Inhumans: Divide and Conquer

“Giant cow dogs do not exist.” A better episode this week as the need for exposition diminishes, we know the characters and the story can feather. It still feels a bit like that final season of Torchwood, though.

There’s a series of flashbacks here with Black Bolt and Maximus as children where a pre-mists Black Bolt expresses reluctance to be king as Maximus glowers, and we see both his parents’ trust in him to control his power and Avon gently telling Maximus that he’s a simple, vanilla human. Nice to have all these, I suppose, but the flashbacks don’t tell us anything we can’t infer, which makes their inclusion questionable. I suppose at least we have Agon explicitly telling Maximus he can never be king.

We also see Black Bolt threatened with violence in prison but making a friend with (Inhuman?) powers and connections with whom he manages to escape. I’m not sure how his friend manages to interpret his apparent muteness as a superpower though. He’s followed  throughout by the tenacious Louise, who manages to witness their helicopter escape- which just misses Medusa, whose own subplot has been treading water up until now.

Crystal manages to defy Maximus, find Lockjaw and escape to Hawaii, while Gorgon and his Hawaiian nationalist mates fight away an attack by Auran and her gang, including the mysteriously powerful Mordis. And Karnak, powers still damaged, is suffering a crisis of confidence and throws his lot in with some weed farmers.

We have a cliffhanger ending in which Lockjaw is, er, hit by a quad bike. All this is watchable and just about ok, but it’s awfully slow with a lot of treading water. Can we have a bit less of this boring old Earth stuff please?