Swamp Thing [2019], Season 1 Review

Swamp Thing [2019], Episodes 1-10

[originally reviewed as individual reviews from June 2019-October 2019]

_____________________________________________________

Swamp Thing, Episode 1: Pilot

It's kind of a shame that I'm opening this series pilot review with the foreknowledge that this season was not only cut in half due to studio and budgetary mandates, it was also cancelled after that very first season. I'll try to not let that affect how I view this show, but it's going to be interesting looking at this show with that knowledge in mind. It's not a show that's trying to make enough of an impression in its first season to draw in the audience and last for a long time; it's a show that's through no fault of its own ended up being prematurely axed.

Which is a shame, because Swamp Thing is a pretty interesting pilot. Yes, perhaps it was a bit too long for my tastes, and I generally do think that most superhero shows that try to serve up one-hour episodes tend to really stretch for content to put inside them (and they're kind of a chore to watch). This episode was neat enough, but there were a couple of scenes that certainly were obviously there to pad things out with the excuse of "setting up characters" or the like.

Swamp Thing itself is a pretty interesting creature. While ostensibly living in a world of superheroics and having some B-horror-movie sci-fi aspect going on to it, it's at its core a story of soul-searching with horror and spiritual elements. Different incarnations of Swamp Thing have had differnet aspects of the character played up -- the spiritual aspect, the sci-fi monster aspect, the plant elemental aspect, the body horror aspect, the American Gothic sensibility... the live-action adaptation in 1982 that arguably solidified the whole "shambling plant man-monster living in the swamp" thing as a trope now commonly seen in many other pieces of media.

And the pilot episode is... it's interesting enough to drag me in, even if it is admittedly trying too much to sell me on this city in Louisiana instead of the Swamp Thing itself. The mysterious Swamp Thing is honestly only glimpsed very briefly in the beginning and at the end of this pilot episode, with the vast majority of the screentime devoted to the two people trying to figure out a mysterious plague that has befallen the small swamp-side town. Dr. Abigail "Abby" Arcane (played by Crystal Reed, who recently played Sofia Falcone in Gotham) is a highly competent and compassionate doctor from the CDC that has had history in the town, whereas dr. Alec Holland is an eccentric, strange scientist that has already been studying a strange super-fertilizer, a mutagen or a growth accelerant of sorts.

It's partly a mystery episode as Abby and Alec try their best to try and figure out the simultaneous mystery of a plague of sickness that's been spreading across the town of Marais, and what seemed to initially just a strangely hard-to-cure disease turns out to be weird when Abby goes off to investigate the hose of the first child to fall victim, finding her father and part of the hose encased in horrifying vinelike growths. Even while I know exactly what the Swamp Thing is all about, it's extremely effective and certainly horrrifying visual.

Meanwhile, as Alec gives us a quick showcase of the mysterious accelerant he's been finding by centrifuging the swamp waters and showcasing just how fast it causes dead plant vines to grow, both Alec and Abby end up learning more about each other. Turns out that Alec is a bit of a fraud that's been fired for falsifying evidence in a paper (because the 'truth' matters more?) and has already been fired by his supposed sponsor, local big businessman Avery Sunderland. Abby herself has had dealings with the Sunderland faily, formerly being best friends with their deceased daughter, although we don't quite learn the specifics of what Abby did to make the Sunderland couple so angry at her, it's definitely the reason she hasn't came home in a while and she clearly blames herself enough to dramatically state that she "killed" Shauna.

And while the show is taking its slow, sweet time to slowly build up the mystery and the revelations -- not always to great success -- we also meet a bunch of the townspeople. In addition to the Sunderlands, we get to meet sheriff Matt, as well as Abby's good friend Liz, and her CDC co-worker. Oh, and a blind fortune teller called "Xanadu", who comic book fans will probably get a chuckle out of. None are super memorable other than Mama Sunderland's pretty tense meeting with Abby, which honestly makes me think that the pilot could've been a bit more condensed, and we could've had the more extraneous scenes with the side characters either shortened or moved to the subsequent episodse.

Perhaps the most horrifying and what I would call the signature scene of the episode is when the corpse of Boyle, the fisherman dad, ends up starting to twist as the plant roots and vines within it start to thrash aroud in response to Alec and Abby mucking around with the mutagen halfway across the room, eventually bursting up and transforming the corpse into a horrifying Croneneberg-esque mass of vines and flesh that still has some semblance of a humanoid figure even if it's technically a gigantic mass of thrashing vines.

And honestly, without the knowledge that a superhero origin story is coming somewhere down the line, these short revelations and genuinely horrifying bits with the ever-encroaching sentient vines are genuinely well done, hinting that there's something that's definitely not right with the swamp and the plants there. From the zombie corpse, to how they initially find that body, to the presence of the strange mutagens, and how Abby and Alec eventually find a mysterious destroyed boat encrusted in a massive pillar of vines -- which the audience saw in the prologue -- is pretty amazingly executed.

Of course, when their discovery seems to be at a head, Alec goes off to try and fish out all of the other super-mutagen boxes in the swamp while Abby deals with the more medical stuff, but ends up getting shot by a mysterious man on a boat, and Alec's mortally wounded body falls into the swamp. Abby's panic as she goes out is met with attacks frm the mysterious vines, and the first encounter of the shambling man-thing that is the Swamp Thing. And while they are using a guy in a suit for the Swamp Thing as opposed to the CGI vine monsters earlier in the episode, it's to the costume designers' credit that the Swamp Thing genuinely looks like a mass of moss, plants, lichen and icky swamp matter moulded into the shape of a man instead of "a dude with a suit that has plants plastered all over".

