I watched all eight episodes of this show.
I think I'm a little bit dead inside now.
This entire Inhumans TV show is such a strange and baffling failure it's hard to comprehend it all. It's just so stunningly wrong-headed, both as an adpatation and as a stand-alone project, that it can be overwhelming, but don't worry, I'm here to help guide us all through the wreckage of this TV show. To start with, we should briefly recap the plot of the first season, which basically just boils down to the five members of the Inhumans Royal Family being exiled from their home, the city of Attilan, on the Moon to Hawaii. King Black Bolt (Anson Mount), Medusa (Serinda Swan), Karnak (Ken Leung), Gorgon (Eme Ikwuakor) and Crystal (Isabelle Cornish) are the Inumans that have been banished in the middle of a coup by Black Bolt's brother Maximus (Iwan Rheon).
While on Hawaii, the characters are isolated from one another and get into antics that sound like parodies of what you'd give the Inhumans to do in their own TV show. Forinstance, Medusa breaks into peoples homes and takes their things, Karnak basically just loses his superpowers and starts helping some drug deals and Gorgon is just wandering around the jungle for multiple episodes, Maximus just stays behind on Attilan and lingers in his throne room while staying in one boring mood (exasperation) while he mostly just talks to off-screen people without much in the way of motivation for his actions. Crystal and Karnak both discover that hot people exist by hanging out at the beach with scantily clad indivdiuals they're attracted to.
And oh man, if you thought Scott Buck's other 2017 Marvel TV show, Iron Fist, felt politicially ill-timed in this current political climate, wait until you see how Inhumans makes those without superpowers who suffer from the caste system of Attilan the bad guys of the program! It's no shocker to discover a show with as dismal of writing as Inhumans can't handle the concept of exploring a caste system based society in an engaging fashion but good gravy do they bungle that aspect of the show big time. Since The Royal Family aren't well-established as characters nor are just entertaining to watch, they always just come off as conceited jerks who, as they're depicted here, would probably be the antognists in a conventional superhero storyline. Heck, they're basically the Hunger Games baddies as it is!
But no, here we're stuck watching these royal Inhumans saunter around Hawaiaan locations and grapple with personal character struggles that alternate between being boring and being tedious. The only interesting non-doggie character on the TV show is the villainous Mordus, a knock-off of Cyclops whose super casual demeanor in both speaking and body language makes for an amusing contrast with his physical appearence that makes him resemblewhat would happen if Leatherface got a Jason X-like wardrobe update. Oh if only Mordus was the star of the show, but he's not. Instead, Crystal and Karnak's terrible romances procure too much of the screen time while pivotal character beats, most notably Black Bolt being the one who killed his parents with his super-powered vocals, are hurriedly introduced into the show with no time alloted for the impact of such events to linger on the characters or the audience.
Don't even ask if even the action of this show could help alleviate the multitude of the flaws of Inhumans because, no, the action is a total garbage fire. Because everyone's superpowers get heavily muted or even removed altogether, there's no chance for unique action sequences deriving from one-of-a-kind power sets like super-powered hair. Whenever action does rear its head on the program, it arrives in the form of hand-to-hand fight scenes that have no energy or life to them, they just feel like an obligatory presence in a show that seems to have no idea how to utilize the characters and settings at its disposal for anything resembling fun. These brief bursts of action are heavily hampered by visual effects that are just atrotcious throughout the show, especially in a crucial moment where water-based Inhuman Triton returns from the dead and laughably swims to shore looking like he's David Hasselhoff in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.
The peak demonstration of how Inhumans misses every chance for even just the easiest brownie points imaginable is crystallized in how it uses Lockjaw, the teleporting bulldog. Bulldogs, because they are dogs, are pure and good and if I had a bulldog on a TV show, I'd use him/her at every chance possible. Even the most garbage storytelling imaginable would be tolerable if there was always a bulldog on-screen. But noooooooooo, Lockjaw is barely in the first season of Inhumans, his total screentime over the course of eight hour-long episodes is ten minutes, tops, and its laughable how the writers try to write him out of the show so they can save on VFX money. Lockjaw spends the majority of the season asleep off-screen and instead of letting him just be cute when he does show up on-screen, the writers instead put him through pain by either having Crystal electrocute him or having people run him over with dirtbikes. Inhumans has a can't miss way to make people like their show in the form of an adorable bulldog and they shove it aside in favor of thoroughly dismal storytelling. The treatment of Lockjaw the Bulldog on Inhumans is a lot like the quality of the show itself; a colossal travesty.
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