On Earth, the Royal Family are starting to slowly make their way towards one another. On Attilan, Maximus is still trying to consolidate his newly acquired power, and raging at the incompetence of his Earth-bound hunting party.

Another week, another disappointing episode of Inhumans, made all the worse by the few bright points of potential scattered amongst the dross. The newly reunited Black Bolt and Medusa are tooling around the island in search of Karnak, using the echolocation abilities of Locus to track his location. Louise is basically being their chauffeur and acting as a mild comic relief, now that her character is no longer required by Medusa (seriously, it’s like the scriptwriters want me to dislike the protagonists of this show).

Elsewhere, Karnak and his new girlfriend have a problem in the shape of her partner in crime no longer being happy to share the proceeds of their little weed farm. Being as how he’s been obnoxious from the moment we first met him and spent most of the last episode staring daggers at them both, this is not completely surprising, but Karnak does get the opportunity to do a little bit of growing as they face danger together, realising that his powers are still not infallible, and that sometimes a little doubt isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Why the romantic subplot from nowhere was required to frame this is anyone’s guess, but there we go.

Meanwhile Crystal is hanging out with her new male friend and the healed and fully-able-to-teleport again Lockjaw, but honestly most of their conversation is just insipid nonsense about how she needs to let go of her anxiety and chill out, which is apparently a she needs to forget the importance of finding her family and fighting back against the coup happening in her home city, which is nice.

There are other good bits – we get the first hints that Maximus might well be more than a cardboard thin moustache-twirler of a villain, though it has come so late and after so much twirling that it feels all the more incongruous, almost as if the writers have been reading reviews and swiftly re-shot some scenes as an afterthought to add depth. There’s a first chink too, in the hitherto bulletproof façade of Black Bolt and Medusa’s rock solid belief that they are just and wise rulers and everything on Atillan was just hunk dory before Maximus got out of hand thank you so very much. Unfortunately, the way it is delivered is so ham-fisted and stupid as to rob the moment of much of the impact it should have.

And there’s Gorgon and Karnak’s relationship past and present which is explored via a series of flashbacks showing prior events between the two which is nice but feels about three episodes too late.

Oh, and Auran is still directing surely the most ludicrously incompetent manhunt ever. Mordis’ costume still looks so stupid as to undercut the relief of him being the one villain allowed snark instead of just pseudo-Shakespearean dialogue and absolutely nobody cares about Tibor even though the episode clearly wants us to.

There’s more gore in this one too. All of a sudden. For no apparent reason. It’s a hugely jarring change because until now it’s been sub-early Agents of SHIELD levels of looking away and implying maybe a bad thing happened and now it’s just jumped into unflinching brutality up close and personal, like going from PG to 15 in the space of one episode.

Verdict: Though in some ways it’s getting slightly better, in that certain beats of character development are occurring and progress in the interminable journey of everyone to find everyone else is finally being made, it all feels too little too late, not to mention it gets drowned among all the constant missteps everywhere else. Please, Marvel, do the decent thing and put this series out of its misery. 3/10

Greg D. Smith