Again, while the pacing's a bit slow, I really do appreciate what good horror television this ended up making this first episode of Swamp Thing. Always a huge fan of sci-fi based horror, and while Swamp Thing isn't quite just "plants mutated by science" and has a fair amout more going on for it, the visuals and the atmosphere of the show certainly manages to hook me in as this creepy sci-fi mystery-horror show. The pilot's not perfect, with Alec coming off as being pretty assholish early on, and some parts of the show feeling way too awkwardly scripted (Abby telling Alec about how she 'killed' Shauna, for one), but the faults are minor enough that I can overlook them. An enjoyable pilot, if nothing else. 

_____________________________________________________

Swamp Thing, Season 1, Episode 2: Worlds Apart; Episode 3: He Speaks

The second episode of Swamp Thing is still pretty slow-paced, but it is certainly a pretty good one. And honestly, it's such a shame that the real-life circumstances behind this show led to its cancellation. I'm not claiming that Swamp Thing is like the best superhero TV show or anything like that, but it's been consistently well-done as a mystery horror show, which is actually what I want more out of Swamp Thing. 

The focus is still securely on Abby Arcane and her running around trying to uncover what the fuck's going on with the city, and while we still have a couple of new character introductions (ones that will make DC geeks like me grin a little at the cheeky way they sneak some superhero characters in), the episode is free from what bogged down the first episode, which is a lot of "as you know..." moments. Abby is free to go around pursuing her leads, and while there are definitely lulls in the episode due to the procedural nature of the episode, it's not terrible enough to make be go bored or disinterested. Perhaps my favourite scene is the meeting between Abby and Avery Sunderland. We know there was some bad blood between Abby and the Sunderlands, but Avery Sunderland apparently views Abby as a surrogate daughter... while also being a gigantic slimeball all at once. Some really great scripting and acting on this scene for sure. The rest of Abby's scenes aren't bad as she tries to figure out the mystery behind what Alec Holland was working on, and that romance bit might be a bit too rushed, but Crystal Reed really ends up making the character a fair bit more interesting than she otherwise would be. 

I kinda wish the second episode wouldn't give away the hue twist that of course Avery Sunderland is the hue corporate businessman who's totally behind the dumping of toxic waste in the swamps, working with the entertaining Jason Woodrue (!!!) to apparently produce some kind of super growth accelerant... they just didn't expect the accelerant to cause the weird green flu or whatever. Woodrue is entertaining, and his mannerisms honestly is pretty fun -- he straddles the line between "lovable asshole" to just a straight-up dick, particularly to people that aren't Avery. Looking forward to see more of these two, even if I'm not 100% sure how their monetization of the bio-goop works. 

Meanwhile, the Swamp Thing (which the show's final scene confirms is Alec Holland to the viewers that are particularly dense) is going through some pretty interesting moments. We don't get to see a lot of him, as he spends most of his time in this episode just wandering the muck in the swamp, but apparently he's psychically connected to the little girl Susie, and I'm a fan of that scene where Swamp Thing rips apart chunks of his plant-moss body in tandem with Susie ripping apart her IV lines and shit. This leads to the convergence of the three plotlines of the episode. Susie wants to return to the swamp and stows away on the boat of one of Avery/Woodrue's smugglers or something, right at the same time that Abby and her police friend goes off to the swamp. 

The sense of panic and confusion as the random thug runs and chases after Susie in the swamp, that harpoon-through-the-face scene, and the frantic, claustrophobic scene where Susie tries to hide in some ramshackle hut in the swamp are all pretty well done. The swampy action isn't the best and isn't particularly spectacular, but I really love the genuinely over-the-top gory death of the thug as Swamp Thing summons a bunch of vines to quite literally rip him into many itty-bitty bits. 

It culminates with Abby arriving to see Susie next to the Swamp Thing in all his glory, one of the few times in this episode that the Swamp Thing suit (?) isn't shadowed in any way, and it's pretty glorious. The Swamp Thing is clearly a monster, but it's clearly sentient and also a protector of some sorts. 

I'm not too enthused with the B-plot of this episode of Maria Sunderland meeting Madame Xanadu. It's obviously meant to be a hint that Swamp Thing isn't just the result of a mutagenic goop turning a corpse into a plant-man, but that there's something mystical happening in the swamp... but I dunno, the scenes are paced way too awkwardly. That random twist that Maria's apparently cuddling with the ghostly corpse of her dead daughter is a pretty creepy shot, for sure. 

Overall, there definitely are some mis-shots in this episode. I'm not feeling a lot of the side-characters that Abby works with -- the lovesick cop and the girl best friend feel throwaway to me for now, and I'm not the biggest fan of Maria and Xanadu... but episode two definitely works out pretty well as part of the 'early chapter setup' episodes.

The third episode is also relatively neat, although it does end up playing out like more traditional superhero fare. I do like that the dude that the Swamp Thing killed, Munson, ends up being reanimated in a pretty cool way by a swarm of insects and worms -- presumably The Rot itself, if not something connected to it. I do like that Swamp Thing, still unsure what or who he is, ends up hallucinating that Munson is condemning Alec Holland for killing him. Zombie Munson ends up being the 'villain of the week', sort of, for the episode, even as the disease ends up ravaging more people, including some of Abby's fellow doctors. Of course, there's still a lot of mystery going on here -- how much is the disease just part of the swamp's own... defense mechanism or whatever? How much of it is mystical and how much of it can be explained by science? Where does the Rot come into play in all this?

