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davidmann95 · 7 years

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I read your post about why Batman is great and I love how thoughtful that is. Can you do one for Superman? Thanks ^_^

Unsurprisingly, I’ve touched on a lot of the basic aspects of it before, so for a couple parts of this I’ll keep it restrained (speaking entirely relatively), but given I think about Superman more than most people think about their best friends, I feel qualified to state that yes: Superman is great. As I said with Batman, the reasons why on a mass cultural basis are much broader than ‘he’s a really well-written character’ - hell, too often that isn’t even the case, even if plenty *have* stepped up over the years - so I’ll start with the lizard hindbrain stuff and work my way down to the finer details.

Superman has iconic power by default

What it really comes down to, at least in terms of keeping him afloat in the public eye when actual public opinion on him has been shot completely to hell over the last couple decades, is that Superman is a Big Deal. He’s the founder of his own genre: literally every surface-level aspect of his mythology is shorthand for the concept he created as well as for plenty beyond superheroes, from the suit (trunks included) to Lois Lane to Lex Luthor to Clark Kent to flying to Kryptonite to Bizarro and Brainiac to super-pets and x-ray vision. A red cape fluttering in the breeze is itself an evocative image entirely sans context, because people know that means him, by which it really means all superheroes. That means he takes the hits of getting all the complaints other characters duck even as others write thinkpieces on his place in culture and how he represents everything from America to Jesus to conservative values to the immigrant experience, all from people who may well have never picked up a comic or watched a cartoon of his in their lives. Even when most people don’t know much about him as a character, he as a symbolic figure is too massive to not grapple with one way or another, even via shorthand such as ‘he’s dumb’ or ‘he stands for us at our best’; while many of his recent woes can be traced back to people telling stories solely about or defined by that iconography, it still has power. Kids on the other side of the world from wherever you’re sitting right now know he can leap a tall building in a single bound. There’s maybe two or three other fictional characters in the world with that level of exposure and impact, and the unconscious emotional connection that comes baked right into it.

Superman is a protector

When kids talk about loving him because he can do anything, and adults talk about how he brings back those memories of joy and comfort, I think this is what it really comes down to a lot of the time. Superman’s the one who looks out for us, the guy who cares about you. Yeah, there’s gotta be the odd story about how NOT EVEN SUPERMAN CAN SAVE EVERYONE! to keep him honest, but by and large, yes he can. He wears a fun flashy uniform and he can wrap you up in his cape and fly you away from whatever bad’s happening, and even if something can catch up, no bullet or bomb in the world is going to get through him to you, or even hurt him enough to at least be scary. Nothing’s so hard or so big or so scary he can’t help, not really; he naps on clouds and swims in the sun. He’s polite, and never aggressive towards the innocent (not even that often towards the guilty), and he doesn’t talk down to people even though he’s stronger and knows better. He’s as confident as a cool big brother, as supportive and sturdy as a good dad, as vaguely ethereal and perfectly impossible as Santa Claus. It’s not an act, it’s not impersonal - he wants you to be okay, he cares about you and he’ll do whatever he can to make sure you’ll be alright. When that’s done just right? That kind of unreserved, unconditional, powerful demonstration of kindness making a difference, even from a cartoon alien, can knock a lot of typically steely emotional walls down like balsa wood, especially when that can save the day just as much as quick wits or a fist, the way anyone here could too in the right circumstances when they try their best.

Superman is a romantic figure

Something overlooked or deliberately sidelined by many is that a huge, huge part of Superman’s appeal in lots of circles is that he can be a romantic ideal rather than (or as well as) a protective one. He’s a sweet, funny, confident, smart guy who’s built like Adonis and doesn’t think he’s better than everybody else even though he’s literally the best. He holds down a socially valuable job he’s successful and happy at, he’s gentle and considerate, and he’s entirely comfortable being second in his household to a commanding career woman who he’s instinctively protective of, but also willing to back off of when she feels smothered because he acknowledges her independence. He can fly her to the moon, he never lets her forget how happy he is that when he was left lost and alone on the other side of the universe he fell to the one place he could find her, and he wears tights. The comics may forget that, but Lois & Clark knew it. Smallville sure as hell knew it. So have the last couple movies, and Supergirl. Even Christopher Reeve, America’s Dad, got it on with Margot Kidder in that weird shiny Fortress hammock. You wanna talk about the aspects of Superman that go for…ahem…primal instincts, that he’s the member of the Justice League historically most likely to go shirtless* is worth bringing up.

