Posted in: TV | Tagged: ABC, Anson Mount, entertainment, HRL, inhumans, marvel, Serinda Swan, television

Marvel's Inhumans: The Best Episode of 2017

Published Sun, 31 Dec 2017 15:39:23 -0600

I went in wanting to like Marvel's Inhumans. I saw it in the theater, watched it on ABC, and hoped that the show was better than the negativity that surrounded it. I grew to like some of the characters. Anson Mount as Black Bolt and Ken Leung as Karnak quickly became favorites, and by season's end I had completely warmed up to Serinda Swan's Medusa. And at one point in the series, the fifth episode, I thought I had it figured out. I saw what Scott Buck was trying to do with the series. It gave me hope, making it the best episode of 2017: Something Wicked This Way Comes.

The episode was directed by Kevin Tanchareon, making his second appearance on my best of 2017 list having also directed the best episode of Iron Fist. It was written by Scott Reynolds and it brought the royal family back together. It was faster paced and involved some good character development.

The episode spent most of the time with Karnak as we find out that Reno was planning on double crossing his partners all along and tries to kill Karnak and Jen. He gets his when his real partners show up and kill him. We get to see Karnak in action and how he can see the flaws in things. The way he took the bullet out is how his powers work in the comics and showed well on the screen… except they had the bad result of causing Jen to get shot.

We also got to see how upset Black Bolt got when he heard about what Maximus did to Medusa. The affection between the two really shone through this week. Even Gorgon got some good moments when he began tracking Karnak, and we get a better idea of the big brother/little brother relationship between the two. We got some nice action with Karnak and Gorgon, but they chose to have the final fight with Black Bolt and Medusa take place off camera, which worked emotionally… and it was probably good on the budget, but I would like to have seen it.

The fact that Locus told Medusa that Crystal was on Earth showed that she saw something different in the Royals than she expected. Crystal, on the other hand, spent a day at the beach. Her story seems to be a delayed version of everyone else's. Find a human and get distracted for a bit while you learn that they aren't as bad as you feared — except hers is a bit more blatant. I have to say, Mordis impatience and sarcasm maybe the oddest and best thing about the series. Not what I expected form the second-deadliest Inhuman.

The interesting thing here is that none of the Royals were really likable at the start, then we got to spend an episode with each and they got better as it went. The characters began to change and grow, but only to a certain point that was stunted by the series ending. I liked these characters and the actors portraying them enough that I would watch another season if the series was given to someone else to run. This is the episode that made me feel that way. This is the episode that started to redeem the series, but the ones that followed didn't take it the rest of the way. That makes this the best Inhumans episode of 2017.

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