It's just kind of a shame that Zombie Munson sort of disappears after he gets introduced, shows up briefly later only for the third act action scene. The episode does get a lot of mileage from the sheer creepiness of a gaunt zombie man animated by rotting insects, for sure, although after the first couple of creepy bug-man scenes, Swamp Thing just shows up and exorcises the evil influence out of Munson's body without much effort. As the title itself notes, though, "He Speaks", so Swamp Thing, well, speaks in this one. He acknowledges that he is (or was) Alec Holland in a fashion, and ends up giving Abby Arcane a clue to curing the current strain of the disease. The disease is 'not fighting -- fighting back', which means that in order to cure it, Abby ends up administering immuno-suppressants to stabilize the patients. I still think that there's a bit of ridiculous angst stemming from Abby being sad over losing Dr. Holland since Abby and Alec knew each other for like a day or something, which is kind of an unfortunate side-effect of showing their first meeting in the first episode. I wonder if the show wouldn't have been better served introducing them as already being involved.

The rest of the B-plots are still... eh? Again, the only B-plots outside of Abby and Swampy that I seem to be interested in are the Sunderlands and Dr. Woodrue. Woodrue this time around gets to be an absolute asshole who gives a speech about how he doesn't care about life... but then apparently shows up with a noble Mr. Freeze esque motivation to cure his wife's Alzheimer's.

Ghost Shawna seems to be creepy but well-meaning, essentially telling Maria to not completely trust Avery. With Avery seemingly losing part of his business, and thanks to Ghost Shawna's advice, Maria shuts Avery out from asking even more of her money. The fact that we see that Avery apparently seems very willing to flirt with Officer Cable is definitely ringing alarm bells, too. Avery ends up going around and killing the shit out of loan officer Gordon, who was pressured by Liz in her own sub-plot to uncover whatever the Sunderlands are doing, and whatever Avery is doing with "The Conclave". It's pretty brutal, and honestly pretty well done acting from Will Patton. Good stuff all around on his side of the episode.

Liz, as mentioned before, is going around doing her investigation although the screentime devoted to her is honestly pretty lacking, and if not for the connection to the loan officer, I would've forgotten she showed up in this episode at all. Her girlfriend ends up furthering the plot a little by finding part of Alec's boat, riddled with bullets. Matt Cable ends up showing up at a party and working up the courage to ask Abby for a dance as the Swamp Thing watches forlornly from the swamp. Knowing my DC comics lore I know Matt Cable's going to be important in the future, but man, right now he's kind of an accessory.

The other DC not-yet-superhero characters meet each other again, with Madame Xanadu giving Daniel Cassidy a reading in the sole scene that the two of them have in this episode. Apparently there is a tarot reading that Cassidy has constantly been trying to prove... and it's the same reading, but in reverse. Okay? I do like that they're doing a bit more with Cassidy other than making him just sort of like a dudebro actor man, but I felt like they could've integrated this a bit better.

Overall, I kind of feel like episode 3 ended up perhaps trying to do a bit too much. So many of the storylines -- hell, even Swamp Thing's hallucination and his first meeting with Abby -- end up feeling truncated and short, and I honestly wonder if some scenes (like the Xanadu/Cassidy or Liz's bland investigation) could've been better if they transplanted them into episode 2 and explored the storylines in a more concrete way. The episode itself is still pretty solid watch and all, but I really wish it was structured a bit better.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Daniel Cassidy is the alter-ego of the DC superhero Blue Devil. Clearly, his origin story hasn't happened yet, and he's still an actor playing a character called Blue Devil (he gets merged with the suit he's acting in as part of his origin story) -- we get to see the posters and the name of his in-universe Blue Devil character on both the walls and the wallpaper of his laptop.
• Dr. Jason Woodrue in the comics is the alter ego of the plant-mutant monster Floronic Man (who also goes by many different alter-egos over the years like the Seeder, the Plant Master and Floro. Originally an enemy of the Atom, he would be most well-known as one of the Justice League's enemy as a member of various incarnations of the Injustice Gang. Most of you would remember him as the evil scientist that was responsible for Poison Ivy's creation in the live-action Batman & Robin movie. 

_____________________________________________________

DC's Swamp Thing, Season 1, Episode 4: Darkness on the Edge of Town

Okay, this episode was pretty great. The third of episode of Swamp Thing introduces a threat that's a bit more impressive than just the relatively abstract threat of the green flu and the general whole corporation profiteering that Avery Sunderland and Dr. Woodrue are up to. Sure, the bug-decay zombie was dealt with pretty quickly by Swamp Thing's supernatural powers, but this episode ends up throwing another maybe-supernatural, maybe-scientific foe our way in the form of a fear-plague that is transmitted from one person to the next, hopping like some sort of ghost changing hosts. It's actually a pretty neat little threat, with different minor supporting characters hallucinating and experiencing their worst fears, and the hallucination stopping when the odd fear-plague jumps into a new host. 

We're not sure if this is the same entity that possessed the corpse of that one dude Swamp Thing killed last episode, but it certainly is yet another sign that the magics of the swamp itself is being corrupted. We get a particularly horrifyingly gory bit with the first showcase of this fear-plague, with the poor deli worker stabbing his own arms and plunging his entire hand into a weird meat-grinder machine to get rid of the snakes that he sees. That's pretty nasty. The other fear hallucinations, thankfully, aren't quite as gory, mostly just involving guns and the characters (Delroy, Chief Lucile) going through some of their worst fears... and Abby, of course, coming face-to-face with the dark figure of her father basically being a gigantic douchehole to her before she managees to stumble her way into the swamp and get Swamp Thing to expunge the disease from her. 