* Aside from maybe Batman, who’s usually beat to hell and too miserable to leverage any of that playboy charm, and Aquaman, who’s Aquaman.

Superman is an easy power fantasy

Obviously, superheroes are often power fantasies in general; they do stuff we can’t do but wish we could. And Superman’s near the top of that list not just because he’s iconic, and not even because of the scope of his power - Green Lantern and Thor are comparable in terms of raw ability, GL even has an honest-to-goodness wishing ring, but they don’t measure up in that regard. What is is, I think, is that Superman’s powers are rooted in physicality, and therefore easy to imagine yourself doing. Everything most people can do, he does best, from lifting to running to looking to hearing to punching. Even his non-physical powers have a connection to actual physical acts: to see through objects he focuses as if peering through a fog, he doesn’t shoot power blasts from his fists to light things on fire but instead burns them with a furious glare, he doesn’t dispassionately levitate through the air as a standard but takes off and holds his arms forward as if in a mighty never-ending leap. Batman may be ‘real’, but if you imagined suddenly being him, you wouldn’t be Batman, you’d be a rich dude with a weaponized theme park in his basement, because you have no training and no tangible point of reference for thinking of how anything works beyond “punch and throw things”. But it’s easy to imagine being Superman in a visceral, physical sense - just imagine everything you did worked optimally, even the way it only could in a dream.

Superman is fun

All of the above makes him grand and likable, but that’s not the same as being able to support decades of monthly adventure stories. The basis of that is that he lives in a universe-sized, Earth-shaped toybox. He doesn’t just have superpowers and a nifty suit, he’s got a cave at the North Pole right near Santa with a time machine, statues of all his friends, a space zoo, a gun that turns people into ghosts, and a bottle city full of real people, plus robots to keep it all tidy, and only he can get in because the key was forged in the heart of a star. His cousin, kid, dog, and a few of his best friends wear capes too, and his ‘brother’ with reverse-superpowers lives on a cube planet where it’s perpetually opposite day. His friends and wife often go on their own adventures and get temporary superpowers just by being in his vicinity, he dated a mermaid in college, his after-school club was in the future and he commutes to the moon for work, and his deadliest enemies include a crazed mad scientist, an evil robot with a death-heart, a mischievous imp in a derby hat, and brilliant alien computer literally named Brainiac. Superman lives in a sci-fi fantasy dreamland of childish archetypes that can exist on any scale from the microscopic to the galactic to the other-dimensional, and as a result of that he can go on any adventure imaginable, to any time and place, and as a super-man who doesn’t often have to worry for his own safety, he can survive and appreciate and care for it all.

Superman mythologizes the mundane

And it’s where the fun and the big, mythic aura Superman carries meet that the magic happens that makes him as versatile and effective a character as there is in fiction: everything he does is rooted in something incredibly normal and human. His wild super-suit of circus royalty is made to reconnect with his heritage the only way he has, and to try and make himself colorful and unthreatening to a world he needs to accept him. When he travels through time, it’s never just to save reality, it’s to go see family and friends. He walks his dog around the rings of Saturn, he looks at his city in a bottle and wonders if he’ll ever be able to get around to taking care of that, he walks on the bottom of the ocean to think things through privately, and spends an entire day saving the world to get away from a conversation he doesn’t want to have. Every mad, cosmic aspect of his world is something totally normal blown up to be as big as it feels, and even when he does interact with the truly ‘mundane’, his presence alone elevates it to myth in a way no other superhero can. That’s the true source of his ability to adapt, rarely tapped but always potent: he can do anything, because he’s us.

Superman’s an actual good, interesting character

I place this at the bottom because it’s the aspect that’s most rarely captured, especially in the public eye (though the handful of times it has been are why he’s my favorite). But when he’s handled properly, then even divorced from everything else, Superman is fascinating as a *person*. Raised knowing there’s something different about him even as his weird alienness lets him understand people and the world around them in ways no others can, he learned one day he was born of the most mind-shattering act of cosmic horror imaginable, with a place greater than Earth in every way destroyed by coincidence, a signpost by any measure that the universe is a chaotic, meaningless, cruel place that destroys the innocent with indifference…and he became a good man who treasures life over anything. He has power that lets him do literally anything he pleases, and he spends half his life among us at a desk job because he thinks we’re just swell and he wants to keep being part of it all. Even though he can never entirely, not really, divvying his life up into discrete, manageable chunks that let him interact with the world on his own terms and try to see through what he sees as his responsibility, until a woman sees through the deception and self-deception and gets the real him to tentatively come out.

