Category Archives: If We Controlled Your Remote

Have you ever been at a loss as to what to watch? Too many shows to pick from? We’re here to give you our opinions on what we feel is worth watching. Check it out and then let us know in the comments below what you’re choosing for tonight!

Phoebe’s Choice

Wasting no time after the triumphant end of Doom Patrol season one, DCU dove right back into the folds with the premiere of Swamp Thing last week. It’s one of the darker, stranger DC characters and, we’ve been told, is a tale that exists outside the continuum that started with Titans last fall. This moist, murky story started as you might imagine, deep in a swamp with two scientists trying to retrieve readings they have been tracking in this corner of the wetland. The swamp itself became agitated though, and it impaled the one researcher to death with a barrage of pyscho animated vines that extended from every direction in the muck. The second man, Eddie Coyle, escaped somehow with his life.

A few days later though, Coyle’s daughter, Susie, succumbed to some sort of virus in the middle of her school day. CDC specialist Abby Arcane was called in to head the response to this potential outbreak of an unknown virus, after the school nurse and a teacher also were hospitalized by the mystery disease. Following the trail of the virus’s apparent origins, she encountered fellow scientist and freewheeling interloper Alec Holland taking sample near the body of Eddie Coyle, who was stuffed to death with swamp vines. Holland convinced Arcane that the best way to catch her up on how this bizarre contagion works was to show her in his own lab. She agreed to go along, and deep in the swamp at his lab he showed her that he had identified a new mutagen that he believed was the root cause of the virus and the violent animated vines in the swamp.

Later, back at Arcane’s labs, testing of one of Coyle’s latest samples somehow animated his body and woke Susie from her catatonic slumber. This soon shifted from shocking to a full-on vine monster attack on the lab. Holland was able to improvise a bomb, and they got away. At the local bar, they met Abby’s press contact, who gave them a solid lead on what part of the swamp Coyle had been allegedly boating in the night his partner in science vanished. When they followed up on that, they recovered a laptop with new data to analyze. As they went over the new data, they bonded over their dark histories.

When they returned to the swamp for more samples, an enigmatic man with a gun shot Holland’s engine, knocking him into the water. He was soon overtaken by the vine attacks, but he was not impaled to death right away. Instead he came back up from the water looking very much like the Swamp Thing hero we’ve known and loved for the last forty years. Very last scene of the episode was Abby Arcane knee deep in the swamp fleeing as Holland emerged as the veggie-beast.

This was an exciting, jam-packed start to what was once going to be a 13-episode season one. Then it got lowered to 10 episodes. As of yesterday, however, it’s been called off at the end of that 10-installment run. It seems North Carolina is reneging on fifty million dollars worth of promised subsidies, so DCU can no longer afford to shoot the show there. They decided to cut their losses, no matter how much of a success the show could turn out to be. So at least we know not to get our hopes up about this one. Nonetheless, let’s hope it’s a stellar ten-episode run!

On today’s episode, “Worlds Apart,” while Sheriff Cable searches for Alec unsuccessfully, Abby theorizes that it was more than an accident and retrieves his video journals from Daniel Cassidy. When one of her patients, Susie Coyle, escapes from the hospital, Abby and Matt follow her into the swamp.

Check out the fun this morning on DCU, which went up live at 9AM/8AMc.

I’ll also be tuning in to Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.