Posted in: Movies, TV | Tagged: ABC, entertainment, HRL, karnak, Ken Leung, marvel's inhumans, television

Marvel's Inhumans: What Exactly Are Karnak's Abilities?

There is a lot of negativity towards Marvel's Inhumans — some of which I get, while some I think might be overblown. One of the ones I understand is the complaint that the series fails to show how Karnak's ability works. The problem is, don't think the writers on the show understand how his abilities work.

Below is a clip from the series premiere that shows Karnak (Ken Leung) taking on four of Maximus's men. We see him go through the fight and take out three only to have the fourth shoot him dead. Then another version of Karnak walks into the scene and starts figuring out what went wrong. We see a lot of glowing lines and symbols as he walks around and looks at his own body, then he walks back to the starting point and tries it again. This time, he grabs the third man's gun and shoots the fourth before he can fire. Karnak then says, "You shouldn't have given me a choice."

It's a scene with a whole lot of visuals that don't exactly make sense. I'm not sure what they're supposed to be measuring and marking. I saw one reviewer describe his powers as an ability to "do-over" and asked why he didn't do that later in the episode when he fell down the mountain. Karnak's ability is not a do-over, nor is it an ability to see probabilities, which is how they make it seem in the show.

What are his powers? This is what is listed on the Marvel wiki page:

"Through mental discipline, Karnak has gained the extrasensory ability to perceive the stress points, fracture planes, or weaknesses, in all objects or persons around him. By striking and applying pressure at these points, he can split or shatter objects made of seemingly invincible substances or render insensate beings of far greater strength than he. This mental discipline is virtually effortless, and Karnak can attain this state of awareness for extended periods of time."

Basically, he can find flaws in objects and people and then exploit them. Not exactly the most visually stunning thing you could put on television, but definitely not what they did in the series.

Perhaps we'll get better examples of his ability later in the series, but for now, the knock against how they showed what he could do is definitely valid.

Marvel's Inhumans airs Fridays on ABC.

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