He has fun little hobbies, and unusual friendships, and a complex rivalry with the one man in the world who could’ve been his equal. He’s seen the best and worst of the world, and he accepts it all, but he still radiates a decency and innocence that can be mistaken for naivete by those who don’t know him. He’s clever but easy to catch off-guard in the right circumstances, always struggling to be the god people expect him to be rather than the inadequate fake his humility can make him look at himself as, he likes football and pretzels and pulp novels and Metallica, he gets a kick out of writing because it’s one of the few things he can do on an even playing field, he’s not sure how best to raise his kid, he worries that that one alien dictator is going to pop by again soon and he might not be ready to deal with it, he has to coordinate dates with his wife precisely because they both have such busy schedules, he counts dust particles in the air when he gets bored, and he believes in everybody. There’s so much going on with this guy, this identity-case, this brute, this pacifist, this establishment-man, this rebel and idealist and weirdo and a dozen other conflicting things. He’s been and done just about everything with charm and style over the decades, and it works, because it all adds up into one nice guy’s unusual, well-rounded life. And because it’s always anchored by an understanding: for all that he’s a unique freak of creation, he knows that in all the madness and uncertainty and horror, the one thing we have to rely on is each other. So he’ll put on his suit and throw himself out there against the only things in the universe that could kill him when he could be doing anything else, because he’s found a home with us little people when he lost his, and he knows we’re worth the fight; everyone is, aliens just like him in their own ways, waiting to be saved the way they saved him when he landed in a field. That’s why Superman’s great.

#Superman #Analysis #Opinion

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briangroth27 · 7 years

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Marvel’s Inhumans Season 1 Review

I didn’t find much to love in Marvel’s latest TV series: I’ve never been a huge Inhumans fan and this did little to change my mind. The show felt prohibitively small-scale, the character arcs were messy even in an eight-episode season, and they took the bizarre position of making the supposed heroes the heads of an oppressive caste system. It seems like budgetary restraints put a cap on power usage, but I feel like we see more action on episodes of Agents of SHIELD than we did on this show. There were many opportunities to go bigger, weirder, and much more interesting in all areas of the series, from design to superpowers to character arcs, but more often than not they chose to play it safe and conventional.

From costumes to sets, the production values for the Inhumans’ hidden moon base Attilan looked far too mundane and ordinary, like you could find them in any location on Earth. Their design choices and way of life didn’t reflect a people that had been separated from humanity for such a long time. Shouldn’t they have wholly disparate customs and outlooks; shouldn’t they essentially be aliens to us at this point? The terrigenesis ceremony, which gives the Inhumans their powers, was the one cultural touchstone that felt like it separated them from any other Earth culture. Attilan should’ve been home to as many strange and wondrous Marvel Easter Eggs as possible—this was their first chance to truly dig into the weirdness of the MCU on TV—but we got none. While Hawai’i was shot well, the rest of the Earth locations didn't really pop either. The set for what was supposed to be a high-tech space agency was an empty warehouse with a big-screen monitor and some desks arranged in front of it.

