Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
It’s an absolute delight of a series: riotously funny, defiantly geeky, and big-hearted – a rare bit of alchemy by any measure.
Intro:
Peter Serafinowicz, Griffin Newman, Valorie Curry, Jackie Earl Haley, Yara Martinez, Scott Speiser
The second half of the first season of the third television iteration of Bed Edlund’s big, blue, befuddled superhero, The Tick, picks up where it left off: accountant turned superhero Arthur (Griffin Newman) has been captured be returned megalomaniacal supervillain The Terror (Jackie Earl Haley), and The Tick (Peter Serafinowicz, still brilliant), Arthur’s sister Dot (Valorie Currie) and hyper-violent vigilante Overkill (Scott Speiser) must mount a rescue.
While The Tick in general delights in parodying the entire swathe of superhero culture and history – and demonstrates plenty of deep dive nerd cred while doing so – the back half of season one is more concerned with the somewhat convoluted internal history of the show’s setting, delving into relationships, back-stories, old rivalries and romances. As a result, it’s more plot-focused than the first six episodes, and less funny – its hard to keep the one liners coming when you’re trying to sketch out a narrative that starts with the Tunguska Blast of 1908 (the show’s ground zero for superpowered heroes and villains), plus decades of relationships and rivalries.
Of course, in this instance “not as funny as the first half” means “still pretty goddamn funny”. This is a show where an artificially intelligent boat (voiced by Alan Tudyk) ponders the ramifications of identifying as a gay man; where a supervillain obsesses with the movie Whiplash; where a talking dog (voiced by Townsend Coleman, who voiced The Tick in the animated series back in the day); where the title character, still mystified by his origins, spends an episode convinced he’s a robot, much to Arthur’s consternation.
It’s delightful stuff, unafraid to be silly and unashamed to be poignant. Stepping to the emotional foreground in this run of episodes is Arthur’s stepfather, Walter (Francois Chau) an amiable Asian-American retiree whom Arthur utterly resents. The show gets a lot of mileage out of Arthur’s largely unfounded anger at Walter, playing it mostly for laughs but never forgetting there’s a complex emotional dynamic at work under the surface. It’s an incredibly well-written relationship, and the show makes sure to leave narrative threads dangling that indicate it’s only going to get more complicated down the track.
Hopefully there’ll be something down the track to look forward to; tucked away on Amazon Video, The Tick has mostly flown under the radar here in Australia, which is a shame. It’s an absolute delight of a series: riotously funny, defiantly geeky, and big-hearted – a rare bit of alchemy by any measure. If you enjoyed the first six episodes, you’ll be well served by the remainder of season one. If you’ve yet to sample The Tick’s weird delights, marathon the lot.