And... for the most part, Swamp Thing is still pretty damn confused about what's going on with him. Sure, Abby's trying to try and work out the bizarre plant/animal cell combination that Swamp Thing has -- and we get an encouter with Dr. Woodrue, who sort of latches on to Abby's research with a "pinky swear I promise I am going to be ethical" bit. Not a whole ton of progress is made on this front, because Avery Sunderland is still gathering funds while Abby's distracted by the whole fear plague thing, but it's interesting. Avery gets an interesting subplot where he basically continues to try and manipulate and worm his way into everyone's good graces by acting all sorry for poor little Susie Coyle, and ends up paying off her relatives in order for Avery to adopt her -- both for good publicity, and to basically fill the childless void that his wife has, which, in turn, get her to help fund Woodrue's research to cure the poor sick widdle orphan. (With Shauna's ghost roaming in the house, though, this can't be good). 

Xanadu and Daniel Cassidy, the other DC superheroes, are... done a bit better here. Turns out that Cassidy has made a deal with some larger figure, something or someone, that tasked him to do a mission in this small town... and it seems to be helping out Abby Arcane. It's an interesting little idea that makes Cassidy's involvement in subsequent episodes feel a bit more natural now that we know he's a man with some sort of mission. 

Overall, a pretty solid episode. It builds up on the plot threads set up from previous episodes, it solves another small-town-supernatural-horror threat, and continues to build up on the backgrounds and histories of our characters. I just hope we do actually cover some of these payoffs before the season is over. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Abby Arcane's father, Anton Arcane, in the comics, is a pretty huge asshole that faced off against the Swamp Thing and his allies time and time again, and is pretty big on trying to corrupt his own daughter. I'm not going to spoil too much here, because it seems like this incarnation of Anton Arcane will probably be pretty faithful to the comic-book version. 

_____________________________________________________

DC's Swamp Thing, Season 1, Episode 5: Drive All Night

I'm slowly inching forwards and slowly watching through my backlog of miscellaneous superhero shows, and... yeah, I do agree that Swamp Thing as a show really deserved a better fate than what it got, with legal problems causing its cancellation after a single season. Because it really did have a lot of great quality packed into it. Take this fifth episode, "Drive All Night", for example. It's a very effective horror episode because we did get a couple of genuinely horrifying jump-scares in regards to Shawna, particularly that opening scene where it's clear that she's partially a vengeful spirit that's angry that her mother has "replaced" her with a new girl, and also out for some vague revenge against Abby. We later get the explanation that the Swamp has "twisted" her, and while throughout the series we've gotten hints of Abby and Shawna's tragic backstory, this episode finally reveals the truth about Shawna's disappearance, and the revelation that it's not just a tragic accident but might actually have some mystical elements behind it -- Shawna was pulled into the swamp; she didn't just drown -- is interesting. Most importantly, this means that some sort of dark corruption is already in the swamp even before Woodrue and all his chemical goo were dumped into the swamp. 

Abby spends most of the episode interacting with Shawna's ghost possessing Susie, slowly corrupting Maria Sunderland and basically leading to a plot where the ghost is trying to get Maria to walk and drown herself in the swamp. Kudos to child actress Elle Graham for playing the possessed Susie and her sneering familiarity and disdain towards Abby Arcane amazingly well. And, y'know, all the horror scenes in the first half of the episode are definitely pretty great. Never been the biggest fan of horror, but man, the imagery from the bathtub scene, the drowning corpse outside the window, the horrifying apparition that appears before Abby vomiting black goopy swamp snakes...

Meanwhile, we got a bunch of things that slowly hint more and more towards a wider world. The Swamp Thing is visited by a mysterious man on a boat that introduces himself as just a random passing stranger who ends up allowing Swamp Thing to slowly communicate and witness "The Green" and the loads of memories that the trees themselves are able to see. It's some desperately-needed focus on Alec/Swamp Thing, because the previous episodes, while exploring what the Swamp Thing and the Green are, doesn't really dwell too much on how Alec is taking in all this. This, of course, leads to the Green and the plantlife of the swamp imparting their knowledge to Swamp Thing -- particularly those relating to Abby and Shauna's past. I'm not sure if the mysterious boating man is meant to be just a generic avatar of the Green or the show's adaptation of iconic DC character Phantom Stranger, but either way, it's pretty neat. 

The supporting cast is also great. We don't get a lot of Madame Xanadu, other than her confessing her culpability in casting a ritual she wasn't sure would actually work (and was that ghost really Shawna?), but we get a fair bit of focus on Dan Cassidy. We get to see his old Blue Devil mask (complete with glowy eyes, hinting that the Blue Devil origin story might've already taken place, at least in part), and that he's still trapped within the town and we're not sure what his 'task' is. By the end of this episode, he's involved in the Liz/Avery storyline -- albeit by circumstance, and gets mortally wounded. I don't really care all that much for Liz as a character, honestly, who felt kind of like an accessory, but her poking Avery Sunderland who's getting more and more desperate to stamp out anyone who stands against him is definitely interesting. 

