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Boomb Tube, The Week in Comic Book Television: 9/25-10/1/2022

By | October 3rd, 2022
Posted in Television | % Comments

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, at least for a few more weeks, check out our 2022 Summer TV binges, where Multiversity staffers reach back in time to review comics/comics-adjacent/nerdy shows all summer (and the first half of fall) long. (Here’s a handy list of what’s being covered too.)

Andor – “Reckoning” (S1E3, Disney+)

In case you missed it, read our full review of part 3 of the three-episode series premiere by Brian Salvatore.

Andor – “Aldhani” (S1E4, Disney+)

Read our full review by Brian Salvatore.

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe – “The Beginning of the End, Part 1” (S3E7, NETFLIX)

As expected, with the penultimate episode for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, season 3 upon us, “The Beginning of the End, Part 1” starts off with an intensity worthy of a Marvel action movie. The writers have followed a very marvel-esque format that leads to an ending which amounts to a mini-feature film each season. In this episode it’s extra apparent in the way that separated parties join together, with a plot featuring a full-contact war of armies that seem to be taken directly from Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: End Game. The beauty of what makes this feel organic and unique to this series is how the three seasons have shown massive growth across the board for all the characters involved. Prince Adam went from sulking outcast to hero of the kingdom.. to twisted junkie.. to hero again. His father, King Randor went from vengeance obsessed father in mourning to proud papa of Prince Adam the He-Man. It is character development like this that took three seasons to happen that really makes the journey worth it across the board that really pays off in this episode.

This episode brings us many interesting twists in the dynamic that are actually paying off seeds planted from season 1. For instance, Evil-Lynn was never happy being Skelator’s underling and she had a very small but odd affection for Teela that has grown into a full-blown partnership by this episode. She is asked to change sides and help stop Skelator because this time Eternia is at stake. She agrees to do it as long as she gets a pardon, and the army for good.. gets badder.

With Ram Ma’am going native with the enemy, the dynamic between her and Skelator this season has been begging for her to realize she was being played.. and turn against him. Of course that happens this episode as she goes toe-to-toe with Skelator, only to be totally outclassed by his god-level power. In one part she is literally grabbed by the foot and slammed on the ground back and forth with a play ripped directly out of the first Avengers movie when Hulk turns Loki into a rag doll. It’s hard not to find that moment just a little satisfying to witness, considering she made such a mess of things, and that we know in the end everyone is going to end up as friends again anyway. It’s not like anyone can die in this show right.. right? This is put into question when Skelator holds her head against a beam of pure energy blasting from the ground and we see her face glitch into a skeleton. It’s clear that her life is on the line and Prince Adam does what any real hero would do.. sacrifice himself for his friend.

The episode, being the first half of a two-part ending, finishes on a cliff-hanger that begs us to finish the episode and season, as the stakes are higher than ever. –Henry Finn

Locke & Key – “Farewell” (S3E8, Netflix)

Read our full review by Alexander Manzo.

Continued below

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power – “Udun” (S1E6, Amazon Prime)

“Udun” (named after Morgoth’s first fortress) is split roughly into two halves: the first is an extended battle with a lengthy build-up in the vein of Jackson’s Rings films, as Arondir and Bronwyn lead the villagers of Tirharad in a grueling and intense defense of their home. The TV-14 rating is pushed to its limit, from the black blood gushing out the blinded eye of an Orc who almost kills Arondir, to Bronwyn nearly bleeding to death from an arrow wound. Events become especially distressing when the Orcs begin slaughtering civilians to force our heroes to give up the sword hilt Adar needs. It’s such an impressive sequence, it’s all the more jarring it suddenly becomes early morning when the Numenoreans arrive with Galadriel and Halbrand.

Halbrand and Galadriel capture Adar, after she orders him to spare the Orcs’ Lord-Father, reminding him vengeance is like seawater. Adar does not recognize the king-in-exile, despite his seething hatred of him. During Galadriel’s subsequent interrogation, Adar is confirmed to be one of the first Orcs. He tells her he turned on Sauron, claiming to have killed the Dark Lord, because his experiments on his children became too much to bear. It’s a fascinating sequence, wrestling with a dilemma Tolkien himself struggled with: the professor always had second thoughts about his portrayal of the Orcs, mulling how to rationalize an intelligent race being irredeemably evil in his personal letters and writing (see: “Myths Transformed” in The History of Middle-earth: Morgoth’s Ring.)

