The Tick S01E01 Review: Wackiness

The Tick, Season 1, Episode 1: Pilot

So, last month, the first six-episode season of Amazon's adaptation of the Tick aired. I know scant little about the Tick other than a couple of episodes from the 1994 cartoon that I can barely remember. I remembered he was bombastic, and had a big-ass chin. And I know he's getting a new live-action series adaptation, with a less-big-ass chin.

I clearly don't remember anything about the show, though, because I didn't even realize that the Tick had a sidekick, Arthur, who is the main character of the show as opposed to the Tick himself. Or maybe that's original to this particular adaptation. I could do some research, of course, on what the show's all about, but that wouldn't be quite as fun. 

So yeah. Let's see what we have here. The main story of the pilot follows Arthur, who is a man with some... obsessive tendencies. The poor man might be crazy, and the Tick might be a voice he hears in his head, and he's very convinced that the greatest supervillain of all time, the Terror, is still alive. We learn that this isn't the first time that Arthur has been obsessed with superheroes, because as a child he witnessed his father, and the local superheroes Flag Five, brutalized and murdered by the Terror, which will fuck with someone's brain quite a bit. Not to mention the Terror throwing little Arthur's ice cream onto his head! What a villain! The Terror is supposed to be killed in a battle against the universe's resident Superman, called Superion, but of course, they never quite found the body.

It's all neat backstory, and Arthur's interactions with his long-suffering sister Dot paints him as a well-meaning man underneath it all. As an adult, Arthur goes investigating on like a drug deal or some shit, but he's clearly unprepared, just a geeky and slightly mentally unstable dude who ends up over his head and getting his ass arrested by the police who think he's off his meds. But during his little stakeout, he meets the huge, bombastic musclebound superhero, the Tick. Who, while lacking his animated counterpart's gigantic hammer jaw, makes up for it with an insane amount of hamminess and hammy lines.

The Tick narrates a good chunk of the episode (and the final scenes show that he actually just says the lines out loud bombastically while perched on the side of a building), of course, and while we don't get as many scenes with the titular Tick as we do Arthur, he's still obviously quite important in his own show. He gives long-winded hammy speeches and apparently has no real concept of common sense, and is pretty hilarious. His proportions might not be as exaggeratedly musclebound as his cartoon or comic book counterpart, but hey, I guess it works. The show makes it ambiguous if the Tick is part of Arthur's delusions for a good chunk of the episode -- or, knowing the genre, like a split personality that takes over or some shit. But, of course, it isn't. Yeah, he seems to disappear when Dot or the policemen come into the scene, but we do get a scene of the Tick running around deflecting bullets and causing a huge explosion on the pier while Arthur is sleeping at home... or maybe is that some kind of split-personality thing where the Tick can only really manifest when Arthur's asleep? The man is certainly traumatized enough due to his childhood  Whether the Tick is real or not (I'm definitely leaning more towards 'real, but kooky') it's going to be interesting. 

And the final scene of the episode has the Tick basically bring one of the merchandise, including a gray moth-themed costume that he gives to Arthur, intent on making the nervous wreck of a man into his sidekick. Not just his sidekick in the conspiracy investigation front, but a straight-up Robin-to-his-Batman sidekick. Without training. The episode ends with the Tick giving a speech, Arthur just wearing his new costume, while the bad goons show up to shoot up Arthur's apartment.

There's a neat balance of earnest superheroing that borders slightly on parodying the superhero tropes, just as the Terror's brief scene in the episode is over-the-top (blinding Syphilis gun, anyone?) but still has enough menace and sliminess to actually take seriously. Both the Tick and Arthur are fun enough and well developed enough to follow through, and the premise is decent enough, with the whole thing seeped with a dose of weirdness. We'll see if the next few episodes prove to make this more memorable than an exercise in hamminess.