The characters didn’t fare much better and for the most part, their sojourns in Hawai’i did little to endear them to me. While it was great to have a lead who couldn’t speak and instead used sign language (or a version of it, anyway; like I saw in reviews at the AV Club, there’s no reason for them to speak English but not use ASL), Black Bolt (Anson Mount) wasn’t given many opportunities to do more than glower. When he did get to briefly explore other emotions, like comedic reactions to humans or romance with Medusa (Serinda Swan), Mount was believable, but overall Blackagar Boltagon felt pretty grim the whole time. I didn’t buy the angst of his character: a scene where he accidentally vaporized his parents with his super-destructive voice was so nonchalant it appeared comedic, not tragic. Additionally, Black Bolt did not appear to be a ruler charismatic enough to uphold the oppression the royal family continued forcing on the people of Attilan. His leadership choices didn’t make much sense either: learning of the spread of Inhumans on Earth (as seen on Agents of SHIELD), he secretly sends Triton (Mike Moh) to recover them, complete with a secret rendezvous location in case things go bad. Why wouldn’t he tell Medusa and his master strategist Karnak (Ken Leung)? We’re never given a hint that he distrusts them and it’s clear neither would betray him. How did he send Triton, when the show makes no effort to give Black Bolt the means to communicate without Medusa interpreting for him (the Inhumans have wrist communicators, but the devices don’t have video screens or text readouts) and only Medusa and Maximus (Iwan Rheon) know how to understand his sign language? We’re also told he has a secret bunker that no one else knows about, fully stocked for several lifetimes. What if Black Bolt had been killed in a sneak attack from their “greatest enemy?” Medusa and the rest of his family would’ve never known where they could seek shelter. Keeping secrets like these made no sense and only served to manufacture cheap drama when the other characters found out and (rightly) called him on his bizarre choices. I did like that Black Bolt always maintained his self-control about using his powers, making him a clever foil to Maximus’ obsession with getting abilities, but that wasn’t played with as much as it could’ve been. Finally unleashing his voice to give Maximus the other thing he wanted—to be king of Attilan—was fitting, but I didn’t feel anything from their struggle since they spent so much screentime apart.

Karnak was introduced as an abusive and borderline psychotic womanizer—telling a servant (Jenna Bleu Forti, I believe) that within two days of dating he’d hate her so much he’d want to kill her because he could see her flaws—and his brief fling with a human (Jen, Jamie Grey Hyder) while his powers were on the fritz did nothing to convince me he’d changed. I’ve liked Leung in other roles, but making Karnak likable was a truly uphill battle. That he hit his head and messed up his powers of seeing the flaw in everything because he calmly stepped on a loose rock and fell off a cliff was absurd. Immediately abandoning his quest to find Black Bolt once his powers glitched—not to find out how to fix them, but because he felt useless—made me wonder why he was ever seen as reliable among the royal family. His truly random time on a pot farm was extraneous to the plot (especially once violence was involved), and his self-doubt momentarily changed into completely embracing a carefree lifestyle far too fast, but at least his fling attempted to provoke some character growth by getting him to not look for flaws so much. However, his inability to see them at that point deflates that growth a bit for me. Once he reunited with his family, their biggest reaction to the changes he’d supposedly gone through is that he acts without being absolutely sure now, not that he’s grown as a person or anything. He does defy royal decrees and tradition by putting Gorgon (Eme Ikwuakor) through terrigenesis a second time to resurrect him, but Black Bolt and Medusa scolding him felt half-hearted, so it didn’t seem like that big a breach in protocol. While his dedication to his friend was admirable, he was so abrasive in the beginning that I still didn’t find him likable at the end of his arc.

Questions of competency further arose around Gorgon, who seemed to be the worst head of a royal guard ever. This is a guy who, knowing they have to remain hidden, intentionally crushed exploratory rovers, stole the flag Neil Armstrong planted on the moon for fun, and told a bunch of Earth strangers about their secret moon city right after meeting them. I don’t know if it’s because he never had to actually police anything in Attilan, but he wasn’t written like someone who’d be in charge of security; he was written like a bumbling fool Karnak had to put up with. I get the buddy cop pairing they were going for—Gorgon was the fun impulsive contrast to Karnak’s obsessive planner—but too often Gorgon came off as dumb and Karnak as cruel for me to buy into their friendship very much. Don’t get me wrong; a fun-loving, jovial head of security would be a refreshing change from the standard gruff characterization—Ikwualkor seemed more than up to that task—and it would’ve been fine if Gorgon hadn’t seemed so irresponsible as well. His only response to Karnak telling the servant he’d want to kill her was “You’re your own worst enemy,” which either implies these kinds of comments are so common that he’s decided they can be laughed off or that Gorgon sees Karnak’s sex life as more important than the actual lives of the servants (“say nothing about wanting to kill them—even if you’re thinking it—and they’d sleep with you” was my interpretation of his reaction), or both. Resurrecting him as a somewhat confused “zombie” after a heroic sacrifice (possibly the only truly guard-like thing he did beyond training people to fight in flashbacks) in the later episodes didn’t help matters either. They had a chance to make him see that the royal family’s way of doing things was wrong when a group of Hawai’ian freedom fighters told him about Hawai’i’s history, wherein America forced Hawai’i to give up its monarchy—as if all monarchs are good regardless of who they are—but the writing didn’t let Gorgon realize that Maximus didn’t parallel the imperialistic Americans, Black Bolt and co. did. I found it odd that Gorgon would take these random humans’ advice about strategy for fighting Maximus (staying on Earth to make himself bait so Maximus would bring the fight to him) instead of coming up with one himself. He did have a good idea when he suggested Karnak bluff about still having his power, though, and he did show a little responsibility in eventually telling his freedom fighter pals to back off for their safety; I just wish he’d shown more of this kind of behavior. It seemed like they were afraid to extensively show his hooves, as he wore special boots that made his feet look normal in every action sequence. Triton (Mike Moh) was wasted—maybe the heavy makeup required to bring the character to life prevented them from using him much—and there was no reason for Black Bolt to keep his mission a secret except to create a later moment of internal drama. He did have pretty cool fight scenes at the end of the season, though.