The thought of an Orc having as much right to life as her is unnerving enough for Galadriel that she refuses to consider the enemy of her enemy an ally, causing Adar to gloat she may be the heir to Morgoth she is searching for. She comes this close to executing her unarmed prisoner, before Halbrand interrupts her: she thanks him afterwards for bringing her back from the brink. Halbrand reminds her she did that first for him, and the two briefly acknowledge the bond they’ve forged before Miriel summons him to be introduced to his people. Whether this is romantic or platonic, and regardless of who Halbrand turns out to be, it is undeniable that their relationship is beginning to change Galadriel’s unrelenting nature.

Alas, it turns out Adar swapped the sword hilt for an ordinary axe, and gave it to Waldreg (whose survival of Arondir bringing down the tower of Ostirith came as even more of a surprise.) Ostirith is revealed to be a dam, which Waldreg opens with the magic blade to flood the tunnels the Orcs built to the magma below Orodruin, igniting the dormant volcano. “Udun,” the captured Orcs chant, celebrating their homeland’s recreation. I had an inkling the peak soon known as Mount Doom would erupt, transforming the east Southlands into Mordor, but the explosion here was absolutely jawdropping, it’s miraculous anyone could survive. As the episode closes, Galadriel stares into the eye of the storm, and sighs deeply at the sheer scale of her Pyrrhic victory. – Christopher Chiu-Tabet

Quantum Leap – “Atlantis” (S1E2, NBC)

One of the things that Quantum Leap is doing really well in its first few episodes is, even with his swiss-cheese’d brain, we are learning about Dr. Ben Song and, specifically, how he differs from Dr. Sam Beckett. In “Atlantis,” we see Ben leap into an astronaut on a space shuttle mission. Because this astronaut died on the mission, and the mission info was classified, the leap provides some interesting hurdles for Ben and co. to jump over. It is through those hurdles that we see Ben as a much more impulsive leaper than Sam is. Specifically, when Ben does an untethered space walk to knock on the MIR satellite, it seems like a move that Sam would never have done.

This episode still spends a lot of time with the ‘home’ team, but that team’s purpose seems to be almost entirely about the overarching plot of ‘why did Ben go into the accelerator?,” whereas Ben and Addison are almost entirely focused on the mission at hand. I still wish we got more with Ben and the keap itself, but this episode found a better balance in the action than the pilot did. The one question that I do have is about the location of the leapee. In the original series, when Sam leaped into someone, that someone winds up in 1995 in a chamber. But since we spend so little time with the ‘home team’ in the original series that we never get to really see those folks. But here, we get a ton of time in HQ, and yet we’ve heard nothing about where these folks wind up. It’s a small point, but it could be a fun way to differentiate it from the original. – Brian Salvatore

Continued below

Resident Alien – “I Believe in Aliens” (S2E16, Syfy)

Read our full review by Christopher Chiu-Tabet.

Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles – “Interdimensionals” (S2E5, NETFLIX)

The plot is back in full force and I…really couldn’t care less. I’m honestly shocked by how much I don’t care about Kagehito or the Clavis or any of the big, grand plot machinations. Maybe it’s because all the characters – OK. Fine. Mostly Yuichi – are interminably oblivious. Like, the reason the Ki-Stone was acting weird was so glaringly obvious but the show decides to treat it like a big revelation here. We didn’t need Kagehito to talk about how the thing he spent half of the episodes he was in and 90% of his lines on is Bad and An Instrument of The Invaders and Draining the Ki-Stone. We knew! No duh!

Or, I guess, a lot of duh because none of the previous episodes, not even the season premiere – which, I must remind you, pointed out that the obviously damaging thing is probably obviously damaging, really addressed why Tetsujin wasn’t worried about the clearly evil device on the entire city’s sentient power supply.

So that whole thing was snooze city and I basically checked out for the whole episode. In fact, I checked out so hard I forgot that the actual main plot was really fun! Because of the inciting incident, Gen & Yuichi and Kitzune & Chizu go off to recruit help, one from Chickabuma’s crew and the other from the Neko Ninja, who are slowly defecting back to Fuwa because change is hard and Neo-Edo is an empty wasteland with overly cute oasis masquerading as a functioning city.

