Critics Den

Before we go any further, I want to apologize for being late.  I take punctuality terrible seriously – gravely so – and like any self-respecting Hannibal fan, I abhor rudeness.  So while there is every reasonable assumption that no one actually gives too particularly much of a shit about the timing of this little piece, I’m still going to throw myself at the mercy of whatever court.  Old business out of the way, let’s move on swiftly to the new, because damn, there’s a lot to cover.

I could spend and waste so many words telling you, ad nauseam, that Swamp Thing is great, but at a certain point it is an insult to your intelligence, I’ve said it, you get it, and I respect you way too much to do you like that.  What I would like to focus on this week is just how deftly the show is managing to service multiple character arcs, while still having them feel a part of the greater plot.  This may seem foregone and obvious, but I didn’t actively realize – until I witnessed the skillful way the stories are woven through Swamp Thing – how often a show counts on the audience just caring about the individual characters enough that there is no greater call to fuse their arcs to the serialized elements.  And listen, that can be okay.  But there is something very satisfying about the way Swamp Thing makes everyone a moving piece – a necessary component – of what’s happening in the swamp.

Swampy himself remains the greatest surprise for me.  I truly expected him to just become some sort of ecological avenger.  Instead, this week we see him struggling to come to terms with what he is.  Call it the beauty and advantage of being a series instead of a movie, but body horror so rarely dedicates the time and energy it should to discussing the implications of having your basic physiognomy distorted.  Swampy is grappling;  the swamp keeps trying to show him shit, but he can’t process it, because he still doesn’t understand how or why he went from being stone cold science fox, Alec Holland, to being the sentient mass of vines and twigs we know and love.  Help comes via a surprisingly chill fisherman, who is either a zen guru or a manifestation of the swamp, intended to Virgil-style lead Swampy through the changes he’s experiencing.  The show, wisely, refuses to commit.   Whatever he is, he provides Swampy with some guidance and our troubled, mossy friend begins to understand that he is seeing what the swamp has seen; he shares its memories now.  Clever trick, this.  It’s a difficult and frankly overwhelming thing to attempt – turning a setting into a character – but the swamp at the center of this show feels as living and breathing and most importantly, essential, as any of the human characters.
And speaking of the human characters…

This episode of Swamp Thing goes full possession story, to glorious effect.  Shauna is inhabiting the body of little Susie, saying creepy things, and periodically appearing to Abby in her bloated, postmortem form.  Maria embraces it; she is thrilled to have Shauna back and since we know – because the show took the time to do the heavy lifting and establish our characters – that Maria is open to the supernatural and the belief that Shauna would return to her at some point, it actually scans as authentic that she would believe and accept that her lost daughter would return to her in the form of an abandoned child.  Of course we know that ghost Shauna is a creature more malice than comfort, so when she tells Maria that she is lonely and needs to return to the swamp, it’s pretty clear nothing good is going to come of it.  Abby follows them, aware that Susie as Shauna is absolutely bad news, and determined to stop anymore tragedies from happening on her watch (do it on your own time, death!).  Shauna releases Susie at the bog (I apologize for the awkward use of “bog”.  I hate to lampshade, but I’m acutely aware of how often I have to use the word “swamp” and it’s starting to feel clunky.  I’m sure I’ll return to it in a sentence or two) and Susie tells Abby to hurry.  Abby finds Maria and tries to call her away from the water, but a scuffle ensues, and Maria tries to drown Abby.  Abby breaks away and Maria goes under, but is ultimately saved by Swampy, who carries her to land, and then shows Abby that he shares the memories of the ecosystem around him, by mind-melding with her, to watch Shauna’s death.  Young Shauna, impulsive, urged young Abby to jump off a bridge with her.  They swam safely in the water below for a time, but something pulled Shauna under – a  memory Abby had repressed until that moment.  The something bad in town is, it seems, not new.

I want to hit everything, but there’s always so much on this show; so please bear with me while I do the “things that happened” lightning round!  Our friend, Daniel, a stealth favorite character for me, tried to leave town but discovered he can’t.  He has a frustrated talk with a blue devil mask he carries in his trunk and I am intrigued as hell.  Liz is still a total boss, refusing to be intimidated by Avery, even after he sends some heavies to pop her tires and menace her.  She kicks their asses, but unfortunately one of them is able to deliver a bonk to the head of Daniel.  And perhaps most importantly of all the developments this week, we discover that it’s possible that Matt was involved in Alec’s boat blowing up.  Ophelia is investigating Alec’s disappearance and speaks to a man who witnessed the boat going out and he alludes to having seen Matt that night.  He attempts to blackmail Ophelia, but she ain’t to be flexed with where her little boy is concerned and shoots him.  Perhaps Swampy’s long glowers at Matt are NOT a manifestation of jealousy, so much as a recognition of danger, a development I would be here for.

