This Has Not Been Marvel’s Year #Inhumans #3weekroundup #recap #review #ABC

This Has Not Been Marvel’s Year #Inhumans #3weekroundup #recap #review #ABC

All pictures courtesy of ABC and Marvel

Let me start this review by saying that I haven’t seen Logan still to this day, so don’t lump that movie in with the title of this article. This is mainly focused on Marvel Studios properties as produced or co-produced by Disney. Having already covered my disdain for this summer’s Spider-man: Homecoming and contented disappointment in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (it was OK, but could’ve been better), I now turn to TV. As noted earlier, I didn’t see The Defenders and didn’t particularly care to. I don’t have Netflix and only occasionally catch some of their shows on Youtube. That leaves me with the network shows. And while I have yet to see The Gifted (again, that would count more as FOX studios for me rather than Marvel), I have seen the first few episodes of Inhumans. So, has Marvel transformed what could’ve been a theatrical blockbuster into a serialized mega-hit, or is this show begging for Marvel to do the humane thing and put it out of its misery? Let’s find out together.

Before I begin, I should warn readers going forward that I actually enjoyed ABC’s Agent Carter that followed Peggy. You should be able to find a review of it somewhere on this blog. Was it great? Heck no. I thought it had a rather rocky start but that it got its footing about halfway through the first season and delivered a pretty good second season that linked well into the films. I should also say that I’ve been a day-one fan of Agents of SHIELD even when Marvel fans hated on it and even before Captain America: Winter Soldier switched the game up, which I still hope will happen again with this next Thor or with the Black Panther film. Yes, I’ve liked what I’ve seen of Daredevil as well, so you know where my baseline for fandom is. With all of that said, this Inhumans show is worse than that first cake that your boyfriend tried to make you on that one birthday you had where he was trying to go above and beyond to impress you knowing damn well he can’t cook for nothin’. Yer garbage, Inhumans! Gah-bage!

Left to Right: Gorgon, Karnak, Black Bolt, Medusa, Crystal, Maximus the human

Inhumans follows the boring exploits of the titular race of people. Inhumans, as explained in Agents of SHIELD, are humans who have undergone a transformation after having been exposed to Terrigen crystal mist. Think mutants but with an alien twist. And to think that I was actually worried about this show when I started plotting my Extraordinary episodic serial novel (out now). Anyway, like mutants (which we all know Marvel can’t have because they sold all of them to FOX), Inhumans are hated beings that are hunted down, captured and often jailed or killed. The world is not really ready for them but they are in it regardless. Only in the show Inhumans do we learn that these types of people have existed for years, eons. Currently, to avoid all of the harshness on earth, the Inhumans live in an old-school monarchy kingdom on the moon, beneath an invisible dome. They live in a city that is divided into a strange caste system that almost seems to exist for no reason save but to create needless drama. In the comics I thought that they lived on a floating, invisible island above New York, but I haven’t actually read the comics.

The city, as said, is ruled by an archaic form of monarchy in which there is a royal family and no kind of parliament. There is a king and queen. The king is Black Bolt, played by Anson Mount. Throughout the first episode (which is smashed together with the second episode to make them movie-length. More on that later) we see Black Bolt using his hands to speak. At first, without knowing much about the character, one might think he was deaf or dumb (couldn’t speak). We later find out that he is actually imbued with such great power that simply by speaking he can launch cars, destroy people and even wipe away entire cities with the booming sound of his voice. This, I suppose, is why they call him Black Bolt, though, I would’ve expected his powers to be more thunderous than just sound, but I digress. Let me also say here that from what I’ve heard on the show so far, no one has a legit name AND a superhero name. For instance, Black Bolt isn’t his work name like Spider-man or Iron Man. It’s his actual name, or at least what everyone calls him. Just keep that in mind as we walk through the characters.

