DC's Swamp Thing, Season 1, Episode 5: Drive All Night
I'm slowly inching forwards and slowly watching through my backlog of miscellaneous superhero shows, and... yeah, I do agree that Swamp Thing as a show really deserved a better fate than what it got, with legal problems causing its cancellation after a single season. Because it really did have a lot of great quality packed into it. Take this fifth episode, "Drive All Night", for example. It's a very effective horror episode because we did get a couple of genuinely horrifying jump-scares in regards to Shawna, particularly that opening scene where it's clear that she's partially a vengeful spirit that's angry that her mother has "replaced" her with a new girl, and also out for some vague revenge against Abby. We later get the explanation that the Swamp has "twisted" her, and while throughout the series we've gotten hints of Abby and Shawna's tragic backstory, this episode finally reveals the truth about Shawna's disappearance, and the revelation that it's not just a tragic accident but might actually have some mystical elements behind it -- Shawna was pulled into the swamp; she didn't just drown -- is interesting. Most importantly, this means that some sort of dark corruption is already in the swamp even before Woodrue and all his chemical goo were dumped into the swamp.
Abby spends most of the episode interacting with Shawna's ghost possessing Susie, slowly corrupting Maria Sunderland and basically leading to a plot where the ghost is trying to get Maria to walk and drown herself in the swamp. Kudos to child actress Elle Graham for playing the possessed Susie and her sneering familiarity and disdain towards Abby Arcane amazingly well. And, y'know, all the horror scenes in the first half of the episode are definitely pretty great. Never been the biggest fan of horror, but man, the imagery from the bathtub scene, the drowning corpse outside the window, the horrifying apparition that appears before Abby vomiting black goopy swamp snakes...
Meanwhile, we got a bunch of things that slowly hint more and more towards a wider world. The Swamp Thing is visited by a mysterious man on a boat that introduces himself as just a random passing stranger who ends up allowing Swamp Thing to slowly communicate and witness "The Green" and the loads of memories that the trees themselves are able to see. It's some desperately-needed focus on Alec/Swamp Thing, because the previous episodes, while exploring what the Swamp Thing and the Green are, doesn't really dwell too much on how Alec is taking in all this. This, of course, leads to the Green and the plantlife of the swamp imparting their knowledge to Swamp Thing -- particularly those relating to Abby and Shauna's past. I'm not sure if the mysterious boating man is meant to be just a generic avatar of the Green or the show's adaptation of iconic DC character Phantom Stranger, but either way, it's pretty neat.
The supporting cast is also great. We don't get a lot of Madame Xanadu, other than her confessing her culpability in casting a ritual she wasn't sure would actually work (and was that ghost really Shawna?), but we get a fair bit of focus on Dan Cassidy. We get to see his old Blue Devil mask (complete with glowy eyes, hinting that the Blue Devil origin story might've already taken place, at least in part), and that he's still trapped within the town and we're not sure what his 'task' is. By the end of this episode, he's involved in the Liz/Avery storyline -- albeit by circumstance, and gets mortally wounded. I don't really care all that much for Liz as a character, honestly, who felt kind of like an accessory, but her poking Avery Sunderland who's getting more and more desperate to stamp out anyone who stands against him is definitely interesting.
There's also a lot of stuff going around the cop family, which I'm genuinely not really feeling. Lucilia's sleeping with Avery; her son Matt killed Alec under Avery's orders; Lucilia killed some dude called Remy to cover for Matt; Matt has been doing Avery's dirty work to cover for a ton of blackmail Avery has on Lucilia. Also, y'know, there's the whole Liz/Avery thing going on. And Jason Woodrue is just skulking in the background, desperate to get the scientific breakthrough he needs, and ends up asking Avery for a hunting team to get the Swamp Thing into his laboratory table.
Overall, I still think that the B-plots of the show are kind of something that as viewers, you're going to really like or just find it kind of clunky world-building. There are a bit too many pieces, I guess, and a lot of the other storylines felt pretty uninteresting compared to Abby, Maria, Swamp Thing, Woodrue and Cassidy. Still, a pretty great episode that mostly deals with a stand-alone crisis while also moving a lot of the mythology as well as the Avery Sunderland conspiracy plot forwards.
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