We are officially halfway through the season, and I genuinely can’t say enough positive things about Swamp Thing.  If you have the means, it’s worth every penny.  Or if you know someone who’s already paying for the service, it’s definitely worth borrowing their log-in.  See you next week!

I promise, with about 60 percent hope of adherence and 100 percent guarantee of trying my damnedest, that I will not dedicate a portion of every remaining Swamp Thing review to lamenting its cancellation, shaking my fist and pounding my breast in the general direction of DC and the powers that be.  Starting next review.  Because today I have to say again, what a hideous shame it is that we won’t be getting more of this weird, wonderful show.  As the season progresses, I am increasingly impressed at the evolving ways they manage to progress the serialized elements, while also implementing a slightly procedural, week-to-week component that also enriches and furthers the narrative.  Let me show you how.

This week, what I can only describe as renegade timber poachers (and god bless this show for allowing me the opportunity to use that turn of phrase!) sneak into the swamp.  When they try to cut down some good ol’ fashioned swamp wood, a mummified corpse falls from a tree, and one of the loggers gets scratched by it.  When he returns to the one bar we’ve seen in town, he gets to work alongside Liz, Abby’s reporter friend.  He begins to hallucinate an enormous snake on his arm, and takes a knife to himself.  Despite Liz and Del (Liz’s father and the bar owner) telling him there is no snake on him, he manages to chop off his arm – and scratch Del in the process.  Liz calls Abby in and away from the sample of Swampy she took to study, and Abby discovers the mummified corpse in the swamp.

Swampy himself has become a bit of a harbinger of both doom and exposition, a situation that I might find problematic were it not for how well it actually manages to correspond to his own, gradual self discovery.  Yes, he is a convenient way to provide Abby with answers, like “it’s not a virus, exactly, it’s a darkness” (“whatever the hell that  means” – attribute that quote to Kelly not Swampy, he’s unconcerned) “and it needs a host to survive”, but also, and fair enough, he is a frightened new version of himself, talking to a colleague.  There’s something that actually, strangely, feels very intellectually honest about the moments where Swampy and Abby are talking about the virus or this new menace; I’ve previously lamented the fact that Abby is the weakest component of the show, and I haven’t completely reversed my opinion on that.  And I want to be abundantly, loudly clear on this, in a way I think perhaps I’ve failed to in the past.  It is no fault of the actress.  She’s charismatic enough, and she has dynamite chemistry with Derek Mears, even with all the swamp latex.   It’s just that she is so often sort of damsel-in-distress-ed.  But an episode like this, where she is allowed to talk about in quotation marks science – because make no mistake, a lot of this science is actually magic – and to ask the right questions and bounce off of Swampy as an intellectual equal, Abby is compelling.  And you root (yes, yes, run me out on a rail, come to my house with torches, I know, it’s an unforgivable pun, and even so, I refuse to recant) for her.  But I’ve lost the plot, let’s see if we can find it.

Swampy gives Abby the news about the host business, and Abby rushes back to town, having seen Ophelia – previously referred to, I believe as “Sheriff Lady” – was scratched by Del.  At the shrimp boil that Avery (more on that shit stain later) threw, Ophelia begins to hallucinate someone attacking Matt and draws her gun on the crowd.  Daniel – who remains a fascinating mystery – is able to disarm her, but when Abby goes to try to restrain her, she scratches Abby and gives her the parasite.  Abby runs to the swamp to make sure she doesn’t infect anyone else.  When she reaches the swamp, our guy holds onto her and takes the infection from her, then gives it back to the mummified remains, which are then promptly eaten by the swamp.

The clever conceit here is that some balance has been shifted and a darkness is taking over the swamp.  Last week we saw Bugman, and this week we see the parasite.  It’s tempting to call the resolution of these things within an episode too tidy by half but they are plagues – symptoms, not the disease.  Indicative of a bigger problem, we aren’t entirely certain of yet. 
But let’s speak very quickly on Daniel and Avery, both of whom we would be terribly remiss not to acknowledge on this day.  I don’t totally understand Daniel’s deal, but he is quickly becoming one of my most anticipated characters.  This week, Xanadu, the medium lady, mentions something about a deal he made and a heroes journey, and I have no idea what the hell that means, but guys, I am into it.  I want to see where things are going with him.  Also, this week, Avery continues to be the sleaziest of grease balls.  He has in essence bought young Susie from her shit-heel uncle, because of the good optics of an adorable child.  He believes that having Susie as a face of the virus will make people more likely to give him money.  He is a vile, disgusting piece of garbage, but he’s clever, and frankly a damn good villain.