There's also a lot of stuff going around the cop family, which I'm genuinely not really feeling. Lucilia's sleeping with Avery; her son Matt killed Alec under Avery's orders; Lucilia killed some dude called Remy to cover for Matt; Matt has been doing Avery's dirty work to cover for a ton of blackmail Avery has on Lucilia. Also, y'know, there's the whole Liz/Avery thing going on. And Jason Woodrue is just skulking in the background, desperate to get the scientific breakthrough he needs, and ends up asking Avery for a hunting team to get the Swamp Thing into his laboratory table. 

Overall, I still think that the B-plots of the show are kind of something that as viewers, you're going to really like or just find it kind of clunky world-building. There are a bit too many pieces, I guess, and a lot of the other storylines felt pretty uninteresting compared to Abby, Maria, Swamp Thing, Woodrue and Cassidy. Still, a pretty great episode that mostly deals with a stand-alone crisis while also moving a lot of the mythology as well as the Avery Sunderland conspiracy plot forwards. 

_____________________________________________________

DC's Swamp Thing, Season 1, Episode 6: The Price You Pay

An... interesting episode. We take a break from a self-contained episodic supernatural threat that has been taking up a majority of the previous episodes, and actually have the supernatural and the mundane storylines come to a head. Swamp Thing ends up getting hunted by a bunch of hunters, who assault poor Swampy with bear traps and shotguns. Which, mind you, is definitely not going to hurt our good buddy Swamp Thing, but we've seen the Swamp Thing's horrifying plant powers before against people who deserve it. And these hunters, while morally ambiguous, are basically just there under contract. The Swamp Thing does end up punching a tree and using it to unleash a hail of spiky wooden spikes to take out one of the hunters, and later on we get to see a harrowing scene of the surviving hunters being both physically injured and mentally traumatized. It's an interesting sequence as Abby ends up being confused, particularly when Matt Cable ends up discovering the Swamp Thing's existence later on. Just how much has changed when Alec was turned into the Swamp Thing? How much of Alec's humanity is lost in the transformation?

The fact that Matt Cable was the one responsible for killing Alec Holland is also going to be interesting. Things come to a head when Swamp Thing seems to remember Matt... but not as the shooter that blew up his boat, but as a police officer that helped Abby that one time. It's going to be interesting to see how this particular revelation's going to happen... especially since Matt's probably going to go all green-eyed monster regarding Abby and Alec's relationship. I've been completely dismissive of Matt throughout basically the entire series prior to episode 5, but this situation definitely kind of re-ignites my interest on how Matt's going to be utilized in the show. 

This episode also ends up as a bizarre backdoor pilot to Blue Devil, which takes up a majority of the B-plot portion, and... and I'm not sure how I feel about that, really. We get to see a bit of his backstory, where he was a stuntman that ends up meeting a random stranger (the "Phantom Stranger" again) who offers him a chance to be something greater in exchange for future favours... and ends up causing him to be promoted from stuntman into the main Toku actor for the Blue Devil. And I guess it's the Stranger that ends up causing the Blue Devil to be cursed to stay in Marais for some undetermined purpose, too...

And then while Cassidy is in a coma, Dr. Woodrue, desperate to prove his mutagenic serum thing works after getting some samples of the Swamp Thing's plant-animal cells, ends up injecting Cassidy with the serum, causing him to wake up from permanent brain damage, but also to catch blue flame and run around town burning blue. So I guess the "Blue Devil" stuff is caused by the serum as opposed to a deal with the devil? I'm kind of curious, but I also kinda wished that the Blue Devil origin story could've been a bit more standalone as opposed to being tied into the Woodrue stuff. 

We get to see Woodrue himself get some great scenes with his wife, who just is tired of this all and just wants to leave Marais right now, but Avery Sunderland basically has a stranglehold on Woodrue, forcing him to continue his research, because despite the horrifying side-effects, Avery is determined to spin the Daniel Cassidy coma recovery thing as something that's going to benefit them both. Interesting, if predictable, situation for the villain side of things, and I'm actually pretty invested in Jason Woodrue's story. I mean, I know there's no way this isn't going to end with him becoming an evil twig-man, but still. 

The show also, I felt, kind of dropped the ball on Abby and Avery's conversation in this episode. After being informed by Liz about how the thugs that attacked her and Cassidy all but confirm that Avery sent them, Abby's angry argument with Avery felt very muted. I get that Abby has conflicting feelings about Avery, a man who's basically an asshole-father figure to her, but I felt like it was pretty underwhelming. I guess they're just saving it for subsequent episodes? And that's honestly what I think the episode felt -- mostly just setup. Which isn't bad, but it does make "The Price You Pay" feel like a weaker link compared to the previous episodes. 

_____________________________________________________

Swamp Thing, Season 1, Episode 7: Brilliant Disguise

I've been oh-so-slowly making my way through Swamp Thing and Punisher episodes, but they're... they're kinda heavy shows, y'know? It takes me a while to go through each individual episodes mostly due to how tense and serious they are.

"Brilliant Disguise" moves the plot along presumably to the final arc of this season, as we basically get introduced and are shown the name of "The Rot". The Swamp Thing spends a good chunk of this episode as Alec Holland because Abby ingested some... hallucinogens or something? It's certainly an excuse for Andy Bean to run around as an actor instead of just voicing a plant monster suit. The two of them sort of spend almost the entire episode sort of bonding and moving around, eventually leading to a sequence where Abby was nearly killed due to an encounter with a vine of the Rot. Really, she couldn't have asked Alec to take the sample for her? We do get some pretty neat showcases of the Swamp Thing's abilities, including apparently summoning and/or growing a bunch of exotic herbs to cure Abby's rot infection, and stab her with vines to help her inner microbes or whatever heal. 