That second plot was fine, moving things along and having the same strengths and weaknesses as every other mediocre Samurai Rabbit B-plot. The opening and closing gags of Karasu-Tengu and O-Dokuro were great on the strength of their interactions alone; the “subversion” of the master getting jobbed as a cliffhanger to create tension for a new/returning enemy trope was pretty lackluster as such.

The A-plot, though, was gold through and through, mostly because it consisted of: 1) big scary bug to defeat in fun ways, 2) an utterly silly competition treated with the utmost seriousness (a staring contest with a Chickabuma, the mole who always wears sunglasses,) and 3) Yuichi’s drugged out meditation space. It really hammers home how much I wish the show was 2-D animated (and that the animations weren’t subjected to an absolutely abysmal time table.) Ah well.

With that, we’re halfway through season 2. The plot is kicking in and so are the edibles from Bargain Bunji. I sense a chiller review in my future. Ikuzo! – Elias Rosner

The Sandman – “Collectors” (S1E9, Netflix)

Read our full review by august (in the wake of) dawn.

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law – “The Retreat” (S1E7, Disney+)

“The Retreat” is a nice, solid piece of writing. It’s not the best or funniest episode of this series so far but it tells a story that stands on its own two feet while making meaningful steps forward in the season’s greater arc. It does happen to open with maybe the best sequence we’ve seen thus far — the rom-com montage. Over the course of a blissful, lovely couple of minutes, we see Jen and Josh fall for each other. Even without words, it’s incredibly effective thanks to the pair’s easy chemistry and the fact that Tatiana Maslany communicated Jen’s joy so well. It’s such a good scene that I’m convinced that director/writer duo Anu Valia and Zen wells should get a proper romcom greenlit immediately. Of course, once they’ve actually spent the night together, Josh completely disappears.

Luckily, Jen is called for backup when Emil Blonsky’s parole officer has to go fix Blonsky’s inhibitor. (Blonsky says it got fried when he touched an electric fence. It’s a funny line but surely there’s more to this that we’ll see down the line?) Jen gets stuck on the massive property Blonsky lives on when her car is totaled by two of the superpowered men Blonsky is helping learn to process their feelings. It’s a very funny premise that leads to a surprisingly effective episode.

Continued below

Jen, in her pursuit of a text back from Josh and waiting for a tow truck to bring her home, gets wrapped up in the group’s talking circle to surprising results. The self-help buzzword-filled group therapy session is an excellent source of comedy (one of Blonsky’s inspirational posters just says “today is today”); it’s inherently funny to see a bunch of D-list macho guys in superhero costumes say things like “I accept radical accountability” and comment on the rules around texting a new guy. The story even gives way to some genuine character development for Jen, who starts to process the fact that her confidence as She-Hulk has made it harder for her to feel good about her human-self.

Then there’s Porcupine’s contemporaneous breakthrough in which he takes his mask off for the first time in so long that the entire group is disgusted by the smell. That one’s less touching. Ultimately, this is a simple, silly, and effective storyline. Tim Roth is still having a blast, the supporting guests play their roles perfectly, Tatiany Maslany is doing excellent work, and the whole thing just comes together nicely. While Ginger, Pug, and the GLK&H crew were missed, it doesn’t feel like there was a natural fit for them in “The Retreat.” Sometimes the best service to a character is not to do them the disservice of a shoehorned in B plot.

This is still a superhero show, though, and an episode can’t end without a little intrigue. Now, in the midst of the aforementioned wonderful romcom montage, I jotted down a note: “Oh no is Josh gonna be evil?” He felt too good to be true because he was. The last thing we see is him copying data from Jen’s phone and seemingly texting someone that he’s secured a blood sample from Jen. While it’s a heartbreaking twist, it’s compelling stuff. Plus, it introduces some real personal emotional stakes to the serialized plot that’s been brewing in the background throughout the season. Whatever happens in these last two episodes, they’re sure to put Jen through the wringer (adjusted to proper She-Hulk: Attorney at Law levels, of course). –Quinn Tassin

Star Trek: Lower Decks – “Hear All, Trust Nothing” (S3E6, Paramount+)

Read our full review by Joe Skonce.


//TAGS | Boomb Tube | He-Man and the Masters of the Universe | Quantum Leap | Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles | She-Hulk: Attorney at Law | The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

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