Superhero Media: Cleverman - Season 2

I really want Cleverman to be as good as it wants to be, but its obvious that marketing pressure, budget and exceeding their own grasp is crippling the potential of the production. The first half of this six-episode season is more of the same meandering that fans have seen before, made worse by the fact that the climatic battle Season 1 closed on is never shown on screen! Even in flashback! What the hell ABC? I know big, set-piece, fight scenes are expensive to produce, but you couldn't do a few shots to tempt us in for the next couple of episodes? That first major misstep almost killed my desire to keep watching, but I'm glad I stuck it out, because things really pick up after Episode 3. It seems like someone finally cracked open "The Big Book of Superhero Tropes" and pulled out a few things to make the progamme actually resemble something that may be found in a comic. 

That's right, Koen gets a costume! And it's pretty cool too, with the integral scarf, funky jacket, face paint and courier tube for the Nulla Nulla, it looks like he scavenged it together, which he probably did; well thought out design department. Waruu gets hopped up on Hairy DNA (sciencey but stupid, like all good Silver Age origins), gaining strength, speed and endurance to challenge Koen, culminating in a decent showdown in the last episode. A new Hairy character, Jarli, is introduced as a renegade waging a guerilla war against the human government from an untouched hairy settlement in the "wilderness" 40 minutes out of Sydney. Jarli looks to be a possible antagonist or ally in the future, but his willingness to kill every guard he runs past will likely cause friction; I am keen to see a "Clevermen" team develop over the next season though. The more interesting part is that the version of Australia being presented is made up of cities surrounded by vast tracts of wilderness, making the whole "Hairies coming out of nowhere" thing a bit better. I wonder if they just left it out of Season 1 or retconned it in after reading the reviews.

As said above, Cleverman is getting better, Season 3 could be really good if the production team keep up the superhero tropes rather than trying to be "groundbreaking" constantly. The "too many plot lines" problem is resolved thanks to some characters dying and others meeting in the middle and it's great to have the setting fleshed out more, but the old habit of dragging out episodes with characters that don't drive the plot or build the world still makes some parts extremely dull. In researching for this entry, I found that Cleverman is indeed well received outside of Australia, mostly for representation, rather than writing, but it's good that Aboriginal Australian content is getting international exposure. I'm really hoping that Season 3 builds on the strengths of Season 2, rather than fall into the trap of trying to make every little thing a big deal. There's a lot here to like, I just wish it could settle for being a pretty-decent superhero progamme rather than trying to be the next Breaking Bad.