Seriously. This is an awful show with zero plus zero redeeming qualities. It belongs in the after-school slot before the evening news. It reminds me of the show Mutant X. Not in terms of plot, but in quality and writing. That is: both suck ass and I would have watched them when I was a teenager.
The Good
The family. Loved the stuff with the main character’s family. The kid can’t act, but still, the family screen time was good stuff.
Summer Glau. She’s adorable. (And was fucking hot in that one episode of Chuck.)
The Bad
No more family. They aren’t dead, and we’re sure to see them in every episode. But now it’s a broken family so the good that I wrote about is gone.
In one episode, the mom might go on a date, and The Cape stalks her the entire episode until she decides she’s not ready. No actual reason, her date will be with a great, attractive man who’s nice with kids. And, you know, it’s been six months, and I still don’t have any evidence my husband is alive or not a serial killer–sure I don’t believe it, but six months is six months–and he surely ain’t around to trim to hedges. Buuuuuuuuuuuttttttttaaaaaaaaah, you should be moving on, Mr. Handsome-Man-Whose-Ain’t-Killing-Peoples. I just feel like my husband is watching from serial killer heaven and he wouldn’t approve.
And in a very special episode, The Cape will stalk his kid until he’s found out, but the kid will keep his father’s secret. Blah, blah, blah.
Summer Glau. Every show she’s been in has failed. Not saying she’s the problem, she’s more like the sign of the Plague, but not the Plague itself. Also, her character is obviously the daughter of the bad guy.
Plot holes that have plot holes. Which are enveloped by plot holes. Quick question: Do you know where the phrase, “Like shooting fish in a barrel” comes from? Answer: When you shoot into the barrel, the force from the shotgun blast distributed in the water kill the fish. So when the main character is touching the SUV that explodes from buildup pressure early in the first episode, he would have died before his body moved two inches. Even if he had been wearing full bomb disposal gear, the concussion blast would have squeezed his brains out his ears.
And I could look past that. One time. The man’s going to become a superhero, he needs that kind of luck. But don’t do it twice in one episode. Later, after he is framed for being the bad guy, he is ten foot under a gas explosion which would have forced super-heated air downward through the hole he had fallen through and cooked him while he protected himself with a corrugated tin slate.
He worked for ARK like thirty seconds, but had an all-access pass. “Oh, here’s a keycard that will work on every door we’ve got. Including the banks, which, you know, aren’t your department, really. But we trust you, Person We Just Hired. Yeah.”
The all-access pass wasn’t deactivated after the first robbery. For a billion-dollar company where the city’s bad guy is the CEO, you have to wonder about his intelligence if he doesn’t think or employ someone who thinks TO DEACTIVE THE FUCKING KEYCARD USED TO ROB HIS BANKS. Christ.
Everyone at ARK somehow missed the fact the all-access pass belonged to the main character. I mean, in every company I’ve worked for that gave out ID cards like that, the cards were identity-locked. That was the purpose of the goddamn thing. So from the very first robbery, the CEO would have known that so-and-so wasn’t dead. This could have lead to a much better pilot episode where the bad guy kidnaps The Cape’s family and The Cape saves them, gets himself revealed to them, and the wife and son aren’t left believing the man is a criminal serial killer. That’s real camp. And good.
Scene with kid at end was awful. So the main character as The Cape visits his son to give him a message from the kid’s father– that is, himself. And he’s twenty feet away, with his face fully visible to any retard. I was expecting a nice stoic child moment where The Cape disappears and the kid goes, “Okay, dad.” If you’re going to have a campy show–which The Cape is a shitty depiction of camp– give us those awfully awesome campy moments.
THE CARNIVAL ANGLE IS A BUCKET OF CRAP. Doubt suspension is a bond of trust. Which the writers of The Cape rape, videotape, and share on the internet. I would rather the cape be an cape-version of KITT from Knight Rider than some set of carny tricks and an old metal breastplate. Which I’m 100% sure was invented before armor-piercing bullets. But no, in less than a week– any longer and it doesn’t matter to anyone in that world– he learns all the trickery he needs to fight crime as a caped crusader.
In the first 60 seconds of his first fight, The Cape gets his ass kicked. That’s a big one. One problem was that the writers put him up against what’s to become a recurring villian at the onset. That’s like a Bond villian inviting James to a one-on-one fight in the first minutes of a film.
The Cape is taught tricks he doesn’t use. The average viewer will say, “Oh, but I liked watching the part where he makes the hypnotist wear a bra.” And I say, yes, it was a good scene. But. Going back to Bond, showing the hypnotize skill being learned and then not using it in this episode is like showing a gadget in a Bond film, but using it in another film. In the future, when The Cape does hypnotize people, a couple of things will happen: 1) we’ll be reminded he can hypnotize people in the “previously on” intro, 2) he’ll have to hypnotize someone in front of another person and say, “Trick I picked up.” Or 3) we won’t remember that he can do it, they don’t remind us he can do it, and we go, “Uh, since when can he hypnotize people?” Destroying what little doubt suspension invested thus far. The scene would have been better as an opener to some other episode where he actually uses the trick.
The Crux
Won’t watch again. When Heroes went bad– every second after the climax of the first season– I continued to watch and live tweet my despair. But I have no investment in The Cape. The show has ass writers. I envision them literally rubbing their asses on script pages. The stink just rises off the screen.