Next, we have his wife and queen Medusa played by Serinda Swan. Medusa, as one could guess, is Marvel’s play on the mythical she-devil of the same name that was said to be able to turn a man to stone simply by him looking straight on at her face or, in some twists of the story, directly into her eyes. While she doesn’t have that power here, she does have another intersecting aspect of the Greek myth’s powers: sentient hair. The mythical Medusa was said to have a thicket of snakes for her hair, where as Inhumans’ Medusa has long red hair that she can control and use as snakes. We see this in her introductory scene with Black Bolt. As they are making love, he reaches for his communicator only for her hair to restrain him and keep him bed-pinned. Similar to the Bible’s Samson, in her hair lies all of her strength. Here’s a funny factoid: the actress Serinda Swan who plays Medusa was also in the Percy Jackson film series where she played the role of Aphrodite, but only after auditioning for the role of Medusa.

Keeping this going, we next have Maximus played by Game of Thrones alum Iwan Rheon (Ramsay Bolton). He is the younger brother of Black Bolt and thus a member of the royal family. But the most interesting thing about him is that he is human. Apparently, as we learn in the melded-together first and second episode, when he was introduced to the terrigen crystals as is every person in the moon kingdom, while it gave his brother immense power, it changed his Inhuman genetics to make him perfectly human. Yes, he is bitter about it. Yes, he is our heel.

Then we have Crystal. Crystal rounds out the royal family as she technically qualifies by proxy. She is the sister of Medusa. While Black Bolt and Maximus were born into the royal family, Medusa and Crystal, as we learn in episode three were born into what can only be assumed as a noble family that tried to revolt against the royal family and the system under which the kingdom operates. We’ll talk about the system in a bit, but let me round out the cast.

Crystal has a massive dog named Lockjaw and even he is inhuman—er, I mean in-dog-an? Anyway, this huge bear-dog of a thing (he’s a really big dog. Think four Donald Trumps all smashed together except a lot cuter) has the ability to teleport to anywhere in the galaxy I’m guessing as he easily goes between earth and the moon. All he needs are the instructions. The one problem is that his teleporting skills are not an exact science. Either that or the instructions given to him aren’t specific enough for him to properly understand. But in the end, he’s a good boy. He’s a very good boy.

We round out the main cast with Gorgon played by Eme Ikwaukor. Our black guy of the group, he is half man, half minotaur or centaur. The point is that he has hooves and is part of the royal guard and is the distant cousin of the royals. Then we have Karnak played by Ken Leung, our Asian guy. He seems to be council to the king and queen. His power, as I understand it, is that he can either rewind time or rehearse a scenario completely in his head and course-correct to get the best outcome before he ever makes a move. Or something in-between that. If you’ve ever seen the Nicolas Cage film NEXT where he can see the future, think of him in that sense. And finally we have Auron who seems to be the personal... guard or maybe just a minion/henchwoman of Maximus. She can fight but I can’t remember what her Inhuman power was. It’s inconsequential for the first three episodes.

So, we start out by witnessing an Inhuman on earth being tracked down by a group of what looks like black-ops military men. We first assume that this is one of the many government bodies tracking down Inhumans. The Inhuman girl is young and she runs into an older man who is also inhuman and looks like a green alien. He tells her that there is a place for her and that she isn’t a freak like she thinks and tries to save her. But before they can escape the black ops team shoots her and shoots the Inhuman guy too. Next, we jump up to the moon city and see that some private tech company has rovers up there to map out the surface so that they can build things like a hotel and whatnot up there. As they are mapping it out, the rover-drone hits against the invisible force field that hides the city from prying eyes. Before the drone pilot can explore this phenomenon further, a hoof stomps the drone.

We then jump to the King and Queen in counsel with Karnak who is talking about the drone. Gorgon defends his decision to kill-stomp the drone and Maximus is all gung-ho on this idea that they need to go and invade the earth before the earth invades them. Black Bolt keeps his calm as always and allows for Medusa to speak for him when she says that they must do nothing for now. Revealing themselves will only cause harm.

Anyway, they must all go to what I called a Misting Ceremony which every person in the city must go through at some point in time. This is where, as teenagers, people are exposed to the terrigen mist and their powers are revealed. From what I can see, usually teen siblings do it together, meaning that there’s no set age where everyone does it. Apparently the entire royal court must be there to witness every one of these ceremonies because they have to run and get Crystal as she stands out in the city looking at boys and playing with Lockjaw.