I could easily write more about Swamp Thing and how it is rapidly becoming a favorite show, but I am reaching the precipice between charmingly verbose and offensively garrulous.  So.  We’ll talk more next week.  With great anticipation.  It’s not too late to check it out – this show is worth your time.

I am about to say, in a fashion one might – were they feeling generous – describe as succinct and concise, the exact sentiment that I will then expel many, many more words proving throughout this review.  I’ll try to phrase it in fun and different ways, and it certainly will involve far more plot details than the five words that I promise are coming, right around the corner, any second now, but I will leave it up to you, letting you know that no opinion I profess will be any more controversial than what I’m about to say, right… now: I fucking love Swamp Thing.  It’s a really good show, and yes, I worried that perhaps it was the momentum of newness often present in a freshman show.  But by three episodes, we have a sense of quality and ambition.  Swamp Thing could settle for just being that weird body horror show about the monster-guy, but instead it is something more complicated and nuanced.  There’s a carefully unravelling mystery and – quelle surprise – there’s some pretty damn impressive character development.

And honestly, who could have foreseen it?  Usually once you introduce the concept of a bio-engineered swamp monster, you kind of abandon hope for character.  But we start this episode seeing Alec talking to one of the men that Swampy has torn asunder; he is reconciling his guilt with what was ultimately an elemental reaction to what he has become.  But we know that Alec – with the pretty face and the good hair – is not so much entirely human anymore, so we also know that this is a vision, a hallucination, and so that all of this is happening inside Swampy’s head.  Which is a telling detail in and of itself.  He is not mindless or devoid.  Some pretty industrious and very gnarly bugs go into the pieces of the man torn asunder and hold him together.  As my notes for this episode point out, nothing good has ever come from a bug-puppet.

Meanwhile, Dr. Woodrue – he who made the accelerant – has taken over the CDC operation to cure the virus.  To return to my point about this show taking the time to be more nuanced than it necessarily needs to be, we see that his wife, the Lady Dr. Woodrue, is suffering some sort of gradual degenerative disease.  Look, Woodrue didn’t need to have a reason.  He could have been a patsy, an overly ambitious scientist, too hungry for discovery, any of these things.  But the grace with which it is revealed that his own reasons for wanting to find biological answers are sad and delicate is admirable, and frankly very uncommon for any comic based show.  Of course, the methods he’s using to treat the virus are wrong and stupid because, as we learn, there is something in the swamp itself that the accelerant specifically reacted to – he may have created the accelerant, but he’s not taking that variable into account.

Abby’s assistant, Harlan, contracts the disease, which spurs Abby to break into Alec’s lab in the hopes of finding literally anything that might help her figure out the cure. I’ve said before, and I fear that I will have cause to say it again, that in the swirling haze of this wonderfully weird show, Abby is the weakest link.  Frankly, she and Alec did not have enough time together for the dewy, sad-eyed nostalgia she seems to be feeling in his lab.  Look, he was hot.  I get that.  No one is arguing that!  But still, she knew him for five minutes.  I love you, Swamp Thing, but please no more flashbacks to the 20 seconds they had together.

Anyway.  Bug-man sneaks on in and is approaching Abby like a real creepo, when Swampy explodes through the floorboards to defend his woman.  He beats Bugman into submission, but recognizes the raw materials that were the man he dismembered, and in a moment of empathy and kindness, simply tells the bugs to leave him.  Which they do.  And friends, I tell you no lies, Derek Mears is really, truly great as Swampy.  He gives him a pained physicality and a steady, almost weirdly calming voice.  If I expected him to be less human after the transformation into swamp monster… I was wrong.  Swampy is actually a very compelling pile of moss.  He tells Abby that the virus isn’t fighting, it’s fighting back, which is enough information for her to realize that the harder they hit it with antibiotics, the more it mutates and evolves.  She returns to the hospital and administers what I will simply call stuff that manages to at least stay the virus.            