Medusa fared the best by far on the show, and was the one character I was invested in. Even though they cut off her prehensile hair in the first episode—for budgetary/effects reasons, I suppose; for the record, I didn’t think the CGI hair looked bad—robbing her of her trademark powers, her arc was the best-written and acted. At first I thought she was a little too stoic, but Swan did great once Medusa was banished to Hawai’i; her reactions to the loss of her hair—effectively several limbs—were haunting and powerful. I wish we’d gotten more time to see just how intrinsic Medusa’s hair was to her everyday life so we could see how big an impact losing it had on everyday actions (how often does she use her hair when the rest of us would use our hands, for example?) or her fighting style (I did like what little we got to see of her using her hair offensively), but Swan absolutely sold her loss. I liked that her displacement revealed her as a tough fighter (and clever strategist, correctly guessing that Crystal (Isabelle Cornish) was being used to track the royals’ locations) rather than crushing her, though as I’ve seen pointed out elsewhere, a bigger reaction to seeing Maximus again in the end would’ve been appropriate. They could’ve even included the twist the comics did, where she could still control her hair to attack him even after having it cut off. I did like that she destroyed his last chance to get powers by smashing the terrigen crystal just like he stole hers, though. And she got to deliver perhaps the series’ coolest line to Maximus, “Black Bolt wants to have words with you.” Her drive to save her husband—her second call to Black Bolt on their communication devices after arriving on Earth was a great expression of their love—and reunite her family provided the urgency and stakes to the show. While Black Bolt got arrested or captured a lot early on (elaborating on Maximus’ connections on Earth) and everyone else was stuck in subplots that went nowhere and added very little to their character development (mostly they just gained an appreciation for humans, though Karnak and Gorgon once tried thinking like each other to solve problems), Medusa’s arc fit squarely into the narrative and drove most of the action. While she was abrasive when she got to Earth, her burgeoning friendship with Louise (Ellen Woglom) was well-constructed to spark her character development and it’s the one human relationship that felt real and natural. While I would've liked Medusa to spend a little more time dealing with how her rule affected her citizens, taking responsibility for the royal family’s misdeeds and acknowledging that Maximus had the right idea (just like her parents) was a good start, though we probably should’ve seen more of a reckoning for the royals in terms of public reaction to them. I also liked her getting fed up with just being Black Bolt’s interpreter and his lies in general, so I’d be very interested to see what she does with an equal share of the responsibility of ruling. Will she balance her parents’ teachings with the way Black Bolt has been leading, or will she do something entirely different? I would also watch a second season of Medusa and Lockjaw travelling the world to rescue scared and persecuted Inhumans. Medusa and Lockjaw recurring on a Ms. Marvel series, with Medusa teaching Kamala how to be an Inhuman and Kamala teaching her how to respect non-royals and humans, would be welcome too.

