Marvel's Inhumans, Season 1, Episode 7: Havoc in the Hidden Land
Oh, man, it's such a shame that it takes the penultimate episode for us to get out of the fucking stupid subplots about fighting randomly murderous drug smugglers or jealous vet ex-girlfriends. God, I completely forgot about the Inhumans TV show for a long, long while, because, shit, there really wasn't much motivation for me to watch it. I guess I kinda gotta finish it up before the year ends, huh?
And after skimming through the synopses for the past 6 episodes in the 'previously on...' feature, it really boggles my mind how little the Inhumans actually act like, y'know, the Inhumans. I'm not the best Marvel fan ever, and I don't read the comics -- my only exposure with the Inhumans is the Agents of SHIELD TV show and their level in the Marvel: Ultimate Alliance game. They're like 'Space X-Men' in my head, and that's cool. But the Inhumans here? They aren't really cool (Medusa's bald, man.) -- they barely use their powers, their personalities are flat as a brick, and their motivations are muddy.
But at least this episode the Inhumans sort of get to use their powers. And Triton returns! Remember Triton? The green-fish dude in the prologue of the first episode who everyone keeps reminding us exists? I don't -- not from the show, at least, because he's not even a character we saw in flashbacks. Why would I care about him? Even if you do a show about adapting iconic characters, there's still the need to actually make the audience actually care about them before putting them in compromising situations. Oh, and everyone keeps reminding us that Gorgon is dead, and Karnak is so desperate to bring him back to life. Of course Gorgon's death won't stick. I mean, like, his death scene was pretty poorly done anyway, so why not?
And apparently Black Bolt gets called out for all the shit he's done, which is well and good. Apparently Triton pretended to be die, and there's a secret room of machineguns or some shit in Atillan... just... because? Lockjaw just teleports everybody everywhere and I'm genuinely puzzled why they didn't just Lockjaw-rescue Black Bolt's allies last episode. Oh well. This episode has Triton show up in Atillan and beat the living hell out of Maximus and his royal guard, and Karnak goes up against Auran and beats the shit out of her. Not gonna lie, at least the action scenes are somewhat decent this time around -- although it really speaks to the show's quality when the most thrilling action scenes involves general martial arts and stunts and not the superpowers that you'd think a show about the Inhumans would be famous for. There's a bit of parlay in Atillan, and Maximus gets Evan Declan back in his clutches, which is... okay, whatever. Maximus has basically degenerated from being angry at the racist schism, and it's so sad to see him degenerate from exploding at Auran for wanting him to be the ideal of "I can be a king even though I am human", emphasizing his inferiority, to just "TERRIGENESIS! I DON'T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING! BUT! TERRIGENESIS!" God, it's such a sad degeneration of a character who went from basically a knockoff Loki (which is still entertaining) to a bog-standard villain.
Karnak also manages to get Auran to help him to revive Gorgon, which... I'll buy? Karnak and Auran are two characters whose writing hasn't been completely horrible and they have some semblance of a character arc, so it's nice that these two at least get some of it dealt with. Gorgon returns as a rampaging monster, though, so resurrection isn't all that good.
Perhaps one of the attempts to be strong narratively in this episode is having Medusa and Black Bolt argue about whether to kill Maximus, and how the little people will see the royal family after this (we see jack shit about the little people in this show, by the way, because developing Dave the lovesick surfer was so much more important than giving Auran or Bronanja, whose POVs would be a great way to see the Atillan society from). And it's absolutely fucking dumb that no one but Medusa knows how Black Bolt's sign language works, so Medusa has to translate Black Bolt's words for everyone's benefit, and then argue against Black Bolt... it's such an inelegant, stupid way to deliver inelegant, stupid dialogue, and any nuance that these scenes have is already partially ruined by that execution.
Oh well, at least it's better than, oh, Karnak trying to figure out how to plant weed or Gorgon getting surfers to fight for him. The show's still horrible in execution, plotting, characterization and dialogue, and I've really decided that I don't care at all for Black Bolt or Medusa with their unsympathetic motivations (Medusa's at least defrosting over the course of the season), but at least this time around we get somewhat decent gems in it all.
No comments:
Post a Comment