The Cape Review: A Complete Dud
Jeffrey Kirkpatrick at .The Cape continues to exhaust me because I have to try too hard to watch it. I find it incredibly boring. It doesn't hold my interest, other than the few moments when Summer Glau is on screen, but that has nothing to do with her character. With this material, even she comes off wooden and flat
The writing... oh the writing! Lines such as, "Either you wear the cape, or the cape wears you" makes me wonder if a high schooler penned the script for "Kozmo."
Exactly which comic villains were The Cape trying to mimic with Gregor? X-Men's Gambit by carrying out card tossing assassinations? The Joker with the makeup smeared across his face later in the episode? Or Two-Face from Batman Forever by serving as surrogate ringmaster, threatening to kill Max and lure The Cape into the limelight? This cobbled amalgam of supervillains just felt contrived and quite simply dull.
All the theatrics with the cape are just plain awful. There is way too much emphasis placed on the cape itself and its many uses. Seriously, are there really that many things one can do with a cape without it actually having some sort of mystical powers?The only moments that elicited even the slightest of smiles occurred when Orwell agreed to go to the circus with Rollo, and ended up riding on the back of his cycle, and then the split second when Orwell was hanging from the rafters in spandex - but even that didn't elevate the episode from its doldrums. It occurs to me now that watching Glau float around for an hour in slinky attire in fact may actually not be enough to sustain a series.
Perhaps I'm being too nit-picky, but there is no way this kid is dumb enough not to recognize his father's voice. Vince doesn't even attempt to disguise it. But, then again, an adult Lois Lane was blinded to Superman's identity by a pair of glasses all those years.
What did you think of the episode? Think I'm being too harsh? Sound off in the comments below.
Jeffrey Kirkpatrick is a TV Fanatic Staff Writer. Follow him on Twitter.