We see a brother and sister enter this terrigen chamber and breathe in the crystals’ mist. While the girl becomes a flier with butterfly wings, the boy comes out and looks no different. It is not until Maximus touches him that he feels a power course through him. He sees some kind of imaginative vision of Maximus’ future. The strange thing about this scene is that the boy tells Maximus in front of everyone that Max will be pinned by snakes and whatnot, yet no one reacts to this as maybe being some kind of mental power. You would think that Karnak, who, arguably has a mental power that wouldn’t have been perceptible to the outside onlooker at first, would have said something about this, but it is almost as if no one else hears him. Again, it just stuck out as strange to me.

Moving on, we finally get to this caste system in which they live. There seem to be three levels of hierarchy here: the royals, the middle or noble class and the bottom dwellers. The noble or middle class have powers that are elegant and or extremely useful. Flight is a noble class power, for instance. Well, the lower class seem to have powers that are not that elegant or are hard to define or find a use for. Strength seems to be a lower-class power as it is only good for one thing. Speaking of that one thing, the lower class is made to work in some sort of moon mine. What is in the mine? Why do they have a mine? What the heck are they mining? Why does everyone in the lower class have to work there? These are all good questions, none of which are answered by the show within the first three episodes. But what we know is that while the butterfly-winged girl gets to stay with her parents in the middle class, her brother who hasn’t been seen to have powers by anyone save Maximus, is sent to work in the mines. There is some talk about how Maximus himself should be in the mines as he is a mere mortal but he turns this objection into a cry for revolution. Supposedly, they have this rigid caste system because of how limited their moon resources are. This forces them to put people in their place and ration out what little they have to those who can actually use it. Frankly, I didn’t fully get this part, but I will save that criticism until the end.

Moving on, we now know that Maximus wants to rule over the kingdom so that he can move all of their people back to earth where they left from thousands of years ago. The assumption is that he wants to rule there too.

Shortly after the misting ceremony, the royal court learns of the disappearance of the green Inhuman guy from the beginning. As it turns out, the guy was sent on a secret mission to retrieve the girl and hasn’t been in contact with the person who sent him since. So, Black Bolt and Medusa decide to send Gorgon down there to hopefully find the missing Inhuman and the girl. Crystal gets Lockjaw to take him down to the Hawaiian island on which the girl was lost, but it doesn’t appear to be the exact same island but another one of the smaller islands that is unmarked.

As soon as the head of the royal guard is gone, all hell breaks loose. Here, I again must note that the first two episodes of this were smushed together to make one long two-hour premiere so I can’t fully divide them from each other quite like you might want. So just follow me here until we get to episode three.

So, with the royal guard gone we soon learn that Maximus is a sneaky, conniving little fella. For starters, he, Black Bolt and Medusa have all known each other since they were children with her parents being high-order nobles and all. As it turns out, he and Medusa used to get into some trouble and he formed an undying crush on her. But after Black Bolt received his power and would never talk again, the would-be king was put into a room of solitary and told by his parents that he must both deal with his newfound power/handicap while also ruling as king—his brother Maximus could never rule because he was no longer Inhuman. Well, all of this pressure got to him which made him ask but one question to his parents as they stood in front of him: “Why?” The very ask disintegrated his parents in front of him, making him the instant king at a very young age. It was for this reason that Medusa felt pity for him and snuck away into his cell of a room to start their romance that would continue on into adulthood, leaving Maximus behind.

Well, Maximus brings up a what-if scenario that implies he is plotting to become king but maintain the same queen, and Medusa uses her “snake” hair to pin him to the wall, just as the boy saw in his vision when Maximus touched him. Now only Maximus knows of the boy’s true foresight powers. He goes back to him to ask a few more questions and the boy basically ensures him that his evil plan to take over the kingdom will go well. And so it begins.

