Swamp Thing, Episode 10: Loose Ends
And, taken away from us too soon, is DC's 10-episode Swamp Thing TV series. Alas, it was a pretty sad affair that forces outside of the show ended with the show's cancellation, since the 10 episodes have largely been pretty consistently good, and, hell, despite the rewrites and the lack of three subsequent episodes, episode 10 even serves as a very, very satisfying conclusion to the story arcs in this season, something that I was genuinely impressed by.
First up is the fixing of one of my biggest problems the show has. Swamp Thing as a character has largely been reduced to a reactionary force in the background, only really coming into his own in the last couple of episodes, particularly the superb acting when he discovered that he was, in fact, not Alec Holland. Swamp Thing's mournful gait and expression as he made his way into the swamp, as he dragged out the corpse of the man that was Alec Holland, was amazingly shown, despite the dark lighting and the fact that I'm watching a god-damn rubber suit. Throughout the episode, Swamp Thing, Abby and even a brief appearance by the ghost/spirit of Alec Holland calls into question the nature of the Swamp Thing itself. Is he Alec Holland, transformed and transferred into a new body? Is he a brand-new being who stole Alec's memories? It's some pretty great existential crisis, and a neat sense of self-discovery.
Of course, it's the finale of a TV show and you got to have an action scene, so we've got an appropriately amazingly creepy scene as the Swamp Thing unleashes all of the forces of the swamp against a bunch of gung-ho mercenaries. Between crucifying a stray member of the group, or stabbing some poor fucker through the jaw with a massive vine, or the roar as he just charges and tosses these outclassed fools around, Swamp Thing wasn't kidding when he said he's now actively ready and is fighting back. Surprisingly for a show cancelled to early, they certainly didn't skimp out on the special effects for this one.
Perhaps the coolest scene was Swamp Thing confronting Ellery. Sure, it's a pretty basic "tell the others not to come", which will inevitably lead to a sequel hook in the now-non-existent second season, but the fact that Swamp Thing now embraces his bizarre nature and actually doesn't give a shit about any of this "for the good of humanity" thing is pretty intriguing. That was also the mother of all bestial roars that we got out of Swampy. Ultimately, Swamp Thing tells Abby that, yeah, he could've just walked into the swamp and allowed himself to essentially join the rest of the Green or something along those lines, losing himself in the hive-mind of the plants, but decided to stay as who he was because of Abby. Meanwhile, Abby doesn't think any less of Swamp Thing just because he's not Alec Holland. It's a neat, relatively upbeat conclusion for these guys.
Meanwhile, the other side of the finale is... uh... the show's newfound focus for Swamp Thing came at the sacrifice of Abby and the rest of the human cast. I already forget Liz exists half the time, but Abby ends up basically bouncing off of the Swamp Thing set and the Woodrue storyline, and, again, the acting with Jason Woodrue is certainly pretty neat as he goes through the admittedly scenery-chewing scene of sautee-ing Swamp Thing's harvested not-heart and not-lungs, wanting to feed them to his catatonic-but-conscious wife... but ends up eating a spoonful himself and, of course, exhibiting some plant-manipulation powers before he continues ranting about how great it is to be a monster and how it's going to cure his wife... until, of course, Abby comes, brings the cavalry, and Jason Woodrue gets dropped with a taser. That's another antagonist down, and he remains down until the post-credits scene.
Perhaps the weakest part of this finale is the Avery/Lucilia bit, which perhaps stems from me not really caring all that much for those characters, and the fact that the silly Sunderland soap opera melodrama took up way too much of Swamp Thing's runtime for me. It's still a decent storyline on its own, though, although like a lot of the things in episode 9, it felt rushed like all hell. Lucilia tries to reconcile things with the not-comatose Matt, refuses to let Avery reconcile with their child, and then Avery decides to kill Lucilia through a pretty gruesome sequence of a stomach stab and drowning her car in the swamp... before seemingly succumbing to the green flu from the season pilot. Okay, then.
Meanwhile, in the asylum, we get a couple of short scenes of Maria Sunderland going crazy and being attacked by random ghostly wall-hands until Xanadu puts her mind at peace by reuniting her with her daughter's spirit or something. Daniel Cassidy gets a brief goodbye to Liz, gives a hasty confused introdump, and he can finally head off out of Marais. Okay? Poor Liz and Xanadu don't even have any sort of a proper character arc either.
And after the credits roll, we get Matt Cable returning to his house to find the corpse of his mother with a whole lot of plant growths... and comes face to face with Jason Woodrue, fully mutated into the amazing-looking Floronic Man (holy shit that suit though) who proceeds to attack and presumably kill him. Okay, then?
Ultimately, some of the conclusions of the characters in the story felt... felt rushed and abrupt, which I suppose is, again, part of the cost of giving the main characters of Swamp Thing, Abby and Jason Woodrue a far more rounded-out storyline, and I do appreciate that if they had to rush things to its conclusion, they did so by tying a neat bow on most of the storylines and actually concluding the main part of the stories this season. Of course there's still a lot of things that are, well, 'loose ends', but they're loose enough that I would actually call this a satisfying season conclusion, with a lot of the other hanging plot threads working well as a sequel hook that isn't too open-ended. Ultimately, it made the season watchable despite its tragic fate of premature cancellation. Everything is wrapped out while enough is left open (the Conclave, Abby's parents, Floronic Man, Dan Cassidy and the Stranger, whatever's going on with the Conclave) if for some reason we would ever return to this version of Marais. It's been a great run, and it's a shame that it was taken from us too soon.
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