DC's Swamp Thing S01E01 Review: The Creature From the Black Lagoon

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.