1x06 The Gentleman's Name is Gorgon

[5.8/10] We’re pretty well circling the drain at this point. Inhumans has had a few episodes to figure out what sort of show it wants to be (and given the ratings news, it looks like it won’t have many more), and its answer is “generic 90s genre show that airs in syndication.” I guess that’s a choice.

But let’s talk about what’s good rather than just hammer away at this thing. The fight between Karnak and Gordon vs. Auron and Mortis and Company is actually pretty good. There’s well-done character beats, like Karnak strolling in without a real plan and hoping to deceive Auron that he still has his predictive abilities in a nice bluff, and his taunting Mortis (admittedly in a cheesy fashion) about what happened to him during terrigenisis. And the action itself is pretty darn good too. The hand-to-hand combat between Gorgon and Auron is well shot and edited, making you feel the impact of each strike and like these two people are evenly matched, and the rest of these sequences, involving our heroes stalking around a dimly-lit lab, make for some nice moody preludes.

That’s about all you can say in favor of this one. The Inhumans split up, with half prepping to take down Auron and the other half trying to find Crystal. As noted, the former is decent, but the latter is a waste, with more on-the-nose exposition about the injustices of Atalan’s society. Plus Crystal, predictably, ends up with Dave the Generic Hunk, in the driest most obvious and least compelling romance I’ve seen on television in a long time.

But most of the focus in this one goes to Maximus. You’d think that turning over more of the hour to Iwan Rheon would pay dividends for Inhumans, but the actor is bogged down in this cliché “Maximus is getting paranoid that people are trying to unseat him” storyline and can’t make chicken salad out of such crud. There’s the kernel of a decent idea, with Maximus’s mistrust stemming from the way he was mistreated for being human, and the heavy-handed character backstory flashback has the solid foundation of Maximus learning that because he’s so overmatched in terms of abilities, the only way he can win is being smart and being sneaky. But it’s all just so trite and so poorly done.

Overall, the action set pieces with Gorgon and Karnak give this one some redeeming value, but otherwise it’s a lot of the usual dull material. Inhumans knows what it is now, and the results aren’t pretty.