Medusa’s sister Crystal had the potential to go in an interesting direction, but they settled for a flimsy romance instead. Maximus seemed to nearly convince her that he was right about the horrible conditions of Inhuman society in Attilan—particularly since her parents had fought against the royalty—and it almost seemed like she might agree. Instead, she escaped Attilan the first chance she got and fell in love with the first human (Chad James Buchanan) she met, who also rammed Lockjaw with his four-wheeler. True it was an accident and he got her dog help, but he also convinced Crystal to go swimming instead of looking for her family in the middle of a coup. From what we saw of Crystal in Attilan, at no point did she need to relax more; even after the coup, Maximus let her hang out in her room. I’m not against romance in superhero stories at all—the soap opera aspect is a core component, dating all the way back to Superman and Lois’ triangle for two—but this wasn’t the time and it paled in comparison to the promise of Crystal more directly interacting with Maximus’ plot. I would have absolutely been on board with her siding with Maximus for the right reasons (minus the overtones of a forced marriage); that would’ve been far more complex and engaging than continuing to draw her as the sheltered princess they did. It also would’ve put her at odds with the rest of her family and built on the backstory of Black Bolt’s parents (Michael Buie, Tanya Clarke) putting hers to death for dissenting against the monarchy. Instead, she got a bland flirtation and her entire role in the final battle against Maximus was to ask a wall (Moses Goods) to teleport everyone to Earth, and she didn’t even have to convince Eldrac to help. Lockjaw was a delight, but he didn’t get to do anything but act as a transporter for everyone else. As I’ve seen pointed out elsewhere, I really wish we’d seen them build their relationship more.

Maximus had all the right motivations—he legitimately had a good argument about the Inhuman caste system throwing people with undesirable or no powers into literal mines (despite the fact that surely powers like Gorgon, Crystal, Karnak, Black Bolt and even Medusa had would make mining easier…no argument that limited resources necessitated the caste system holds up when all the powers useful for labor are wasted on an upper class that does nothing) while those with admirable or beautiful powers were prized—but he was trapped in Attilan without anyone to spar with beyond underlings (another reason Crystal agreeing with him but truly fighting for the greater good would’ve been the better arc). If he wanted an exodus to Earth to ease overpopulation on the moon so badly, why didn’t he just start moving people there as soon as he was in control? Using Eldrac would’ve allowed him to take his people anywhere and the royal family wouldn’t have known or been able to do anything about it. They should’ve been able to hold whatever territory they took or, more intelligently, couldn’t they replicate their camouflaging tech on Earth? Establishing a temporary, invisible home base on Earth where they could collect the newly emerging Inhumans would’ve been better than staying on the moon. Surely fulfilling his promises and leading his people into the future would’ve gone over much better than murdering anyone who opposed him, even with spinning the Genetic Council as the keepers of oppression. It would’ve been a great and complex twist if, in addition to wanting powers, he actually was a good king. When it came to his selfish impulses, he came off as another Loki scheming for power, and while I’ve seen the suggestion that an Inhumans show with multiple “houses” could’ve been the superhero Game of Thrones, that’s much harder to do when there’s only one house. The reveal that Maximus had been communicating with people on Earth and was in command of the soldiers who “killed” Triton was a genuine surprise to me, and I wish there had been more examples of his Machiavellian schemes. On the other hand, forging his parents’ signature on a decree to have Black Bolt lobotomized—inadvertently leading to Black Bolt killing them—had no effect on me; it just seemed so haphazard and random, like it was tacked on to give Black Bolt additional reason to hate Maximus. Having Maximus send out soldiers to attack the royal family got old (though at least they used super powers), and perhaps it wouldn’t have seemed so perfunctory if the royals hadn’t all had their powers undermined right off the bat. Maximus and his loyalists would’ve had to be that much more cunning and powerful if they were dealing with a royal family that had functioning superpowers instead of a scattered array of lost souls, which would’ve made for a more exciting series instead of watching drug dealers try to kill Karnak and random freedom fighters team up with Gorgon. I wish they could’ve given him his second terrigenesis to push him further into madness. I also wish we’d seen his friendship with Medusa—in flashbacks or in the present—since it was apparently so important to him; that would’ve added an understanding of how much he was either hurt by her cutting him off or how much he was willing to sacrifice to be someone important.

