This week on The Inhumans, the Royal Family, or most of it anyway, finally find their way back together. Little sister Crystal needs to work on her punctuality. Meanwhile, back on the moon, and on the earth, Maximus’ minions aren’t finding him to be much better than Black Bolt, and nobody remembers to call him “My King” consistently. Since he’s gotten rid of the rest of his family, he has no one who is his equal to commiserate with. It’s lonely at the top.
Karnak wakes up still in the arms of his drug-growing paramour, Jen. He marvels that she’s still there, because most of his dates slip out well before dawn. It’s her house, using the term loosely, so of course she’s there. Then Karnak does something like his usual analysis of his flaws, her flaws, their flaws as a couple, and the potential flaws of their continued relationship, only his power is still broken, so he has to wing it. Jen starts to consider leaving anyway. Lucky for Karnak, he’s cute in a hapless kicked puppy way, so she let’s it slide.
Then Reno calls them out of the tent so that he can kill them and stuff them in Ted’s grave before breakfast. He tries to shoot them as they exit the tent, but Karnak is getting a hint of his powers back, so he’s able to deflect the bullet away from himself. Unfortunately, it goes into the side of Jen’s abdomen. No one was ever going to accuse Karnak of being a gentleman anyway, but this seals the deal.
Karnak and Jen make a run for it and hide in the jungle. He examines her wound and is able to use a nifty move to push the bullet out with a quick finger jab, rather than cutting it out. He also does a spine adjustment to numb the pain for a few hours. Okay, maybe he’s a better boyfriend than I thought. Jen just happens to have a sewing kit on her for tent repairs, so Karnak stitches up the wound.
They go back to camp hoping that Reno will be out looking for them. Actually, Reno has been killed by the marijuana buyers, who showed up while Karnak and Jen were in the jungle. They didn’t trust Reno after he betrayed Ted, so they stuffed him into Ted’s grave. Now they want to tidy up their loose ends and put Karnak and Jen in there too. There’s not a lot of Don’t worry, Be happy, in the Hawaiian ganja business. You’d think everyone would be a little mellower, given the product.
The buyers come back to camp and Karnak sends Jen to hide in the jungle. He goes out to fight the gang with the bamboo rod that he’s turned into a weapon. He takes down several goons, but can’t take them all. Jen comes out and sets the product on fire, but they’re still captured.
Black Bolt, Medusa and Louise are enjoying the breeze in their hair (Sorry, Medusa) as they drive around the island. Locus is still in the trunk, clamoring to get out. Louise has finally had enough, and insists they let her out. Locus insults the Royal Family and their rule, as one would expect, then leads them to Karnak using her echolocation power.
Gorgon has spent the episode tracking Karnak and Jen through the jungle the old-fashioned way. He comes upon the ganja camp just as they’ve strung Karnak up and begun to beat him severely. Gorgon uses his earthquake stomp to distract and disable the enemy, then gets Karnak and Jen free in the chaos.
Medusa, Black Bolt, Locus, and Louise arrive in the camp just as Karnak and Jen have run away. There are shots fired, then they are all reunited. Medusa says that they took care of the pirates. There’s more discussion of the political situation and everyone’s location, then Locus collapses. She was fatally shot in the scuffle and didn’t think to mention it or show any pain before now. Before she dies, she tells Medusa that Crystal is somewhere close on the island, and asks Black Bolt to try harder to be the king that Attilan deserves. Black Bolt looks sincere when he nods his head to say yes.
Crystal is still in the barn with Lockjaw, Dave and Audrey the vet tech/ex-girlfriend. Audrey’s job is to be skeptical of everything the other two say, until Crystal and Dave grab hold of Lockjaw and transport out of there. They end up on a gorgeous beach, and Dave explains to Crystal that one of the Hawaiian mottos is This is my office. He spins around and sits on the beach. See, Dave knows what I’m talking about. You’re in Hawaii, drug dealers. It’s like paradise. Why you gotta be so mean?
But then Dave decides that Crystal needs to lighten up, because searching for her missing and possibly dead, injured, or captive family is so boooring. He convinces her to go swimming with him, even though she repeatedly insists that she needs to find her family. There goes what little credibility Crystal had as a character. We never get back to her storyline this episode, as she apparently forgets about her family, and the fact that she’s also being hunted, for the rest of the day. But, she has a cute boyfriend now!!!
Dr Declan is in his lab doing autopsies on Auran and another inhuman who died in the explosion when Black Bolt escaped. Auran has severe burns all over. She suddenly comes back to life, sits up, and runs her hand over the burned areas to finish healing herself. When she’s finished, she grabs Declan by the neck and threatens him if he doesn’t tell her what’s going on.