And now, we’re gonna run a little long because a hell of a lot happened and I assure you, I am still cutting shit out.  But before we can say adieu, we need to look in on Avery, who became full villain this episode.  We learn that he was taking unsanctioned loans from a banker named Gordon – loans he has absolutely no ability to pay off.   He tries to convince Maria to give him some of that sweet, sweet family scratch but she saw him trying to seduce a lady cop earlier and is pretty much done up with his bullshit. Avery goes to Gordon’s house and executes the only reasonable alternative to paying the loans in a timely fashion; he bashes the living hell out of Gordon with a golf club.  Our southern gent is a stone cold murderer.

I am so psyched to see where this is all heading.  From a horror perspective, would I call it scary?  Not necessarily, though it is gnarly as hell, and I am here for that.  But.  It is worth the time.   Every great episode reminds me how sad I am that there will only be one season, but as some clichés like to remind us, it is better to have loved and lost…

Before we can discuss – as hideous circumstance dictates we must – tragedy in a smaller still-life form, I want to provide a quick mea culpa.  I said that two episodes were released last week, and discovered pretty quickly that I was wrong.  One a week, Kell, you dummy, so we are only now, discussing episode 2 of my new friend, the Swamp Thing.  A show that I really like.  And to bring it on home and back to that tragic tip, a show that was cancelled right after its debut episode.  Kelly, you might say, why ever would that be?  You probably aren’t, as I have proven myself within the extreme confines of this very review – hell, this fucking paragraph – to be not fantastically reliable as a source.  That said, I’m petty as shit, and wanted to know a bit about why I was allowed to learn to love this beautiful swampy bastard, only to have him promptly returned to the algae and muck from whence he came.

Here’s what I can tell you:  it’s vague and muddied.  There’s some talk about confusion regarding a tax credit promised, but over the weekend, that’s been purported as bullshit.  So I don’t know and frankly, it doesn’t matter.  Because Swamp Thing, it turns out, is a good show.  A really good show, that’s taking the time to build a full world, inhabited by interesting characters who feel authentic and interesting.  It’s a shame; I suspect the tanking of Swamp Thing will also be the tanking of the DC streaming service; a number of people – myself included – have already declared their intent to cancel the service once we’ve run the course of the series.  But in the meantime, we have episode two to talk about, so let us lick our collective wounds, every man to their own tongue, and get down to brass tacks.

Here’s what we’ve got:  the little girl we saw in the pilot, patient zero for the virus, clearly has some sort of telepathic bond with Swampy.  It’s hard to say who’s controlling who, but when she pulls the IV tubes out of her arms in the hospital, we get some truly grizzly horror, as Swampy pulls some of the vines that make up his current corporeal form out of himself.   But because we know that Swampy is part Alec, part accelerant created plant form, his planty-parts regrow rapidly.  He ain’t to be flexed with.  Abby, meanwhile, is staying with her reporter friend Liz, and trying to figure out what the hell is going on.  She thinks that maybe there are answers in Alec’s lab, and that maybe Avery will allow her access.  We are a bit more savvy to the way of the small town fat cat, however, so when Avery very smoothly refuses Abby access, there is nothing of surprise to it.  Sure, he butters her up by telling her it was never her fault that Shawna died, and that he thinks of Abby as a daughter, but he still, ultimately refuses to allow her access.  Perhaps because his own motivations were so singularly mercenary.  The scientists who developed the accelerant meet with Avery, and he tells them that the accelerant’s purpose was always to make resources grow quickly so he could make stuff, sell it, and make money hella fast.  And that if they can’t reverse engineer a cure for the virus and his role in the illness is uncovered, he is sure as shit taking them down with him.  It will be nice to see him get eaten by Swampy.

Meanwhile, the wee tot makes her way to the swamp; she isn’t frightened of Swampy.  She feels his fear and is compelled to help him.  Abby hunts her down, and catches her first real glimpse of Swampy, in all his hideous, Derek Mears glory.  The girl tells her that he’s not dangerous; he is frightened and confused.  And his name is Alec. Dun-dun-DUN!

And credit where it’s due.  The story is taking its time.  It’s developing at a natural pace.   Even the incidental, one off characters are charming, including the small town celebrity who rented Alec’s room to him.  We get to see a carefully deployed hint of Avery’s casual misogyny this episode, when he assumes that the woman who comes to his house is simply the wife of the scientist, and not a doctor herself.  Abby, in a lot of ways, is the least interesting aspect of the show.  Yes, I want to know what happened to Shawna.  Of course I want to know.  Abby is just such an obvious hero character.  And there is nothing inherently wrong with that!  I like her, she’s fine… I’m just more interested in seeing a gross Swamp monster wreak some sort of slimy vengeance.  That might be more my hang-up than the show’s.