We learn that Maximus was the one who hired those black ops guys to go and kill the girl and the Inhuman who was trying to save her. He did this on purpose knowing that Gorgon would have to leave the palace to go off-world, which would leave the royal court open for attack. He has his men, led by Auron, swarm the palace and take out the royal court one by one, but of course they fight back as best they can. He embarrasses Medusa by chopping off all of her hair in a reverse Samson and Delilah, sends his men to kill and be beat down by Karnak who replays every scenario over and over until he can win the fight, and even goes to get Black Bolt to surrender and bow to him as the new king, thinking that the man couldn’t possibly speak or attack him because the guilt of killing both parents and then his brother would weigh on him too great. But the crazy part is that as this takeover is happening, Crystal gets word that Maximus is a traitor and hops into quick action. She orders lockjaw to find all of the royal members and transport them to “the same place as Gorgon.” Remember, however, that Lockjaw isn’t that great at this or those instructions are too vague, so he finds each person and transports them somewhere slightly different. Karnak ends up at the top of a jungle mountain; Medusa ends up in the middle of a huge crater; and Black Bolt, on the brink of parting his lips to say something and destroy his brother, is taken to the middle of a city (Oahu) in the middle of a street full of traffic. Lockjaw, having never seen such busyness and honking and calamity from the traffic gets cutely anxious and teleports back to the moon in a panic, leaving his king to survive on his own.

Before Lockjaw can get to Crystal, Maximus has already found her and is ready to attack. The dog arrives and while she is giving it instructions, Auron comes and zaps the dog unconscious. Not only is the royal court all dispersed across Oahu and its surrounding isles, but they currently have no way of getting back to each other and very little way of communicating to each other. And only at the end of episode two do you realize that this is probably not the show that you were anticipating.

This sentiment is cemented even more on episode three. See at the end of episode two we see Karnak fall off of the cliff while climbing down, resulting in a bad hit to the head. On episode three he realizes that he no longer has his powers like he usually does. They’re probably not gone forever, but he cannot see how a situation will unfold and correct it to his advantage every time. He haphazardly wanders onto a secret jungle plantation of marijuana, which isn’t all that bad in and of itself but when the workers there hold him at gunpoint, he can’t defeat them.

Meanwhile, as Karnak is imprisoned in the jungle drug cartel, Black Bolt tries to fit into his environment to keep clandestine. He goes to a store and gets a suit and tie but walks out without paying as he has no concept of such an idea of cash-money or credit. He lets out a tiny yelp when the police pursue him and sends a squad car tumbling through the air with gusto. Jail for you my friend, although it looks a lot more like prison, but I digress. Anyway, far away there is some scientist guy who knows of the Inhuman stronghold on the moon and seeks to protect Black Bolt, so he contracts an inmate to help break the man out of prison. Yes, this man is also an Inhuman but I’m not sure the guards knew that.

Gorgon is still on the island and has learned of the treachery of Maximus. Armed with a locator beacon and communicator that links back to the moon city, he tells Maximus that he is going to leave his communicator/locator on for the traitor and his minions to come and find him. He wants the fight so he can end it all now. Well, Max only half takes the bait by sending Auron instead of going himself.

Upon her arrival on earth Auron first runs into Medusa who, though she doesn’t have her hair powers anymore, is still a fierce ass kicker. She stabs Auron and leaves her to die. Here, it was unclear for me if Auron actually did die or not but she gets up after a few hours of laying on top of a car hood, and heals herself. I’m not sure that is her power, though. She calls back to Maximus and says that she needs help so he sends this really evil big-bad who is supposedly so vile that they have him locked away in a solitary prison behind a thick wall up in the moon city. His name is Mordis and he looks like he’s wearing a toned-down version of that iron mask Leo DiCaprio wore in that movie where he played a Man in an Iron Mask. Gosh, what was that movie called? Hmm? Don’t know. Mordis, to boot, is not scary nor intimidating and plays more like the most disappointing, comical parts of Ultron in that Avengers 2 movie, or some comedic interpretation of classic villains in a Robot Chicken skit. It’s rather sad, frankly.

