For its second episode, Aquaman: King of Atlantis made the tragic decision to, once again, not let Thomas Lennon do more as Vulko. If I can forgive that, I’ll review the rest of the episode.
1. More music!
The theme song was one of the highlights of the first episode that I forgot to mention, and the second episode went the same route, with singing the entire title “Aquaman, King of Atlantis, Chapter Two, Primordius” and making me laugh out loud for the second straight week. But this week also featured a song by Aquaman about how the fish all love him, and it was catchy and funny and I want every episode to now have a musical interlude.
Beyond just being funny, the music shows what the show has succeeded at thus far, which is taking a lot of comics silliness and distilling it down into a really easy to understand and enjoy episode that doesn’t rely too heavily on anything other than silliness to get its points across.
2. That said, stop making Aquaman a loser
It seems like almost every time we saw Aquaman in any non-comics media, and even in comics sometimes, the character becomes a butt of jokes. The best part of the Aquaman film is that it totally ignores this and makes the character instantly badass and not a laughing stock. But here, most of Aquaman’s history/mythology/continuity is thrown away, but what is kept is that people think he’s sort of lame. Why? From a practical reason, if you live in the ocean and can talk to fish, you’d be considered super dope. Again, I know that this adds to the comedic tone, and if it were any other character, I’d chalk it up to just that.
But damn it, every Aquaman story does this. It’s lazy. Stop doing this.
Geoff Johns, in the New 52’s “Aquaman” #1, made Arthur order fish and chips, much to the chagrin of everyone else in the restaurant at the time. That same gag is recycled here, with people being surprised that Aquaman both talks to and eats fish. I can excuse this joke, as it makes a little more sense than the ‘Aquaman sucks’ joke, but let’s try not to use too much of Johns’s boring run as inspiration, ok?
4. Oh, it’s just a time bubble
A lot of last week’s “Chapter 1: Dead Sea” was about the discrepancy in time between those in and out of the station that Aquaman and Mera saved. I appreciated how this episode answered that question – oh, you were just in a time bubble – and then moved on. It allowed last week’s episode to have stakes without having to cut into this episode’s running time at all. Not that there couldn’t be 5 minutes to spare in another 45 minute episode, but you catch my drift.
5. The best joke thus far
When Aquaman tries to talk to a crab about the being that eventually is revealed as Primordius/Fisherman, the crab is too busy to talk to him, and is basically a riff on John Mulaney’s Law and Order bit. In an episode full of some pretty good jokes, that was the best one.