The series’ biggest problem was crafting the royal family as willing perpetrators of the caste system in Attilan. I’ll give the show credit for taking the hard path and making them knowingly complicit instead of just having Maximus convince the populace that truly benevolent and fair rulers were corrupt simply because it was a monarchy, but the writing didn’t do the best job of having any of the royals deal with what they were doing to their people. With Black Bolt and Co. willfully throwing Inhumans with powers that aren’t desirable or useful into slums and mines, how are they anything but the villains? Why should we root for them? Then you have Kitang (Marco Rodriguez) celebrating terrigenesis as a process which elevates the Inhumans above everyone else; however well the “Inhumans-as-mutants” parallel was going on Agents of SHIELD, comments like these destroy the idea that Inhumans can reliably stand in for mutants as metaphors for the disenfranchised and oppressed in society. Going even further, I didn’t need to see the royal family learn to appreciate humans at all. That was extraneous to their arc this season and not at all relevant to Maximus’ struggle. Though he vaguely wanted to conquer Earth to take back their “rightful home,” the royals didn’t need to know people to disagree with that impulse, as they already did before meeting anyone and Maximus’ immediate plans never involved attacking humans (except holding a few hostages once). They should’ve been learning to appreciate the lower classes of Attilan and the newly-powered Earth-born Inhumans instead; especially given that’s what brought Triton to Earth in the first place (perhaps the Earth-born Inhumans have created their own underground subculture that would contrast with Attilan’s). Accepting and protecting humans should’ve been saved for a potential Season 2, when they would’ve known they were stuck among us but still felt somewhat xenophobic, especially faced with a government that hates and fears Inhumans.

Despite a nice moment in the fourth episode of Black Bolt taking the time to move injured enemy Inhuman soldiers away from a fire, I didn’t buy that one dying soldier (Locus, Sumire Matsubara) was all it took to convince Black Bolt that their caste system was wrong from what we saw. Medusa maybe, because her parents fought it (and Black Bolt’s parents had hers executed), but I still think we needed to see more of her secretly suspecting her parents weren’t wrong all along to really sell that shift. The dots of her emotional arc were there, but they needed to be connected more clearly. Her comment to Black Bolt about killing Maximus, “Think about what kind of ruler you want to be,” was probably prompted by her dissident parents’ deaths, and mercy for Maximus also probably reflects both their childhood friendship and her friendship with Black Bolt, which started when she went to gloat about his parents’ deaths but took pity on him instead. They could’ve even introduced and justified her lack of success in effecting social change by showing her trying to push it once she became queen, but accidentally finding herself taken in by the comfort of royal life and the ease of cold practicalities (such as forcing Locus into her scout position instead of allowing her to be a healer like she wanted) without realizing it. A wrinkle like that would’ve sold the wakeup call Locus’ death was supposed to be while also bringing Medusa into conflict not only with Black Bolt, but the social awakening Crystal should’ve undertaken. These are the sources of internal dissention they should’ve gone for among the royals, not brief spats over Triton’s mission or Karnak being annoyed at Gorgon’s foolishness. Had something like this been included, I would’ve believed the pivot to a more democratic society more (if that’s even what’s happening; we aren’t really told how the royals are going to continue Maximus’ goal).

The pacing on the whole could’ve been faster. After a quarter of the show had aired, it felt like it had gone nowhere. If this had been a super-powered Mad Max: Fury Road, with the royal family chased out, seen what it was like to be the nobodies in society—maybe in addition to Maximus’ forces hunting them, whatever is left of SHIELD should’ve been on-site to deal with the new Inhuman menaces—and then sieged Maximus’ new Earth-bound city (as the only ones equipped to do it in the wake of Civil War), it would’ve been much better and tighter. I suppose that’s essentially what it was, but the subplots on Earth didn’t really contribute to a greater understanding of the system the royals were perpetuating for the characters. I also don’t understand the intentional vagueness of the finale. Where on Earth is their new home? Who is “the Boss” that secured them this location? Who is their “greatest enemy?” There’s no reason not to answer those questions and they’re not interesting enough to be hooks for a second season. It’s also weird that, just like when Agents of SHIELD started, the people in Inhumans are right back to doubting paranormal things despite living in a world full of them. Callisto Aerospace Control Center scientist Louise gets suspended for suggesting aliens destroyed the moon rover? Aliens demolished New York! Why wouldn’t that be a priority-one, “Call SHIELD right now!” moment?

I don’t know if Inhumans will get a second season and I’m not sure I’d watch if it does. They introduced some interesting ideas, but never expanded on them as much as they could have and the budget was not there to accommodate this world or these characters, spoiling their potential and drastically decreasing the stakes. The show did make me a fan of Medusa and it was great to see another strong female character join the MCU, but I don’t know how much longer her character can carry Inhumans. However, everything can be improved, so the question is, will ABC give it the chance?

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