The Tick S01E03 Review: Amendment

The Tick, Season 1, Episode 3: Secret/Identity

The third episode of the Tick, and we get a fair bit of plot development, and, most of all, we learn a bit more about the Tick himself. It's hard to miss his... huge hamminess, and the fact that the lights might not all be on upstairs, but here we get some confirmation about his backstory. Or lack thereof -- the Tick has had amnesia, and remembers nothing prior to the beginning of the series, beyond the fact that he's a superhero and he apparently has a compulsive need to seek out Arthur for some reason.

The main plot at this point seems to be 'find Overkill', the insane Punisher-esque vigilante with gadgets and an insane streak of brutality. We're not sure if the Terror's still alive -- Lint shows up at Arthur's apartment to take back the suit (and appears to be successful in doing so) and at least she isn't involved in the Terror's uprising, because, she, too, believes that the Terror is dead. It could all simply be in Arthur's mind, after all, the wheeze-voiced old overlord of a supervillain. In a genre where conspiracies tend to be true 110% of the time, it's hilariously realistic to see that literally nobody gives a fuck about Arthur's insistence that the Terror is alive thanks to all the evidence that points otherwise.

Of course, after it seems that the whole Terror thing might just be in Arthur's mind, Overkill, when he shows up to fight the Tick in a pretty cool fight scene, ends up talking about how he needs the moth suit to defeat the Terror, so there might be a grain of truth to the conspiracy after all.

Oh, and as the title probably informs you, this time around we're mucking around with the whole concept of a secret identity, something that the Tick recognizes but simply doesn't think much of. Which is cool, since Arthur and his civilian life of filling out forms next to the blathering Yergen is not something interesting at all. Of course, without the moth suit (which Overkill and Ramses all want for some reason) Arthur can't really be much help to the Tick, not that he really has been much help beyond giving the Tick some vague directions as to what to do. If nothing else, despite the Tick's insistence that Arthur is the 'brains' of the operation, the Tick has been so much more of a stable emotional anchor for Arthur.

Oh, and we learn that thanks to the unmasking of a superhero named Cat-man-dude due to a bar brawl (Cat-man-dude has a hilariously alliterative name) which caused the slaughter of his puma-wife, the government enacted an amendment that states that superheroes cannot be unmasked by the police. Arthur somehow bluffs his way through the police interrogation by posing to be a superhero named Arthur (ha!) and since his story about Overkill's involvement checks out, he's let off.

Dottie gets a bit more screentime this time around, though she honestly doesn't do much beyond fill the role of the loved one who stumbles upon the hero's superheroing antics, this time hearing that the one who shot the Pyramid gangsters is the Tick. Not very invested in her at all, to be honest.