The Inhumans S01E03 Review: Disjointed

The Inhumans, Season 1, Episode 2: Divide and Conquer

Episode three [two, because apparently the first two episodes are counted as a single pilot movie] of Marvel's the Inhumans really got to be more and more boring as the scenes ended up feeling like absolutely disjointed material that jump erratically from one character to the next. Half the cast feel like they're just milling around waiting until other characters does something else, and splitting the cast apart into the world really doesn't do much when the show repeats the same old "oh no strangers from another world in our world, and they don't understand!" spiel over and over again, and it's absolutely uninteresting having every single character befriend a different human over and over.

The weakest part of it all has to be Gorgon, who is a character whose personality boils down to 'rawr me fight!' Add that to the horrid lines that the script gives him, and the absolutely what-the-fuck-ery of Gorgon's surfer buddies randomly deciding to fight for Gorgon's king because they... are ex-military? And also used to serve a king? That sounds absolutely half-baked as an excuse. God, Gorgon and the surfers are a horrifyingly bad scene that genuinely hurts me when I watched it. They are assaulted by Auran, who gets sent a bunch of new reinforcements of random Inhuman troops, including Flora (whose powers involve opening a pathway through a jungle that's honestly not even that dense) and Mortus, who's supposed to be this scary death dealing steel monster with glowy eyes, but looks like a cheaply-costumed Kamen Rider enemy, whose powers is basically that of Cyclops. (This won't be the only time I'll compare Inhumans to other better-written superheroes).

Thankfully, the subsequent fight scenes between Gorgon's army of surfer soldiers and Auran's army of Inhumans are a bit more colourful, bringing a bit of excitement to the episode. 

The rest of the other Earth-bound Inhumans are honestly just kind of crap, though. Ken Leung tries his best to portray Karnak as this conflicted person whose powers of planning-ahead ends up not working after his head injury. I think it's supposed to be a tender moment when he confesses to the marijuana lady about how he's made mistakes and he's unsure, but honestly that's not particularly impressive or really makes me care about the character, especially since I don't get the train of thought that leads him to want to stay with the weed dudes who tied him up and were discussing to kill him. Medusa spends the entire episode wandering around confused, ordering ATMs to give her money (which is just pathetic rather than funny -- if Thor and Wonder Woman has taught me anything, you need to have the bombast and hamminess to back up the absurdity of doing something like this), breaks into a house to steal their stuff, and then follows a newspaper to where Black Bolt.

Black Bolt, at least, this time around, doesn't look constipated all the time (that moment with the chess piece is the type of voiceless acting that the actor needs to do more), but he meets Sammy the Inhuman, who, very, very coincidentally for him, is in the same prison as him and is working with one doctor Evan Declan (Henry Ian Cusick, another Lost alumnus) who is apparently a friend to the Inhumans. For some reason. We get to see Black Bolt beat the crap out of some jackass policemen in a prison, and Sammy playing alongside Black Bolt makes him have someone to interact with, and that's a lot better for the character.

There's the plotline with the police officer wanting to throw Black Bolt into gen pop to get people to beat him up and get him to talk, because apparently these policemen have never heard of mute people before.

In Atillan, the royalty plot is absolutely bland and uninteresting. The show genuinely has some good setup with Maximus wanting to abolish the caste system but going through some evil shit to ensure it, while giving us the backstory of how Maximus is basically discarded because he's a human, while the destructive Black Bolt gets the love of their parents because he's an Inhuman... but then proceeds to do nothing with it, continuing to portray Maximus as a card-carrying megalomaniacal tyrant. Crystal also ends up being a generic rebel lady (who, thanks to the dialogue she's given, feels so much like a little brat instead of the independent young woman she's supposed to be), who escapes... and Maximus paints Crystal as someone running from her problems despite, y'know, the lady being in obvious distress. Crystal manages to escape to Earth with Lockjaw, and some dickwad proceeds to run over the big dog, leading to -sigh- yet another inevitable Inhuman-befriends-human moment. God damn, I've seen 80's cartoons with more predictable plot points than this.

Oh, yeah. Mysterious Evan Declan doctor. And the lady that Medusa meets, who's around since the pilot... Louise, I think? She's a generic investigator lady, and I do mean generic in all sense of the world.

It's definitely a better episode than the first two, but that's not much of an achievement. The show is still hurt by haphazard pacing, unlikable protagonists (Medusa and Karnak are easily the worst of the bunch at this point), and a very, very repetitive plot. We did get a whole lot of new characters introduced who then proceeds to be generic humans or faceless grunts. At least we got the Gorgon/Auran fight, and the backstory flashback. That was decent. Overall, still pretty blah of a show.