Marvel's Inhumans, Season 1, Episode 4: Make Way For... Medusa
When the dust from episode 3's action-fueled Inhuman-vs-Inhuman fights have settled down and these characters have to actually, y'know, function as characters, things fall sideways again. And in no small part due to how repetitive everything is, how generally unlikable half of the Inhuman royal family is, and how oddly written the human characters are -- honestly, half of the 'human friends' feel like plot devices to help our characters to get where they need, and there's literally no in-story reason for NASA girl to keep helping Medusa so much that she would break so many laws. Medusa has been nothing but queenly and nasty to her up until like the last two minutes of the episode, her whole backstory rant is exposition that doesn't have any bearing on her motivations to help Medusa, and her personality is easily summed up as "long-suffering sidekick". Ditto for Medusa's random flashback and her rant about how "dreams are stupid, ideals are stupid, all we need to survive". It's something that makes me understand the character more, but all it led is to the conclusion that "damn, lady, you're a bitch!"
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What else happened in this episode? Gorgon's storyline in trying to convince and now to prevent the Hawaiian natives from helping him to fight Maximus's assassins for the flimsiest of all flimsy reason is still stupid as all get-out, but at least we don't get to see a lot of that, and what little we do see had Gorgon acknowledging how much he fucked up. Maximus himself goes through another repetitive political "kill the Genetic Council" subplot... except didn't we already kill the Genetic Council last episode? Eh. Black Bolt, happy fat Earth-born Inhuman and dr. Evan Declan are fun enough, but they're also mostly just expository to the fact that they'll be able to use Black Bolt's perfect Inhuman DNA to cure the world of all diseases. Also that Declan is actually in league with Maximus without knowing that Maximus is evil or some shit. Black Bolt escapes Declan when he realizes he exchanged one prison for another, fought Mordis, and is reunited with Medusa. Progress!
Medusa, Karnak and Crystal get the brunt of the screentime, and I've already ranted about Medusa. The Crystal scene isn't horrible, but it's still pretty bland and repetitive. She asks some random human to help, apparently the human just knows a vet, and does a lot to help Crystal out, and Crystal now realizes humans aren't evil. It's told in such a dry manner that I cannot give a shit, and the side characters are so wooden that, fuck, I'm supposed to care that the vet and the random dude used to date the vet? Did we need two minutes to exposit that, really?
Karnak was the worst, though. Sure, I get that he's insecure and shit after apparently having his powers broken, but he spends the entire episode mucking around on the beach with his new marijuana-growing girlfriend, with brain-searingly bad dialogue like "I do it because I want to." Is there any real reason for them to be romantically involved? Was there even any chemistry between the two of them? Do I care that the marijuana girl's boyfriend is jealous and the big cliffhanger is that marijuana girl's boyfriend has killed their other friend?
So yeah. Other than Black Bolt and Maximus , I honestly find the entire main cast either flat-out unlikable or "why are we doing this scene with these dry characters?" Honestly, I'll be surprised if Inhumans ever got greenlit for a second season. Like, Agents of SHIELD wasn't the most consistently written series, but we lost that for this bullshit?
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