Swamp Thing, Season 1, Episode 7: Brilliant Disguise
I've been oh-so-slowly making my way through Swamp Thing and Punisher episodes, but they're... they're kinda heavy shows, y'know? It takes me a while to go through each individual episodes mostly due to how tense and serious they are.
"Brilliant Disguise" moves the plot along presumably to the final arc of this season, as we basically get introduced and are shown the name of "The Rot". The Swamp Thing spends a good chunk of this episode as Alec Holland because Abby ingested some... hallucinogens or something? It's certainly an excuse for Andy Bean to run around as an actor instead of just voicing a plant monster suit. The two of them sort of spend almost the entire episode sort of bonding and moving around, eventually leading to a sequence where Abby was nearly killed due to an encounter with a vine of the Rot. Really, she couldn't have asked Alec to take the sample for her? We do get some pretty neat showcases of the Swamp Thing's abilities, including apparently summoning and/or growing a bunch of exotic herbs to cure Abby's rot infection, and stab her with vines to help her inner microbes or whatever heal.
While sort of a workaround in order to give the Swamp Thing and Abby a whole lot easier-to-film emotional interaction, the episode sort of ends with Abby going back to Atlanta's CDC facility to find a cure for what she's discovered, while the Swamp Thing seems to recognize that he's now part of something much, much bigger, with a much more powerful set of powers. Not sure what this will mean for the future. Are we writing Abby out until the last couple of episodes of the finale, giving the Swamp Thing some much-needed focus in his own series? Or are we just going to have an Abby-in-Atlanta subplot happening in the background of the next couple of episodes?
Meanwhile, the B-plot finally brings the Sunderlands and Cables together. It's a whole set of fun little backstabbing and treachery, and the revelation that Lucilia Cable and Maria Sunderland are actually in cahoots the whole time to get rid of Avery is pretty neat. Of course, it doesn't seem to be the end of Avery just yet since he survives falling into the swamp, but it's pretty fun to see the plan unfold -- especially since it's completely plausible that Avery and Lucilia were going off to hunt down Swamp Thing, which would bring them into conflict with the Alec/Abby pair.
That sequence where Avery tries to turn Matt and Lucilia against each other by revealing that he is Matt's father is pretty out-of-nowhere and kind of a silly soap opera complication to the whole Avery/Cables thing, but eh, it worked. Meanwhile, Maria shows that when not under the influence of a ghost, she's a lot more awesome and ends up arranging a meeting with both the naive and easily-manipulated Jason Woodrue with Avery's contact, one Nathan Ellery, representing a spooky organization that I think is called the Conclave.
Ultimately, the plot moves nicely onwards and this is another very solid entry in Swamp Thing's first season. Despite some of the themes and general vibe of the show not really jiving with me, all of these episodes are consistently solid and it's a shame that the season was cancelled prematurely.
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