So Gorgon, who can’t swim, is rescued from the water by these surfers (this happened in episode 2 but I didn’t mention it because it didn’t feel necessary at the time) who now want to help him fight whatever force is supposedly coming for him. Well, he warns that they could die but they’re like, whatever, dude. Auron, Mordis and a crew of other red-shirt nobodies come to fight Gorgon and the surfers. A few get their butts kicked, one chick with cool gardening powers (totally want those) makes trees do her bidding and Gorgon decides to flee with the surfers because they are outmatched. But dude, you were all big and bad not turning your locator beacon off.

Meanwhile, Medusa was able to contact Bolt and listen to his heartbeat to know he was safe and still alive (this was before he got arrested). Now, she is on a Kill Bill-esque journey to find him. She sneaks into some rich person’s home and Goldilocks-es about trying on their clothes, eating their food and all sorts of stuff. When she leaves she hops on different buses and public transportation, sees a story about a guy who is a suspected Inhuman who did some stuff to some police cars, and somehow finds the jail and is there to rescue him when Black Bolt and the other guy break out of the jail and fly off in a helicopter. As luck would have it, that drone pilot from the first episode is trying to investigate what happened to the drone and has somehow been led to the prison also. Medusa kidnaps her and tells her to follow that copter.

Back on the moon, Maximus is trying to make moves to either get Crystal to be his queen instead of Medusa or get her to support him in front of the high council to take over the throne as king. Or both. One thing is for sure: he has lied to the people about Medusa and Black Bolt abandoning them. He’s doing everything he can to sully the royal court’s name. But he needs the high council to assume full power and push for this move down to earth. Crystal won’t do it but he keeps working on her, tepidly seducing her by reminding her how her parents rebelled against the kingdom for this very reason and how combining their powers can only help the people. She’s young but smart and does what she must to keep everything from imploding.

What’s my grade? I give it a D. Look, there are so many things that are wrong with this show that it’s hard for me to pinpoint one thing that doesn’t work. For starters, I hate the fact that for whatever reason ABC, Disney and Marvel all believed that this show was good enough to merit a theatrical release of its first two episodes. When I heard they were doing that, I actually got excited, especially considering that this is a limited series that is, I believe, only supposed to have eight episodes. To me, I thought, “Wow, they can spend a good grip of money on each episode to make it absolutely amazing.” Wrong! If you’re going to release the first two episodes of a show as a movie, then make sure that it sorta plays like a movie. Even ignoring the so-so costume work, the uninspired acting and the TV-focused cinematography, the plot itself played more like a television show with little direction. The first two episodes didn’t even have a proper climax. I know that it is a show, but still, it would be better to focus on writing the show as a film than to have it flounder in both aspects.

Going back to the acting, I just don’t know what went wrong. With the exception of the black guy who plays Gorgon, I’ve seen all of the main characters in other stuff where they were much better. I’ve been a fan of Anson Mount ever since I saw that Jason Statham film Safe, which a lot of people didn’t like but I thoroughly enjoyed. I think he’s good. Yet, here, with the absence of dialogue for him to speak, he is no more interesting than a mannequin. No, this is not a criticism of the character and I’m not asking for them to give him more lines, I’m asking for them to better direct him in expressing the character’s underlying emotion. I remember watching the movie Quiet starring Camilla Belle as a girl who doesn’t speak, thinking, “Wow! She’s amazing.” Granted, I was already crushing pretty hard on Belle at the time but still. She brought a certain charm and characterization to the silence of the character that didn’t require her to speak for you to feel. Here, Mount often wears only one look on his face the entire time: “Son, we need to talk.” Even during the opening love scene, I kept thinking that he needed to sit his teenage son down for a talk about responsibility, and how driving is a privilege and how he better not get one of those loose Bronte girls pregnant. Its so stern all the time that it is bordering on satirical. Show us pain, anguish, love, hate, something other than sternness.

Medusa is pretty good and oozes both sex appeal and intelligence, especially because she is the mouthpiece of the king. She seems most capable, oddly enough, even over Karnak. Speaking of, Ken Leung had a great gig on The Night Shift and I don’t know whose idea it was for him to part from that show but I wish he was still on there (Edit: that show has recently been canceled). While he is doing a decent job here, he could be doing so much better. I’ve seen his better. The Crystal character is OK as a young, teenage princess who must hold her own against the would-be usurper but she is certainly no Sansa Stark. Speaking of, Mr. Ramsay Bolton himself Maximus is also just OK here. It is as if the directors told Iwan to be a toned-down version of Bolton. You know, the one that they can show on broadcast network TV. With the plot similarities between his yearning for power, holding a young queen/princess hostage and forcing her and her people to bend to his will, it might’ve been a better idea to have him playing in a different role so as not to draw any comparisons. Here, he just doesn’t quite seem evil enough.