While sort of a workaround in order to give the Swamp Thing and Abby a whole lot easier-to-film emotional interaction, the episode sort of ends with Abby going back to Atlanta's CDC facility to find a cure for what she's discovered, while the Swamp Thing seems to recognize that he's now part of something much, much bigger, with a much more powerful set of powers. Not sure what this will mean for the future. Are we writing Abby out until the last couple of episodes of the finale, giving the Swamp Thing some much-needed focus in his own series? Or are we just going to have an Abby-in-Atlanta subplot happening in the background of the next couple of episodes?

Meanwhile, the B-plot finally brings the Sunderlands and Cables together. It's a whole set of fun little backstabbing and treachery, and the revelation that Lucilia Cable and Maria Sunderland are actually in cahoots the whole time to get rid of Avery is pretty neat. Of course, it doesn't seem to be the end of Avery just yet since he survives falling into the swamp, but it's pretty fun to see the plan unfold -- especially since it's completely plausible that Avery and Lucilia were going off to hunt down Swamp Thing, which would bring them into conflict with the Alec/Abby pair.

That sequence where Avery tries to turn Matt and Lucilia against each other by revealing that he is Matt's father is pretty out-of-nowhere and kind of a silly soap opera complication to the whole Avery/Cables thing, but eh, it worked. Meanwhile, Maria shows that when not under the influence of a ghost, she's a lot more awesome and ends up arranging a meeting with both the naive and easily-manipulated Jason Woodrue with Avery's contact, one Nathan Ellery, representing a spooky organization that I think is called the Conclave. 

Ultimately, the plot moves nicely onwards and this is another very solid entry in Swamp Thing's first season. Despite some of the themes and general vibe of the show not really jiving with me, all of these episodes are consistently solid and it's a shame that the season was cancelled prematurely. 

_____________________________________________________

Swamp Thing, Episode 8: Long Walk Home

After the focus in the previous episode was arguably how the various other players in Maris dealt with Avery Sunderland, episode 8, "Long Walk Home", was focused on Avery himself ending up meeting the Swamp Thing, being rescued from dying in the swamp, and Avery's own conflicting emotions on what to do. He is certainly grateful for being rescued by the Swamp Thing (particularly when Swampy makes it clear that the Green would've rather left him to rot and die), and seems to at least be willing to help Swamp Thing return to becoming the human Alec Holland once more. Of course, this seems to have been turned upside the head at the end of the episode, because of one Jason Woodrue. Woodrue manages to convince Avery to basically "let him save thousands more", and if Avery becomes a legend in history and Woodrue manages to find the ever-elusive dementia cure, it would've benefit them both. There's some really great acting moments from Will Patton particularly in that scene with Woodrue, where his fake enthusiasm and him trying to convince himself to do a decent thing for once is apparent. 

And... and it's pretty well-served? The way the show handles the characters in the show wouldn't be how I would've done so if I was writing this thing, admittedly -- the fact that the Swamp Thing himself feels more like a supporting character at best and a plot device at worst in his own show instead of the main character has always rankled me a fair bit, and it felt particularly bad in this one, where most of what we see of good old Swampy has been in brief scenes of cryptic conversations, until the action scene at the end. And I get that filming with that huge plant-monster suit couldn't have been easy or cheap, but still, I really wished we had actually gotten more from Swamp Thing as a character. When he gives his motive rant about how he's essentially an entity serving the Green, the mystical force of the swamp, it feels more like something taken from the series bible or a wikipedia page more than something that the character himself would say. 

I do like the focus on Avery Sunderland, though, who's been surprisingly pretty well-developed over the course of these past couple of episodes from the manipulative mustache-twirling evil businessman he originally was. The random flashback to how his dad was killed by the swamp for trying to chop down a scared tree is perhaps a bit much and went on for a bit too long, but I really do like what we did get, and the fact that Avery lost his daughter and his father to the swamp really gives him an almost childish hatred towards the swamp as opposed to a generic "businessman does not care about nature" motivation. 

Meanwhile, Abby's in Atlanta's CDC center and dealing with bureaucracy and stuff. Apparently, the Conclave, Avery's James Bond villain buddies, have a stranglehold on the CDC. Seeing Abby bond with her best buddy Harlan is neat, but ultimately I feel it's just there to give another gut punch when the Conclave members abduct Harlan. The Conclave itself has been way too oblique, though, which I know is something that such dark-and-mysterious organizations are supposed to be, but it's really hard for me to care about what this enigmatic organization wants beyond monopolization of the sci-fi plot device. They did give Woodrue a lab, though. That's nice of them. Abby's leg of the story is... it's logical, really -- she's the sort of protagonist character who doesn't realize the amount of reach the bad guys have, and by going around basically looking for clues in all of the official places, she has ended up losing her position in the CDC and caused the Conclave to come down on them. Also, as her superior officer dr. Palomar notes, as far as the town of Marais is concerned, Abby's spent far more time in the swamp as opposed to hospitals and whatnot, which isn't a good look for her. 

