eve (Gillian Jacobs) with such ferocity that she’s left choking on her own spit, and Mark’s arm bone shoots out of the back of his hand when his fist collides with Conquest’s mechanical arm. Kirkman credits supervising directors Dan Duncan and Shaun O’Neill, as well as the episode’s director, Tanner Johnson, for ensuring the movements of the fight felt “super fast and super brutal” and that “everything comes across as efficient and devastating as it possibly can be.”

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Kirkman can’t recall the exact count off hand, but notes the Conquest battle clocks around at least 30 minutes, “which is kind of unheard of,” he says, noting how audiences can often grow bored with long action sequences. To sustain the momentum, the team saw the episode as four escalating fight scenes with location changes: the initial Mark vs. Conquest scene, Oliver entering the playing field, Atom Eve taking a crack at the boss fight, and Mark finally bashing Conquest’s head in with his own skull. “It’s a much more brutal death, so brutal,” Morgan comments. “My grotesque meter was happily filled.”

The goal, Kirkman says, was figuring out “how we can make sure that each one of those sequences have their own payoff, have their own story arc to them, so as an audience member, you’re constantly recognizing the elevation and leaning in more to the fight scene.”

“It’s a four-act fight!” Morgan exclaims. “Never have heard of that in the history of anything.” It’s also one of the reasons Kirkman is thankful Invincible is animated. Could they pull off the same stunt in live-action? “Maybe if we had that Rings of Power budget,” he jokes.

Kirkman calls Invincible “an escalating show,” meaning the team is always looking at what they did previously and working to top it. For him, the Conquest-Invincible fight is the show’s answer to the Mark-Nolan confrontation at the end of season 1. “We deliberately didn’t do anything in season 2 to top that,” Kirkman says. “We tried to tell a different kind of story in season 2, but we really wanted to end [season 3] with, ‘You don’t know where this show can go.'”

They have the same goal for season 4 and beyond. “We’re going to try to continue to escalate the stakes and the scope,” Kirkman teases. He also acknowledges how far in advance the actors record their parts. “It’s entirely possible that there are scenes from season 4 that Jeffrey has already done.” Conquest doesn’t technically die at the end of the season. Even though he looks like a corpse, Cecil (Walton Goggins) is preserving the body so he can be questioned about the movements of the Viltrum Empire.

“I think a Cecil interrogating Conquest scene, with Walton Goggins and Jeffrey Dean Morgan going head to head, that’d be a pretty cool, intense scene,” Kirkman says. “But to put it more succinctly, I don’t think Cecil would’ve gone to all the trouble of containing Conquest the way he did if Conquest was dead. So I think it’s safe to say that Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Conquest will return in some capacity.”

Good luck, world!