"Darkness on the Edge of Town" – Swamp Thing S01E04 Review

And so another week, another small-town plight. Yes, I'm still awaiting for the superheroics to begin. Or even a Swamp Thing saga. But it's all small-town troubles so far. They're good small-town troubles, but it seems like small potatoes compared to either of the previous two DC Universe new shows, or the Swamp Thing of the more recent comics.

Swamp Thing seems like the 90s Swamp Thing series. And... that's not a good thing. It's decent horror and certainly no worse than, say, NBC's Constantine. It just seems rather "small".

This week it's infection time. Or rather, a new infection. This time a swamp hunter (Andrew Yackel) is attacked by an animated corpse that scratches him. That infects the hunter, Todd, with a disease that causes him to hallucinate his worse fear. It's snakes (and he's a swamp hunter?), and Todd works at Delroy's. It turns out Delroy (Al Mitchell) and Liv are father and daughter, which I didn't pick up on before. Todd hallucinates a snake on his arm, tries to hack it off with a kitchen knife, and when that doesn't work jams his hand into a garbage disposal. But not before he scratches Delroy.

The disease spreads to Delroy, who hallucinates when two masked men broke in and robbed the bar. They shot Delroy's mother dead, and Delroy grabs a shotgun and starts blasting at the imaginary robbers. Abby and Liv are there but end up unharmed. Lucilia arrives and jumps Delroy, and she gets scratched. It takes all day for the disease to incubate in her, and she goes berserk at a town party Avery is hosting. Lucilia hallucinates Matt being killed and goes berserk, and Abby gets scratched. She hallucinates Swamp Thing as a faceless figure that haunted her childhood dreams. He draws the darkness from her and puts it back into the corpse. The ground swallows the corpse up and Swamp Thing tells Abby the darkness is only the beginning of the what is going to come out of the swamp and hit Marias.

On other fronts, Daniel asks Xanadu about his mission. We find out he made a bargain to protect Marias but doesn't know from what. Neither does Xanadu, but she says "a storm" is coming to Marais, and Daniel will probably have to face it without her. Maybe it's the storm we see the aftermath of in the opening credits when everything in town is underwater? When Lucilia goes berserk and threatens Abby's life, Daniel tackles her.

Abby collects a sample of Swamp Thing's body. When she's analyzing it in the hospital lab, Jason gets a glimpse of it and is intrigued. I'm still liking Kevin Durand as Jason. He's quirky, arrogant, and curiously vulnerable because of his wife's dementia, all at the same time. I've always liked Durand, particularly in The Strain.

Avery burns Gordon's body in the swamp and has a flashback to his childhood when his father tried to make him kill an alligator. I guess we're supposed to figure this taught Avery ruthlessness. Later he takes Susie in, paying off her uncle, Lee, and says he's doing it to play on Jason's sympathies. Jason doesn't seem to have any sympathies: he tells Abby earlier, "Why would I give a damn about the rest of the world?" But it also seems like Avery is trying to get on Maria's good side because she has sympathies for Susie as well, and Avery picks up on it. So maybe Avery is lying to himself and/or Lee.

We get a bit of gore with Todd first stabbing his own arm and then shoving it into a garbage disposal as he hallucinates a snake ("Why did it have to be snakes?") on his arm. We find out Lucilia's biggest fear is Matt dying before her eyes. Delroy's greatest fear is the masked robbers who killed his mother. As noted, Abby's fear is of a faceless figure from her childhood dreams. None of this adds to any of their characterization, or to the characterization of Liz because of her father's hallucination.

We don’t find out anything new about whatever is lurking in the swamps. The swamp is polluted by the accelerant (which also gives it the power to defend itself?), and the pollution is putting the balance of life and death out of whack. Which causes things like the green flu (which apparently is now gone, since all of the CDC except Abby have left town: no more Harlan?) and the darkness plague. This is all stuff we knew. What the Rot or whatever from last episode has to do with this, who knows?