What else? There's a bit of a C-plot about the Cable mother/son pair, but I really don't think I care all that much about those characters. The hallucination of Lucillia sprouting a fuck-ton of creepy thorny vines from her face-holes is creepy, though. Ultimately, it's your typical darkest-hour part of a narrative, with Swamp Thing captured using the aid of nitrogen gas, Harlan's abducted, Avery and Woodrue are relatively solidly evil, and Abby's the only one who can stop it all. With two episodes left, though, I wonder just how much of the B-plots we've been building up in the background (the Cables, Blue Devil, Phantom Stranger, Madame Xanadu, the Rot, Floronic Man) will get resolved. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Dr. Palomar, Abby's CDC boss, is played by Adrienne Barbeau, who played Alice Cable (a renamed version of Abby Arcane), the heroine of the 1982 Wes Craven Swamp Thing movie. 

_____________________________________________________

DC's Swamp Thing, Episode 9: The Anatomy Lesson

Well, that was definitely fun, and not territory that I thought the TV show was going to touch -- at least not in its first season. As Swamp Thing gets captured by the spooky science people and we get the genuinely gruesome dissection of Swamp Thing's plant-based humanlike organs, we are treated so some genuinely creepy visuals that they really can only get away with because it's all plant organs. Pretty great stuff with Woodrue just clinically cutting into Swamp Thing's "lungs" and "heart" with morbid fascination while we get some amazing voice acting from Swamp Thing's pained screams. All these scenes are set under green light, too, which is amazingly atmospheric. 

Most importantly, all this evil scientist torture ends up revealing one of the biggest things about the Swamp Thing -- he's not a human that is transformed into a plant-human hybrid. He's a plant that is trying its best to mimic the memories of a human that died in the swamp. Alec Holland is dead, and it's left gloriously ambiguous if Swamp Thing is just mimicking Alec's memories, or if there's some soul-transference thing going on, or something else. With the whole point of the Swamp Thing comics being the constant interweaving of maybe-science-maybe-magic explanations, it's absolutely well done.

But while that particular scene was well done, a lot of this episode (as do the previous one) really feel like they are rushing through things, and considering the very troubled production of this show... yeah, it's no surprise there. Kevin Durand manages to keep it together, but the previously consistently written Jason Woodrue goes full-tilt into crazy mad scientist mode, jumping off the crazy slope and being extremely cold and detached towards his wife. Caroline Woodrue ends up just sort of hovering from scene to scene, briefly describing a creepy nightmare to Jason, then talking to Abby, before eventually overdosing on medication at the end of the episode for that final tragic, tragic push to push Jason Woodrue over the edge. 

Abby spends most of the episode in full investigator mode, going around with Liz trying to figure things out from both Caroline Woodrue and Maria Sunderland, but ultimately ends up just sort of hiding in a closet while the Blue Devil arc wraps up. Being benched on the hospital bed for the past couple of episodes, Daniel Cassidy is visited by the Phantom Stranger once more, showing him a vision of Abby and Liz being killed by the evil commando soldiers, unless he 'chooses', and, of course, that choice involves him transforming into the Blue Devil, where he unleashes the mother of all brutal scenes as he rampages and murder-kills all of the commandos with his newfound hellish transformation. 

The problem with this? We really don't get that much context about Dan Cassidy's character beyond some vague 'deal with the devil stranger' bit, and if I wasn't already familiar with the Blue Devil character from the comics, a lot of his character development really ends up feeling bizarre. Dan doesn't really share that many scenes with Abby or Liz, honestly, so him suddenly deciding to stop running away and decide to rescue the other main characters end up feeling pretty shoehorned in. Throw in the decision to almost immediately have Blue Devil bugger off out of Marais also feels like a forced wrap-up. The concept of the Blue Devil itself, while a great visual scene to watch, is also pretty confusing. Is it a Hulk-like transformation? Did Dan Cassidy channel a demon? How conscious is he in either making the decision or when he operates as the Blue Devil? Just how the hell does any of these have anything to do with Marais or the Swamp Thing? Again, as a comic-book fan who's more familiar with Blue Devil as a character, I know what's going on, but I imagine it'd be a whole lot more confusing for anyone watching this for the first time.

Speaking of conclusions, Maria Sunderland also was rushed as Avery shows up, makes up some lie about how she's crazy (bringing up the whole 'take their foster daughter into the swamp' thing as evidence), and she spends her time locked up in an asylum. Another pair of characters that are seemingly dispatched of quickly is the rest of the Sunderland/Cable conspiracy, as Matt randomly gets into a drunken car accident that genuinely made me go "wait, what?" I simultaneously roll my eyes at the pretty obvious dispatching of the more mundane, less-mystically-inclined characters, yet at the same time, I've also been feeling like they've already done a lot of their part and may have overstayed their welcome. 

Ultimately, everything is wrapping up to the finale, which I assume is going to be Abby and Swamp Thing facing off against... the rest of the Conclave's nameless agents? Crazy Jason Woodrue, who hasn't been transformed yet? And that's not taking into account the whole angst that Swampy's going to feel from the revelation of his true nature. I'm genuinely curious just how neatly the series is going to be wrapped up. It's genuinely a shame -- throughout these episodes, Swamp Thing has been pretty consistently well-written. And while I did bemoan them focusing on all the wrong characters, it has been a good run. Now we'll see if we get a proper conclusion. 

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The huge revelation that Swamp Thing isn't Alec Holland, but "a plant trying its best to be Alec Holland", was part of the huge status-quo-shaking soft reboot when Alan Moore took over the writing tasks of Swamp Thing in the early 80's, revamping the story to go from the classic pulp sci-fi into the more spiritual mixture of sci-fi and magic that Swamp Thing is generally known for these days. The title of that issue is "Anatomy Lesson", which this episode's title homages. 

