1x01 Behold...The Inhumans

[4.3/10] In one of Family Guy’s notorious cutaway gag, a character declares that he hasn’t been this confused since he saw the film No Way Out. The scene flashes back to him walking out of the theater and declaring, “How does Kevin Costner keep getting work?”

It’s hard not to feel the same way about Inhumans showrunner Scott Buck. The biggest mystery left in the wake of “Behold...The Inhumans!” is not how the titular heroes will cope with the coup in their kingdom, or whether an apparent seer’s predictions are true, or even what the unclear superpowers of this motley lot are, but rather how Buck keeps being handed the keys to the kingdom after so many meh-to-ugh seasons of television produced under his watch. Does he have compromising pictures of some executive? Are studio honchos happy enough that he makes the trains run on time? Is he just a really nice person?

Regardless, despite driving the back half of Dexter into the ground and getting Iron Fist off to (generously) a rocky start, Buck was nevertheless tapped to run Inhumans, Marvel Studios’ answer to the contractual obligations that prevent it from using the X-Men. The Inhumans are a collection of powerful beings who live in a hidden city on the moon, and develop random superpowers when exposed to terrigen crystals. The opening episode does its best to establish their world (with decor that makes it look like most of the population lives in a modern art museum) and then just as quickly topples it.

At its core, the first episode of Inhumans is more dull than awful, more stock than stinking, which is really the only bit of faint praise I can offer Mr. Buck and the product he oversaw. There’s so many strange or underwhelming choices in the opening hour of the series, so many clumsy efforts to establish character or setting, but the whole thing is largely boringly competent, albeit barely so.

It’s hard to know where to start with the questionable choices at play here. For one thing, the show uses the ABC television house style, which gives everything the veneer of cheapness that sister show Agents of Shield has had to overcome from the beginning. It’s hard to know whether it’s the lighting or the design or what, but it makes these elaborate, faux-regal titans seem like cosplayers putting on a show at a local gallery.

The pilot goes for scenery porn now and then (presumably for the IMAX release) with long zooms or slow motion shots of boots meeting mud, but it’s all empty calories and not particularly captivating even as raw imagery. By the same token, the pair of action scenes in the pilot share the same lackadaisical cadence and choreography that immediately suck the life out of them. If you want to see barely-introduced good guys engage in some going-through-the-motions combat with faceless mooks, “Behold” has you covered.

Or how about the decision to focus much of the episode on a main character who cannot speak and only communicates in hand signals and translations from his wife. While in other hands, that might be an interesting and fruitful challenge, one that allows the lead actor to use all the other tools in his toolbox to communicate meaning and emotions, instead Inhumans’s Black Bolt is just a stone-faced cipher who has all the charisma of a cardboard standee the other characters wheel around the palace.

But maybe Black Bolt is lucky, as he barely has to utter any of the show’s weak dialogue. Buck, who’s also the writer of “Behold,” never met a clunky, obvious statement about what a character’s personality is or what the current situation is that he didn’t like. The episode would, frankly, be better served by just having a Star Wars-style introductory crawl rather than straining to have its characters stiltedly explain things they already know to one another.

There’s also the big issue that the pilot involves a purportedly gigantic change in the status quo -- a shift in leadership, betrayals among allies and family members, and the like -- when we’ve barely seen the status quo long enough to care. “Behold” gives some combination of The Lion King and Game of Thrones, with palace intrigue and a jealous, ousted brother rallying the unwashed masses, but despite its bending over backwards to convey what the scenario is, it never bothers to do anything to make us care.

All of that, coupled with wooden dialogue and tepid performances means there’s little promise to the series after its opening hour. The best hope for the show lies in its premise. However ham-handedly “Behold” introduces and deals with these ideas, there’s some legitimate complexity to Maximus (Game of Thrones’ Iwan Rheon, playing the Inhuman equivalent of a squib) railing against the caste system to the common people, and declaring that their problems could end if they just went to Earth for a little lebensraum. (One of the ill-explained aspects in an overexplain-y pilot is why Inhuman ruler Black Bolt opposes this and thinks going to Earth would lead to war.) Despite the awful lines he’s forced to deliver, Rheon finds some interesting notes to play for the character.

And the series premiere also promises some fish out of water material, which worked well for both Thor and Wonder Woman. The prospect of a pack of nigh-aliens and their poorly-composited CGI dog traipsing around the modern world could prove enjoyable. But that part of the story will need to escape the Buck-shaped anchor bringing it down in order to make something out of that setup, and if the bulk of this episode is any indication, those are some long odds.

Hopefully somebody somewhere looked at this episode and was pleased, patting themselves on the back for having the foresight to sign Scott Buck on to run yet another show. I don’t know what’s going through that person’s mind, or what they think quality is, or if they’ve ever seen Buck’s prior cratering creative failures. But somebody keeps hiring this guy, and so I hope they’re happy, because no one else watching this crap is.