Swamp Thing, Episode 8: Long Walk Home
After the focus in the previous episode was arguably how the various other players in Maris dealt with Avery Sunderland, episode 8, "Long Walk Home", was focused on Avery himself ending up meeting the Swamp Thing, being rescued from dying in the swamp, and Avery's own conflicting emotions on what to do. He is certainly grateful for being rescued by the Swamp Thing (particularly when Swampy makes it clear that the Green would've rather left him to rot and die), and seems to at least be willing to help Swamp Thing return to becoming the human Alec Holland once more. Of course, this seems to have been turned upside the head at the end of the episode, because of one Jason Woodrue. Woodrue manages to convince Avery to basically "let him save thousands more", and if Avery becomes a legend in history and Woodrue manages to find the ever-elusive dementia cure, it would've benefit them both. There's some really great acting moments from Will Patton particularly in that scene with Woodrue, where his fake enthusiasm and him trying to convince himself to do a decent thing for once is apparent.
And... and it's pretty well-served? The way the show handles the characters in the show wouldn't be how I would've done so if I was writing this thing, admittedly -- the fact that the Swamp Thing himself feels more like a supporting character at best and a plot device at worst in his own show instead of the main character has always rankled me a fair bit, and it felt particularly bad in this one, where most of what we see of good old Swampy has been in brief scenes of cryptic conversations, until the action scene at the end. And I get that filming with that huge plant-monster suit couldn't have been easy or cheap, but still, I really wished we had actually gotten more from Swamp Thing as a character. When he gives his motive rant about how he's essentially an entity serving the Green, the mystical force of the swamp, it feels more like something taken from the series bible or a wikipedia page more than something that the character himself would say.
I do like the focus on Avery Sunderland, though, who's been surprisingly pretty well-developed over the course of these past couple of episodes from the manipulative mustache-twirling evil businessman he originally was. The random flashback to how his dad was killed by the swamp for trying to chop down a scared tree is perhaps a bit much and went on for a bit too long, but I really do like what we did get, and the fact that Avery lost his daughter and his father to the swamp really gives him an almost childish hatred towards the swamp as opposed to a generic "businessman does not care about nature" motivation.
Meanwhile, Abby's in Atlanta's CDC center and dealing with bureaucracy and stuff. Apparently, the Conclave, Avery's James Bond villain buddies, have a stranglehold on the CDC. Seeing Abby bond with her best buddy Harlan is neat, but ultimately I feel it's just there to give another gut punch when the Conclave members abduct Harlan. The Conclave itself has been way too oblique, though, which I know is something that such dark-and-mysterious organizations are supposed to be, but it's really hard for me to care about what this enigmatic organization wants beyond monopolization of the sci-fi plot device. They did give Woodrue a lab, though. That's nice of them. Abby's leg of the story is... it's logical, really -- she's the sort of protagonist character who doesn't realize the amount of reach the bad guys have, and by going around basically looking for clues in all of the official places, she has ended up losing her position in the CDC and caused the Conclave to come down on them. Also, as her superior officer dr. Palomar notes, as far as the town of Marais is concerned, Abby's spent far more time in the swamp as opposed to hospitals and whatnot, which isn't a good look for her.
What else? There's a bit of a C-plot about the Cable mother/son pair, but I really don't think I care all that much about those characters. The hallucination of Lucillia sprouting a fuck-ton of creepy thorny vines from her face-holes is creepy, though. Ultimately, it's your typical darkest-hour part of a narrative, with Swamp Thing captured using the aid of nitrogen gas, Harlan's abducted, Avery and Woodrue are relatively solidly evil, and Abby's the only one who can stop it all. With two episodes left, though, I wonder just how much of the B-plots we've been building up in the background (the Cables, Blue Devil, Phantom Stranger, Madame Xanadu, the Rot, Floronic Man) will get resolved.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Dr. Palomar, Abby's CDC boss, is played by Adrienne Barbeau, who played Alice Cable (a renamed version of Abby Arcane), the heroine of the 1982 Wes Craven Swamp Thing movie.
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