If nothing else, Into the Badlands is stylish as hell. The show utilizes color magnificently, and the undefined time period gives it a look altogether different from anything on TV. The only problem is, I worry sometimes that there might really be nothing else to this show. To put it in swordfighting terms, Into the Badlands cuts the skin but never hits the bone.
Last week I said this would be the best show on USA. I changed my mind; I think it’s better suited to the CW, or even MTV (seriously, imagine Into the Badlands on after Teen Wolf, and you’ll agree with me). The show is warmly embracing its young adult trappings, which should come as no surprise seeing as how the creators, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, are veterans of things like Smallville, I Am Number Four, and the forthcoming Shannara Chronicles, which, holy shit, will air on MTV. Badlands being a YA show isn’t necessarily a death sentence, because if Catching Fire taught us anything it’s that YA novels aren’t the juvenile crap they used to be considered. The reason it’s not as successful here is because #1, the marketing was incredibly misleading, and #2, Aramis Knight (as M.K.) has the tendency of many young actors to overact every third or fourth line; and moreover he shares precious little chemistry with Tilda (Ally Ioannides), his newly introduced inevitable love interest.
Tilda is the daughter of the Widow, nee Minerva, who at least gets a badass intro. She has a killer fight scene, unfortunately bookended by expository dialogue at its finest. A crew of Nomads tries to kill her, and one is generous enough to use his dying breath to admit that Ryder Quinn hired them. Obviously we all knew this, because Ryder is being posited as Joffrey Barathen 2K15. Tilda, for her part, runs into M.K. (are his initials supposed to remind everyone of Mortal Kombat?) in the forest, and brings him back to the Widow’s fortress.
I found myself wondering: are we ever going to meet the remaining four Barons? I certainly hope so. But I doubt it. Gough and Millar clearly spent a lot of time developing Quinn and the Widow, and it shows; they’re by far the most interesting performers on the show, which is saying a lot when your ostensible lead spends most of his time doing karate. When Quinn takes Sunny’s sword and uses it to kill a doctor who’s diagnosed him with a brain tumor, it says more about his character than any of his drawling monologues thus far have (although the family’s screams of “No, Baron!” were a little too horror movie to be truly effective).
Into the Badlands isn’t a terrible show. I’ve only seen two episodes, neither of which have given me the visceral anger of watching, say, Gotham. But there are so many damn problems that seem easily fixed. Dialogue, for one, is uniformly clunky. “You said that the boy is powerful,” Tilda says to her mother. “M.K. is the opposite.” Who talks like that? And “Fist Like a Bullet” features characters telling each other three times that Quinn will “hunt you down.” Same phrasing every time. But at the end of the day I don’t think Gough and Millar are interested in dialogue as much as they’re interested in filming a very pretty comic book. That’s fine for what it is, but if the show continues in this direction, we’re always going to be left feeling hollow.
A Few Thoughts
- “Fist Like a Bullet” is a great title that sounds like a 1970s Kung Fu movie…until you realize that characters on this show studiously avoid using their fists
- One good line: “Please don’t pretend you give a shit about my birds”
- Before M.K. ended up back at the Fort, I was hoping he was going to escape from a different Baron every single episode
- Another nice moment of characterization for Quinn: “Let’s not tell Lydia, you know how she fusses”
- I find it hard to believe that the Nomads didn’t check M.K. for a FUCKING SHURIKEN
- Lastly, the Widow bathing M.K. was a weird scene, and maybe not in the way the show intended
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