Abby has fully accepted Alec is Swamp Thing, and working to find a cure for him. He wonders what he's becoming since the plants fill him in on back story, and he then exposits it to Abby.

No major villain has shown its face. That's part of what I mean about how Swamp Thing is kind of... small. "The polluted swamp" doesn't make a decent menace, and its motives are unclear. The accelerant gives it powers, and lets it create an avatar in Swamp Thing. But... it doesn't like the town of Marais. What did Marais and the townspeople ever do to it? I can see why it doesn't like Avery: Avery spread the accelerant and is pretty much a dick. So why doesn't it target him? And what does Reanimated Shawna Corpse have to do with anything?

We’re 40% of the way into the one and only season, and we still have more questions than answers. The performances are mostly good. Ian Ziering is surprisingly impressive even though Daniel's connection to what is going on isn't at all clear. Who or what did Daniel make a bargain with, and what does it have to do with the swamp? There's a "storm" coming and it's tied to Abby. But what her connection is to it isn't at all clear, either. It seems like Swamp Thing and Avery are tied to the swamp, but the swamp doesn't seem interested in them. If the swamp is sending out the reanimated Munson and the darkness, then Swamp Thing is fighting it.

Henderson Wade has a relatively thankless role as the hick smalltown deputy who is the third point of the romantic triangle between him, Swamp Thing and Abby. But he does well enough with it. Jennifer Beals, as his mother and the town sheriff, seems wasted. Granted, Ms. Beals is no great actress. But it seems like every time she has a chance to bring something to the part of Lucilia Cable, it either gets dropped (her being Avery's former lover) or descends into generic tropiness (her greatest fear is... losing her son).

Xanadu has apparently had fortune-telling powers for at least eight years, when Daniel came back to Marais. So what's her connection to anything? I could see Jason developing some kind of version of his accelerant that transformed Alec into Swamp Thing, and using it to become the Floronic Man of the comics, but the creative team doesn't seem to have any interest in moving that plot along. Which means he'll probably transform at the end of the season as a cliffhanger, to a season two we're never going to get. Maybe he'll transform into John Glover's version of Woodrue from the movie Batman & Robin. You can never have enough John Glover.

So, right now, Swamp Thing is an odd mix of the small and the large. The swamp or whatever is behind Marais' ongoing menaces is a "big" threat. But it's personality-less. Maybe that's because it doesn't have a chance to... "act" villainous. There's no Alan Tudyk or Seamus Dever to "go big" and exposit about their master plans. There's ST providing second- or third-hand narration about what the "villain" is doing. And ST is going through his own existential crisis. So, instead, we get "small" crimes like darkness-disease-spreading Munson, and Shawna as reanimated corpses, and Avery as the eeevviilll corporate bad guy who is also the front man for the "Conclave" Gordon mentioned last week.

So while Will Patton does well with what he has as the show's current big bad, he doesn't have much to work with. He's the genially evil "real boss" of Marais who occasionally shows his dark side in private. And he runs an eeevviilll corporation. But we haven't seen anything of the business, yet: just heard about it. So far Avery has dumped plant accelerant into the swamp to help the town (and indirectly helps the swamp and create Swamp Thing), done some fiscal shenanigans to keep his unseen business afloat, and killed a guy who helped him. It's not Trigon or Mr. Nobody, is it? It's not even Mysterio- or Vulture-levels of villainy, to borrow from the Spider-man milieu.

And Swamp Thing himself is rather personality-less. I don't figure he's going to start quipping and doing acrobatics while punching out swamp poachers. Or flashing his Swamp Credit Card and buying drive-thru. But he's a tortured mockery of a man with vague plant powers and a connection to Nature. Got it. Now the creative team needs to move on and making him an interesting character.

Overall, while Swamp Thing is an okay entry into the superhero shows. And the horror shows. And whatever the heck the 90s Swamp Thing was. But he's just not that thrilling. If the creative team doesn't want to go the comic book route, so be it. But I hope they'll go some route. So far they seem content to do a slightly updated version of the 80s and 90s Swamp Thing. When there's so much more they could do.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?