Welcome back to Multiversity Comics’ coverage of Jupiter’s Legacy. With “All the Devils Are Here,” Netflix’s new superhero drama has reached its halfway point and is yet to show any growth. What a joy.
1. Another Stinker
I’ll say something nice to start this review. In the Television Series with Unrealized Potential League (TSUPL), Jupiter’s Legacy is the top seed and it’s not particularly close. This is a show that definitely could be good but it’s growing increasingly difficult to imagine how that would happen. The first couple of episodes technically had all the right pieces in place but they just couldn’t be assembled properly in a kind of heartbreaking way. It was like watching someone play a woefully bad game of Tetris. Now, with two episodes in a row that have broken from the first quarter of the season’s formula, it feels like we’re only getting S blocks (for non-Tetris heads, this is thee most annoying block, as it provides very little utility). “All the Devils are Here” is yet another rocky episode overall. It’s not that any of it is overwhelmingly awful so much as absolutely none of it is good.
2. BREAKING: These Flashbacks Still Suck
Here’s the deal with flashbacks- their job, first and foremost, is to be both emotionally and situationally informative. Here, the flashbacks are ostensibly giving us the superhero origins of Utopian and the other O.G. members of the Union and also giving us important insight into who these characters are. In this extremely decompressed story, though, we aren’t learning nearly enough about these characters, nor are we seeing them become superheroes! What do we learn about Sheldon in this episode? That he’s a good guy and that he’s at rock bottom. That’s exactly what we learned about him in the pilot, though, at least on a basic level. Seeing each step in this process isn’t producing anything even mildly meaningful. Maybe after we actually get to see the first superheroes emerge and learn a bit more about the Code and other things of that nature, we can go back and explore more. The show easily could’ve jumped from Sheldon’s first vision to the expedition that’s clearly going to happen. But instead we get this hollow foot shuffling.
3. We Need to Talk About Chloe
So far, Chloe Sampson has been stumbling around on the periphery of Jupiter’s Legacy, acting as a sort of dramatic pipe bomb. In “All the Devils Are Here,” we get more of a look at her life and what makes her tick. Elena Kampouris does relatively solid work at being a tortured party girl- she certainly makes the mishmash of recklessness, insecurity, and ego believable. The thing is she lacks the charisma to make Chloe more than tragic. See, Chloe really deeply sucks as a person. She shows up at parties and starts fights. She throws a car at her agent’s head during a photoshoot. She isn’t particularly funny or otherwise magnetic and doesn’t really show a capacity to be vulnerable in a way that doesn’t involve lashing out. She seems like the kind of person who you knew at one point and felt bad for for a while but then it just got to be too much. To a certain extent, that’s what the show is going for, at least in that it’s what’s being portrayed. The fatal miscalculation is that she isn’t nearly sympathetic enough for us as an audience to accept her flaws while still caring about her as a character. The state her character is in makes a lot of logical sense (being the daughter of the most famous person in the world sounds stressful) but without the background to endear us to her, we’re just seeing a less than decent person be less than decent.
4. I Just Want to Feel Something
There’s this big issue that Jupiter’s Legacy has and this episode feels emblematic of it: there’s not a single reason to care about anything that’s happened thus far. This is a show where events happen in a world and we hear about them happening and that’s supposed to be sufficient. The foundation that Steven S. DeKnight built for this is not nearly strong enough for any of this to actually work. It’s why Chloe is impossible to connect to and it’s also why three superheroes dying feels entirely insignificant. Think about the club scene and Chloe’s spat with the other young super-powered folk. They’re mad at her for not stepping up their anger makes a ton of intellectual sense. There’s almost no emotional resonance, though, because those deaths are just an abstract thing that happened. We saw it, yes, but the killing felt like a sign of a villain’s strength not an impactful reminder of the risk that superheroes live under. What’s the difference between these heroes dying and the Asgardians dying at the beginning of Infinity War. In general, the series feels cold in a way that doesn’t seems to be based in a certain emotional carelessness; we’re constantly expected to react to the emotional fallout of events that we have no emotional investment in.
5. Over the Hump
So we’re halfway through Jupiter’s Legacy Volume 1 and what do we have to show for it? Not much other than some half baked ideas and melodrama that feels impossible to invest in. In a world where we’re inundated by superhero media, this has failed to offer up anything that you can’t readily find somewhere else. Want a gritty deconstruction of superheroes? Watchmen and The Boys are right there. Want purely fun popcorn flicks? There are half a dozen more coming out this year? If you want a sloppily executed but still interesting debate about what it means to be a superhero and who you should be sticking up for, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier just finished and was less sloppy than this by a mile. To be fair, the show doesn’t have to be entirely unique, nor does it have to set some new high watermark. It does have to stick the landing on at least one of the things it’s attempting to do and so far, so bad.
