The show returns Friday, Feb. 23 with six more episodes that finish off the first season.
The new episodes are, disappointingly, just okay.
The stage was set for a funny-weird showdown.
Credit: Jessica Miglio/Amazon Prime Video
Im not sure what went wrong here.
The characters are strong.
Serafinowicz is a chipper presence, with a trailer voice that makes every line pop.
Newman makes Arthur an endearingly frustrated hero.
Overkills partner is a robotic vessel named Dangerboat, who seems to be in love with Arthur.
SoThe Tickis fun, endearingly overpopulated.
The media called him the Very Large Man, or VLM for short.
But the new episodes reveal a crucial mistake.
The VLM is a Very Large Plot Point, because everything is connected.
Maybe all this is happening for a reason!
Maybe destiny is real!
You say destiny, I say Origin Story.
Once you figure out where the shows going, too many plot turns feel like stalling tactics.
People get captured and then they escape.
Episodes begin with people recapping the plot, and end on cliffhangers that get swiftly resolved.
Itsalmosta joke about long-winded exposition, but the better joke wouldve been anything funny.
Its a strange subgenre of television: The season that feels like a Very Long Movie.
Done well, it can be addictive.
WhenThe Tickis funny, it can be very funny.
And Jackie Earle Haley is having a lot of fun as the local maniac.
Aware of supervillain cliches, he refuses to hold a Blofeldian cat in his lap.
Look, I support any show where a robot wears a fedora and a trench coat.
And the finale ends with a couple unsettling ideas that could power a bolder season 2.
But the second half of season 1 is familiar, careful, unadventurous: The bad kind of good.B-
