DC Recap Summer Session, Week 2

29 Jun

Welcome back! Apologies up front for the lateness of this post, as I’ve been adjusting to a new work schedule for the summer, and it had eaten into my time for a few more days than expected. However, things are settled down so I can get these back out on a regular schedule. With that out of the way, let’s check in on Wonder Woman, Constantine, and Swamp Thing…

“Wonder Woman Meets Baroness Von Gunther”

Steve Trevor is finding himself under suspicion of being a Nazi spy when several incidents against the Army are somehow linked to him. Diana and Steve suspect a long defunct Nazi spy ring is behind this frame-up, a spy ring run by Baroness Von Gunther, who was captured and imprisoned. But wait, if she’s in prison, how can she be running the spy ring? If you guessed “secret jail escape route”, congratulations, you are one smart cookie.

Turns out the investigator of Steve is working with the Baroness, and forced Steve to confess to being a spy to save Wonder Woman’s life. Well, she’s very much alive and not being held captive by our bad guys, but she does figure out where Steve is being held. As you can imagine, our heroine is able to stop the Baroness, defeat her evil cronies, and clear Steve’s name. Hopefully the next prison the Baroness is put in won’t have a secret tunnel.

“You got more brains than all the men I’ve run into in this world, so that’s good news.”

–The Baroness is really the only villain from the Wonder Woman comics to appear in this series.

–Wonder Woman needs to be more careful leaving her stuff behind. In retrospect, if she didn’t leave her lasso at the prison, the warden’s kid probably wouldn’t have found out about the Baroness’ secret tunnel.

–Look, this was back in the day when superhero shows could only have a climax where our lady hero and villain have a showdown where they roll down a grassy hill in the backyard of a mansion, okay?

–“It looks like you’re going to have more time to read about democracy, Baroness. I’m glad you find it so fascinating.”

“The Darkness Beneath”

John goes solo into a mining town plagued by a vengeful spirit killing miners in all sorts of ways, like burning them alive in a bathtub. He finds help in an unexpected place: a young woman named Zed (who we saw drawing all those Constantine portraits in the pilot episode) who is surprised to see the man she’s been seeing in her visions all this time. Despite his reluctance, John realizes her supernatural power might be helpful in tracking down the killer of those miners. The killer happens to be ghosts that are tied to the new mine being made in town, but have been turned to kill by some unknown person.

While there are many suspects to choose from, the real culprit for these corrupted spirits is a miner’s wife who is a gypsy woman fed up with life in a mining town, and is herself corrupted to murder. Good thing those spirits are not cool with miner murder, because they drag her away for their own kind of punishment. With that taken care of, it seems John has a new partner in demonic crime fighting with Zed. But I can’t help but feel something is off with this, especially with that episode’s ominous final shot…

Back when Constantine had this for a problem as opposed to teammates and deadly unicorns.

–No Chas this episode, because apparently, he’s a wanted man in that part of the country. Huh.

–Zed is also a character from early in the Hellblazer run, but as we’ll see, there is some slight deviance in translation from book to screen.

–A lot of Zed’s drawings are covers of actual Hellblazer comics.

–“It takes trust to turn darkness into light.”

“Worlds Apart”

Abby is trying to deal with a lot here, among it Alec Holland’s possible murder, that swamp virus, and oh yeah, that giant swamp guy she saw where Alec went missing. She tries to get more info on Alec’s research from the guy who hired him: Avery Sunderland, the father of Abby’s dead friend, who Abby maybe had a hand in her tragic death. Avery is no help for her, and seems to be looking to cover up whatever connection Alec’s findings had with Sunderland’s swamp accelerant by bringing in the accelerant’s creator, Jason Woodrue, to fix things. Things get more complicated when the young girl being treated by Abby escapes into the swamp, seemingly connected to the mysterious swamp man.

Abby and her old friend, deputy sheriff Matt, head into the swamp to find the girl, and run into a sketchy duo retrieving those cases of accelerant, and not wanting to be caught. One of them goes after the girl, making sure she’s not a witness to this (and to a patrol man being stabbed in the face with a hook, by the way), and runs into our Swamp Thing, who makes quick work of this bad guy by ripping him to literal pieces! Abby finds the girl next to Swamp Thing, and takes her away, but learns from the girl that our swamp man was in pain and confused about what he is. And his name is Alec. Duh-duh-duh!

“S’up.”

–Some nice nods to other DC supernatural characters are set up here, like the Blue Devil (not necessarily a Blue Devil like in the books) and Madame Xanadu.

–You can tell Woodrue will be an interesting antagonist for the show just because of how off-kilter he is. Dude thinks he’s smarter than everyone else in the room, which I’m sure will be fun to see him be proven wrong when he runs into Ol’ Swampy.

–Abby’s girl buddy has a girlfriend, which is barely even noted as a thing. Very casual acknowledgment.

–That hook through the face was quite a shock moment. If anything, the show is really good at horror moments.

–“His name was Alec.”

NEXT TIME: Wonder Woman faces a Nazi doppelgänger, Constantine must find a cursed vinyl record, and Swamp Thing faces a deadly reanimated man with a serious bug problem!