_____________________________________________________

Swamp Thing, Episode 10: Loose Ends

And, taken away from us too soon, is DC's 10-episode Swamp Thing TV series. Alas, it was a pretty sad affair that forces outside of the show ended with the show's cancellation, since the 10 episodes have largely been pretty consistently good, and, hell, despite the rewrites and the lack of three subsequent episodes, episode 10 even serves as a very, very satisfying conclusion to the story arcs in this season, something that I was genuinely impressed by.  

First up is the fixing of one of my biggest problems the show has. Swamp Thing as a character has largely been reduced to a reactionary force in the background, only really coming into his own in the last couple of episodes, particularly the superb acting when he discovered that he was, in fact, not Alec Holland. Swamp Thing's mournful gait and expression as he made his way into the swamp, as he dragged out the corpse of the man that was Alec Holland, was amazingly shown, despite the dark lighting and the fact that I'm watching a god-damn rubber suit. Throughout the episode, Swamp Thing, Abby and even a brief appearance by the ghost/spirit of Alec Holland calls into question the nature of the Swamp Thing itself. Is he Alec Holland, transformed and transferred into a new body? Is he a brand-new being who stole Alec's memories? It's some pretty great existential crisis, and a neat sense of self-discovery. 

Of course, it's the finale of a TV show and you got to have an action scene, so we've got an appropriately amazingly creepy scene as the Swamp Thing unleashes all of the forces of the swamp against a bunch of gung-ho mercenaries. Between crucifying a stray member of the group, or stabbing some poor fucker through the jaw with a massive vine, or the roar as he just charges and tosses these outclassed fools around, Swamp Thing wasn't kidding when he said he's now actively ready and is fighting back. Surprisingly for a show cancelled to early, they certainly didn't skimp out on the special effects for this one. 

Perhaps the coolest scene was Swamp Thing confronting Ellery. Sure, it's a pretty basic "tell the others not to come", which will inevitably lead to a sequel hook in the now-non-existent second season, but the fact that Swamp Thing now embraces his bizarre nature and actually doesn't give a shit about any of this "for the good of humanity" thing is pretty intriguing. That was also the mother of all bestial roars that we got out of Swampy. Ultimately, Swamp Thing tells Abby that, yeah, he could've just walked into the swamp and allowed himself to essentially join the rest of the Green or something along those lines, losing himself in the hive-mind of the plants, but decided to stay as who he was because of Abby. Meanwhile, Abby doesn't think any less of Swamp Thing just because he's not Alec Holland. It's a neat, relatively upbeat conclusion for these guys. 

Meanwhile, the other side of the finale is... uh... the show's newfound focus for Swamp Thing came at the sacrifice of Abby and the rest of the human cast. I already forget Liz exists half the time, but Abby ends up basically bouncing off of the Swamp Thing set and the Woodrue storyline, and, again, the acting with Jason Woodrue is certainly pretty neat as he goes through the admittedly scenery-chewing scene of sautee-ing Swamp Thing's harvested not-heart and not-lungs, wanting to feed them to his catatonic-but-conscious wife... but ends up eating a spoonful himself and, of course, exhibiting some plant-manipulation powers before he continues ranting about how great it is to be a monster and how it's going to cure his wife... until, of course, Abby comes, brings the cavalry, and Jason Woodrue gets dropped with a taser. That's another antagonist down, and he remains down until the post-credits scene. 

Perhaps the weakest part of this finale is the Avery/Lucilia bit, which perhaps stems from me not really caring all that much for those characters, and the fact that the silly Sunderland soap opera melodrama took up way too much of Swamp Thing's runtime for me. It's still a decent storyline on its own, though, although like a lot of the things in episode 9, it felt rushed like all hell. Lucilia tries to reconcile things with the not-comatose Matt, refuses to let Avery reconcile with their child, and then Avery decides to kill Lucilia through a pretty gruesome sequence of a stomach stab and drowning her car in the swamp... before seemingly succumbing to the green flu from the season pilot. Okay, then.

Meanwhile, in the asylum, we get a couple of short scenes of Maria Sunderland going crazy and being attacked by random ghostly wall-hands until Xanadu puts her mind at peace by reuniting her with her daughter's spirit or something. Daniel Cassidy gets a brief goodbye to Liz, gives a hasty confused introdump, and he can finally head off out of Marais. Okay? Poor Liz and Xanadu don't even have any sort of a proper character arc either. 

And after the credits roll, we get Matt Cable returning to his house to find the corpse of his mother with a whole lot of plant growths... and comes face to face with Jason Woodrue, fully mutated into the amazing-looking Floronic Man (holy shit that suit though) who proceeds to attack and presumably kill him. Okay, then? 

Ultimately, some of the conclusions of the characters in the story felt... felt rushed and abrupt, which I suppose is, again, part of the cost of giving the main characters of Swamp Thing, Abby and Jason Woodrue a far more rounded-out storyline, and I do appreciate that if they had to rush things to its conclusion, they did so by tying a neat bow on most of the storylines and actually concluding the main part of the stories this season. Of course there's still a lot of things that are, well, 'loose ends', but they're loose enough that I would actually call this a satisfying season conclusion, with a lot of the other hanging plot threads working well as a sequel hook that isn't too open-ended. Ultimately, it made the season watchable despite its tragic fate of premature cancellation. Everything is wrapped out while enough is left open (the Conclave, Abby's parents, Floronic Man, Dan Cassidy and the Stranger, whatever's going on with the Conclave) if for some reason we would ever return to this version of Marais. It's been a great run, and it's a shame that it was taken from us too soon.