She kills the lab assistant who tries to attack her before Declan realizes how important she is. Then he let’s her talk to Maximus. Maximus tells her to stay at the lab and protect Dr Declan at all costs because he’s doing important research. She’s to gather her forces together again, and try to lure Black Bolt to the lab using Sammy and Declan as bait.
Declan still doesn’t know who Maximus is, so he lurks in the background while Auran is making her call. He will likely be putting some things together after this.
Maximus is starting to understand why Black Bolt kept things so strictly regulated and rarely came out of his room. The Attilanians as a group aren’t very bright and are prone to anarchy and chaos. He’s the only one with an instinctive understanding of how a government should function, or that the needs of the many sometimes outweigh the needs of the few (or the one, TM Mr Spock).
He’s having another rough day as king. Tibor disagrees with his plan to send a couple of lower caste inhumans to earth to join Auran’s suicide squad. NO ONE WILL CALL HIM MY KING. What’s the point of being King if no one call you by the title or follow your orders without question? But, seriously. We’re in the middle of the French Revolution here, and none of the peasants are willing to fight.
Maximus spends the episode having fits at Tibor and explaining how governments and revolutions work, but, to no avail. At the end of the episode, Tibor is approached by three counterrevolutionaries. His response is left as a cliffhanger…
It’s sad to see Locus go. She had a useful power that was cheap to create, so she’s one of the few characters they could show using her power frequently. She was also intelligent and spoke her mind articulately, a rare thing on this show.
There’s nothing wrong with Crystal taking a break, or there wouldn’t be, if she weren’t taking a break the minute she started searching, making it seem more like Dave lured her out onto a date. The way he pushes her toward being happy and relaxed, when she’s in the middle of a major family crisis, is highly obnoxious.
He might as well come right out and tell her to smile. Boys, we don’t need you to tell us when to be happy or sad. If you can’t handle the emotions we’re feeling, it’s best if you just move along, instead of always trying to cajole women and girls into feeling what you think they should feel.
I saw An American in Paris on stage earlier this week, a show in which a woman who has survived years of hiding from the Nazis chooses a man who wants her to be his fantasy woman and BE HAPPY!!! all the time. I’m at the point of adding a Stop F*ck*ng Telling Us To F*ck*ng Smile and Be Happy All of the Time campaign to my Unwanted Non-Sexual Touching Matters campaign. It’s all tied up together, with other people, especially men who want to have women sexually and romantically, deciding that they can control women’s lives and bodies.
Even our feelings aren’t allowed to be our own. This is pervasive in real life and in media. The male writers probably didn’t think anything of having Dave treat Crystal this way. This is why we need women in the writers room, and more female directors.
Speaking of men and women, this episode has an issue that I find frequently within shows that are trying to increase their female representation because it’s politically correct, rather than because they believe it’s the right thing to do. Women are represented reasonably equally amongst the featured and main characters. I’d complain that they’re portrayed as stupid and ineffective, but that true of almost every character on this show.
It’s when you look at the background actors that you can see the bias. Those are virtually all men. If all that’s needed is a body to fill space, or someone random as part of a group to say a line or two, that part will almost certainly be played by a man. The default casting is male, unless there is a reason to make the part a woman, just like the default for directors and writers is also male, with women only occasionally sneaking in.
Maximus would be much better off going down to Earth with whatever cash and powerful, loyal inhumans he can come up with, and setting up shop in some remote place there. He can fund Dr Declan’s work, then turn that and the inhumans’ powers into a multinational corporation, I have no doubt. The moon is too limiting and the people there are too annoying.
Hive was on the right track with his master plan to give the inhumans a safe place to live, he was just too medieval and greedy. Jiaying kept Afterlife too exclusive to help many inhumans. Maximus is just the man to finally set up the inhuman homeland on earth. They can take over Antarctica, the Himalayas, or the remote reaches of the Amazonian jungle, and set up their dome for privacy. Maybe try the depths of the ocean.
Once again, this episode wasn’t terrible. I’d probably give it a C. It would have been a C+ if there hadn’t been visible sexism and a fair amount of time-wasting filler. This whole episode could have been the first 10 minutes on another show, there was so much repeated information and pointless wandering in the jungle.
Black Bolt has helped Medusa and Louise break the Thelma and Louise curse, at least for now. He may bring them bad luck in the long run, like Brad Pitt. I do have a soft spot for Black Bolt, though, maybe because he can’t say stupid things. There is a moment where he and Medusa go on and on about how nothing in their kingdom could possibly have been done differently that pretty stupid, so maybe he just doesn’t have a chance to say stupid stuff.
Metawitches 
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