What’s worse about Maximus, and this speaks to the plot, is that the way this show is written and the brief exploration of the caste system makes it feel an awful lot like he’s technically right. For me, someone who hasn’t read the comics and doesn’t want to bother to do all the research like I have for other comic book characters, the caste system makes little sense when paired with the mines and whatnot, and their refusal to move to earth even after the Inhumans have long been a part of the earthly society. Yes, I know, if you’re only watching the movies you might not have realized this, but on Agents of SHIELD one of their main cast members is an Inhuman and has been since season two. Why the heck are they still up there on the moon and for god’s sake, what the hell are they mining?

Finally, my last big complaint is geared around how the show was packaged and sold as opposed to what it actually is. Again, as someone who wasn’t a fan of the comics, I didn’t get all of the hate for the costumes at the time of the poster coming out. I thought that they looked alright for TV and that their looks sorta fit into a real-world representation or at least into the MCU representation of characters. But now having watched the show, I find a completely different complaint cropping up which only now piggybacks off the costume complaint and that is that these don’t seem to be Inhumans. Think about this, at the end of the two-hour season premiere we have the coolest character in Lockjaw unconscious, we have Black Bolt unable to ever really use his powers for fear of decimating the entirety of the moon city, we have Medusa no longer with her hair powers (is she really even Medusa now?), we have Karnak unable to use his fix-o-dent powers, Gorgon is trapped on a small secluded island, and we have yet to see what Crystal’s powers are. Between Yo-Yo, Quake and her last boyfriend when he was still alive and on the show, we’ve gotten far more Inhumans using superpowers on Agents of SHIELD than we get on this show. Really only the bad guys have the powers. So this basically is a bunch of regular people running from some superpowered ones, which is not a bad twist on the genre but is hardly done well enough to make any statement.

In the end, the costume complaints are fairly unwarranted too because not only do they abandon their powers but they also abandon their costumes. Sure, Gorgon and Karnak are still in their get-ups but I’m sure that the latter is going to change into something more human-like within the coming episode. He’ll be wearing a breezy Hawaiian tee in no time (Note: He did change into a bohemian chic style).

Should you be watching? No, not unless you’re a die-hard comic book fan and/or you have eight to ten hours of your life to kill. Look, I wanted this to be good because I wanted another series that could crossover and complement Agents of SHIELD, and that could tie into the movies in a big way. Hell, we’re going off world for the next Thor and the next season of SHIELD, it only makes since to see Inhumans as a stepping stone for both of those things or to maybe see them show up in Black Panther or reference those events somehow. Give us another Winter Soldier twist for all of the properties. But no. This is simply not worthy of any of that. It needs to be completely retooled, maybe recast and definitely written and directed by others. Give it a bigger budget or just release a film version like originally planned, because this is going nowhere fast.

What do you think? Have you heard of Marvel’s Inhumans? If you haven’t, do you think you’ll watch now? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Do you like it? Where do you think it could improve or is it doing a great job at interpreting these characters. And do you know what the hell they’re mining for on the moon? And how cool is Lockjaw? Let me know in the comments below.

Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend. #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinary on Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.

Until next time, “We’ve got to stop these disgusting mutants and—”

‘Uh, no-no! They’re Inhumans. Inhumans, sir.’

“What? They’re not mutants?”

‘No. We couldn’t get the copyright license back.’

P.S. This seems to be the season of the copy because, for some reason, it looks like every new show has a doppelganger that is either another new show on another network or is a returning show. I sure do hope that FOX’s The Gifted isn’t just a mutants on the run show like Inhumans pretty much is. I’ll try to come up with a better, more original sign-off next time, but no promises.

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