Marvel’s Inhumans series has been dancing around showing us any footage for a while. But now it’s finally arrived, and, most importantly, features a giant teleporting dog who is a very good boy.
The dog’s name is Lockjaw. Oh, right, we need to know about the (in)humans. The series follows Lockjaw’s pal Black Bolt (Anson Mount) who finds himself the victim of a palace coup via his brother Maximus (Ramsay B-, er, Iwan Rheon) and is brought to Hawaii along with his family and a few loyal retainers to regroup and retake their fortress on the Moon, because if you’re going to flee a regicide, you might as well do it somewhere pleasant. Maybe along the way they’ll explain why, precisely, the Inhumans have been sitting on their duffs inside the Moon while all this insane cosmic stuff has been going on in the Marvel Universe.
There’s definitely a bit of Game of Thrones here, and not just because Rheon is playing Space Ramsay. The set design of the Inhumans’ moon base, the framing of the shots, and what we see of the plot in general, which appears to draw only lightly from the comics, feels a bit like Marvel wanted a story of court intrigue as much as superheroes trashing Hawaii. It’s a good fit, though, as the Inhumans were always more of a high fantasy type of story, right down to the princess falling in love with a ‘commoner,’ in the original comics. Granted, the ‘commoner’ in that case was Johnny Storm, but hey, everybody makes bad dating decisions in their ’20s, right?
The Inhumans also all have superpowers, thanks to a substance called Terrigen and aliens monkeying with their DNA. Black Bolt, for example, can level entire planets with the power of his voice, so Mount won’t be saying all that much across the show’s eight episodes. So, unlike Agents Of SHIELD, you can expect them to go full superhero pretty much right out of the gate. We’ll see just how superhero September 1st, when the first two episodes screen in IMAX theaters.
