This is an interesting series.
It takes a famous ensemble piece and turns it into the "Wolverine and Some Guys He Hangs Out With" show. Characters rarely evolve, and our title character is the flattest and least interesting of the bunch. Too bad we spend most of our time with him. The action is generally standard and unremarkable. The writing is sometimes shoddy and slipshod.
Yet it's not a terrible show. It started to find a voice plot-wise towards the end, and they finally started to do something with characters around then too. The writing quality improved as the show went on. The show always had a handle on plot, and those resolved reasonably well.
I would say that the season finale is probably what makes people think well of the show overall. The plots do come together quite well, and it manages to even pull together a theme: trust. A theme that actually was present in many prior episodes, making the finale the conclusion to season-long thematic development. It's strange that a show that managed to have a somewhat-strong central theme throughout the series couldn't give us stronger characters to have that theme happen to.
Overall? It's average. Probably the weakest of the modern era of Marvel-based cartoons.
The fundamental flaw in this series is Wolverine. If you're going to take an ensemble show and turn it into a single-character show, you need to actually do that. And, as I've stated several times, Logan as a character never goes anywhere. He never changes; he never undergoes character development.
Just take a look at how this lack of development affects his seminal decision: trusting Emma. He doesn't trust her because he underwent development; he trusts her because he was told to. Yes, the entire message wasn't given to him, but he worked it out for himself. He knew that he needed to trust someone, and Emma was someone he certainly didn't trust. So it made sense to pick her. If he hadn't been given that message fragment, we know what would have happened: he'd have left her there, because that's what did happen.
The theme of the series is supposed to be trust without guarantees. That's what happened with Rogue; she betrayed them in episode 2 so that it would be more difficult for them to trust her later. Her mind was unreadable in order to make it about blind trust. Elements of trust are incorporated in other places. Can Emma be trusted at all? Can Scott be trusted not to run off and stir up trouble looking for Jean? And so forth.
But the ultimate act by the protagonist isn't entirely about trust. He cheated; he was given the answer to the test. Again, it was a partial answer, which means he doesn't have that guarantee, he doesn't truly know that he should trust her. He still makes a leap; just not as big of a leap.
Imagine how much more powerful it would have been if no message had been sent. Imagine if he had a season's worth of character development, dealing with trust issues and so forth, starting with Rogue and then to maybe Scott and other members of the team. And now, at the last, Logan must trust Emma. A person he has every logical reason to distrust, and no reason to trust. And he must trust her or the bad future will happen.
As with so much about this show, it was wasted potential.
Comments