Either way… I’m hopeful for this season.  If it’s all we’re getting, and all indicators suggest it is, I’m determined to enjoy it to the maximum of my abilities.  Let’s go.

Stepping up to the plate, I made a conscious decision to remain as green as I possibly could about Swamp Thing.  It’s not my usual modus; I have driven myself a little mad trying to find spoilers before.  I like to know what I’m getting into, when the heel turn comes, the twist ending. But I made a choice this time; try it fresh.  No preconceived ideas.  Somehow, despite being a horror nerd and a body-horror specific nerd at that, I’ve made it to this point in my life without knowing virtually anything about “Swamp Thing”.  And then this new, DC Universe series came along, and I suddenly had a pros and cons columns.  You didn’t ask, but I assume you’re secretly curious (this is the assumption I am obligated to labor under.  Otherwise we’ll never get anything done) so let’s very quickly review.

Pros: body horror.  Derek Mears! Practical effects.  The bayou?  Ok!  I’m in.

Cons: It’s called “Swamp Thing”.  That is, objectively, a terrible name.  I feel pretty comfortable assuming that precious little energy, sleep or imagination was lost to the development of that name.  “Swamp Thing”.   Give it credit for being on the nose, I guess. But lots of good things have terrible names.  Just think about Cookie Puss.  So I did the unimaginable and shelled out $7.99 a month for a DC Universe subscription.  And friends, I’m happy to report that early indicators suggest it a very nearly 8 dollars well spent.  The first episode’s got moxie.

I’m going to give you a very nutshell version of the plot; certain aspects are being kept intentionally cryptic right now, so I will, by necessity, have to err towards generalities.  So.  Our immediate way into the story is through Abby Arcane, improbably alliteratively named CDC scientist.  She’s returned to her Louisiana home to try and suss out the cause of a pretty gnarly virus infecting the residents near the swamp.  At the risk of getting very rom-com, “Manhattan is a character itself!”, the swamp truly does feel like a vital presence to the show.  It is, by virtue of being, ya know, a swamp, disgusting, but it is also made very clear that it’s valuable to the town in some ineffable way.  Avery Sunderland, business man about town, has hired Alec Holland to investigate and research some sort of biological accelerant (ill defined) and Alec believes that the accelerant and the virus are connected to each other, so he teams up with Abby to try and figure shit out.  During the course of their research, Patient Zero starts sprouting branches and tendrils and is literally ripped apart as a strange, bioform takes control of the remaining organic material.  Alec torches the thing, and he and Abby share war wounds and do some more research.  Alec heads out to try and locate other deposits of the accelerant, but is shot and falls into the swamp, where a bioform that I am referring to in my head as the Symbiote goes into his body, and seemingly turns him into the titular Swamp Thing.  Which is honestly a little bit of a shame, because I was sporting a pretty huge fictional character crush on Alec – cute, smart-ass scientist type?  Yes, please. And that’s where episode one ends.  And guys, that’s good!  It’s smart to make us wait through the entire pilot episode to get our first glimpse of ol’ Swampy.  He’s who we’re here for, after all.

It’s important to note that with a show called Swamp Thing, you’re probably not in it for exceptional writing.  We are mostly watching for a well paced plot that binds things together between scenes of hopefully truly vile body horror.  It’s too early for me to say if the show will deliver the bare minimum.  The pilot is more than capable.  It gave me some chuckles, I liked the characters introduced, I’m curious where the story is going.  And I feel some reasonable degree of confidence that it can maintain that quality.  But there is the slightest glimmer in the corner, one that I refuse to lean into, lest I be disappointed, that maybe it will surpass that.  Let’s not get our hopes up, but remain cautiously optimistic.  Because the aforementioned body horror is great!  It’s gnarly as shit!  And fearlessly so.

When we think of DC and Marvel, we really focus on the superhero properties.  So I truly didn’t know what to expect from a horror series from one of those juggernauts.  Brightburn helped remind us that super humans are by their very nature dangerous, thus really great conduits for horror.  But would a company like DC bet the success of their streaming service (Swamp Thing and Doom Patrol are, I believe, the only two original series carried so far) on such a fundamentally weird concept? Or would they soften it? I’m happy to report, it’s not soft.  The gore is there; the bodies rent asunder.  They are not for the faint of heart.

It seems like perhaps two episodes were released as the roll out, so I’ll be back tomorrow with a review of the second episode.  After that, we’ll be once a week.  Let’s see where this goes, my dear crawdads!