The Awesomes

The Awesomes turned on a fire hose of character introductions, ensuring that we couldn’t possibly latch on to any of them. This latest episode introduces two new villains and the titular superhero team’s European counterparts.

A grand total of nine new characters (that’s two-fifths of a character every minute of the show, including the intro and closing credits) were introduced and discarded like empty candy wrappers. What’s worse is that most of the story was an elaborate cheat to reunite Hot Wire, the Awesome’s estranged team member, with Prock the team’s leader. Even worse than that is when the only meaningful new character for this season receives similar treatment to the ones we’ve known for five minutes.

The writing saw Prock’s new girlfriend turn uncharacteristically psychotic and reveal a latent power—there was never a hint that anyone in her family had even met a superhero prior to Prock—that seems tied to her mental break. To be fair Prock’s girlfriend has dropped hints up to this point that she could pull an Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates’s character from Misery), but this doesn’t support the sudden power surge.

Maybe I’m just bitter that one of the most annoying members of the cast, Perfect Man, receives another lengthy story arc. Like most of Perfect Man’s story arc’s this season he mimics a movie franchise or movie trope, and his story has nothing to do with any of the other action. So you can up the ratio to almost a one character introduced in every watchable minute of the show.

There were some bright spots in this episode. Impresario sweet talking a comely, French hunchback is good for some chuckles, and while we don’t get to know any of the new characters well, most of their powers are hilarious since they have no practical application: crotch puncher (he has an extra-large left hand with which he uses to punch people in the crotch, perfectly every time). Or the European Awesomes take a classic superpower and make it ridiculous: the Flying Dutchman sprouts windmill blades out of his back, and the blades work like a helicopter’s rotors.

There’s another silver lining. We should have all the introductions out of the way. Let’s hope the show gets back to the core group of characters, and a lot of these issues are resolved in the two part season finale.