Welcome back to Boomb Tube! Here, we will be catching you up on the week in comics TV, both through micro-reviews, as well as links to our full-length TV reviews. We also tend to review series that are dropped all at once weekly so there are a few ‘older’ shows mixed in for good measure. Are we missing your favorite show? Let us know in the comments!
And since the summer is here, check out our 2022 Summer TV binges, where Multiversity staffers reach back in time to review comics/comics-adjacent/nerdy shows all summer long. (Here’s a handy list of what’s being covered too.)
The Boys – “Here Comes A Candle to Light Us To Bed” (S3E7, Amazon Prime)
Read our full review by Ramon Piña.
Dead End: Paranormal Park – “Nightmare Before Christmas in July” (S1E5, NETFLIX)
Gorm may not have been in the first scene of the episode but there was a cutaway gag with Gorm in Courtney’s chair so I call it a win. Five episode streak!
With a title like “Nightmare Before Christmas in July” there wasn’t much in the way of funny holiday related jokes. I’m surprised! Or, maybe I shouldn’t have been considering Norma doesn’t care, Barney is Jewish, and we got the best gag of all: the whole park dying in the summer heat as they pump fake snow in. A+ scene setting right there. Following it up with Barney in a Chanukah sweater giving out the best gifts to his friends? A++
I think this episode is a bit more low-key than the previous four, oddly enough. It feels like we’ve settled into the rhythm of the series and now we can just let the characters play off each other. Courtney doesn’t get much to do besides building her burgeoning friendship with Badyah and that’s OK! The scenes they share are lots of fun and it’s an organic way to strengthen the core relationships in the cast.
It also proves that the characters can exist in interesting ways with varying combinations. Sure our core three remain together during “Nightmare” but we haven’t actually gotten much of them doing a full adventure yet. This changes that and it’s wonderful. Game show lampoons will never get old and Dead End’s team nails all the things we love about them: impossible challenges that are “obvious,” high stakes, and the hosts rigging the games for artificial drama.
The one misstep though is in the stakes of the game. I got the sense early on that there weren’t really any and this ended up bearing out. Barney dies – spoilers – and is then resurrected but then we don’t get the promised twist at the end regarding said life. Is Cuddles the Crab throwing the match because Pugsly is now demon royalty a gut-buster of a sequence? Yes, yes it is. Am I still a little bummed we didn’t get actual stakes in the game show after seeing Chekhov’s 1-up? Also yes.
Do I actually care that much? Not at all. The rest of the episode is strong and we get more Courtney eating animation and I. Love. That. Shit. Cracks me up every time. And the trash gag? Killer. I could keep going but I’ll spare you the rundown of every joke in the episode. Just go watch it and be very afraid of Hux’s terrifying mouth portal. And not, that’s not a euphemism. – Elias Rosner
Ms. Marvel – “No Normal” (S1E6, Disney+)
Read our full review of the season 1 finale by Christopher Chiu-Tabet.
Riverdale – “Chapter 114: The Witches of Riverdale” (S6E18, The CW)
Read our full review by Elias Rosner.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – “The Quality of Mercy” (S1E10, Paramount+)
In case you missed it, you can read the full review of the season 1 finale by Christopher Egan.
Stranger Things – “Papa” (S4E8, Netflix)
Read our full review by Christopher Chiu-Tabet.
The Umbrella Academy– “Kugelblitz” (S3E4, Netflix)
The main focus of this episode of The Umbrella Academy focuses on the aftermath of round two of Umbrella vs. Sparrow kids, and surprisingly it went to the Umbrella crew. Still, they had nothing to do with the victory. Instead, it goes to Harlan Cooper, the boy of the woman Viktor had fallen in love with in the previous season. It seems that when Viktor saved Harlan as a child, he shared his powers, and over the years, he never got a full grasp of them, often causing a trail of chaos. We’re given a visual history of what he’d done in fits of emotional distress, especially when his mother died of cancer, and he was left alone in the world. The big reveal of the episode is that he somehow killed the mothers of The Umbrella Academy during that emotional explosion, thus causing them not to exist in this timeline.
The more twisted reveal came from the storyline with Five and Lila as they explore The Temps Commission, the organization overseeing and managing the space-time continuum, which is in a desolate state in a destroyed building covered in snow. They manage to get into the bunker that is supposed to hold the commission’s founder in case of a rip in the space-time continuum that The Umbrella Academy caused and finds an older man in a glass tank struggling to survive. As Five and Lila get closer, they realize that the man in front of them is actually an older version of Five. He is the one who created the organization that constantly forces him to save the world. The last thing the older version of Five says before he dies is not to save the world anymore and let the “Kugelblitz” eat up the timeline and destroy everything.
While it may seem hopeless for Lila to hear there is nothing they can do about the destruction of time for the younger Five. Although he is in shock at what he just found out, it’s clear to the audience the wheels are spinning at a high rate to find a solution. We’re almost halfway through the season, so there’s still time for more chaos. – Alexander Manzo
