Main cast: Indira Varma (The Bride), Sean Gunn (GI Robot, Weasel), Alan Tudyk (Dr Phosphorus), Zoe Chao (Nina Mazursky), David Harbour (Eric Frankenstein), and Frank Grillo (Rick Flag Sr)
Director: Sam Liu
According to Google Translate, Priyatel Skelet is Russian for “skeleton buddy”. The only character closest to a skeleton in the cast is Dr Phosphorus, although the jury is still out on the “buddy” part, so yes, this episode contains the origin story of Dr Phosphorus. Thrilling stuff, truly. I can barely contain my anticipation.
Turns out he is another cliché marching straight out of the Generic Villain Origin Story handbook: family murdered by mob boss, he killed the mob boss in revenge and took over the operation, became a baddie himself, and was eventually arrested by Batman because of course he was. It’s the exact same trajectory as approximately seven hundred other DC villains, delivered with all the freshness of week-old bread.
Meanwhile, Weasel has decided that Ilana is the little girl he failed to save all grown up, so he’s defected to help her — without telling his former teammates, naturally, because communication is for people with functioning social skills. All of this is clearly designed to give Sean Gunn more screen time and justify his continued employment.
Seriously, this is exactly why you don’t let mentally unstable lunatics with no moral compass carry out supposedly critical black ops missions. It’s basic personnel management. Someone at this fictional government agency needs to take a course in human resources and risk assessment.
Meanwhile, Rick Flagg Senior is still unconscious while the Bride and Nina seek shelter in a brothel. There, the Bride learns a very important lesson about life: she and the prostitutes are fundamentally the same because she sells her body, in a way, to the U.S. government. It’s a revelation delivered with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the face, the kind of heavy-handed metaphor that makes you wonder if James Gunn think the audience requires PowerPoint presentations to understand basic thematic parallels.
Will this epiphany play a role in helping this character become more than a one-note snarling rude ice queen? Well, not by the end of this episode, that’s for certain. She remains as charmless and abrasive as ever, begging the question of why we’re supposed to care about her journey at all.
Speaking of inexplicable motivations, Eric Frankenstein is still pursuing the Bride with the determination of a mall cop chasing a shoplifter, because… oh for heaven’s sake, what is the appeal of that snarling rude ice queen anyway? She’s got all the warmth of a January morning in Siberia and the personality of a particularly aggressive cactus. Eric’s obsession would make more sense if she had literally any redeeming qualities beyond “looks good in the character design”, but apparently centuries of rejection haven’t taught him that maybe, just maybe, he should move on and find someone who doesn’t actively despise his existence.
So that’s basically it. An inch of plot development stretched across about 25 minutes, padded with yet another tragic backstory that we’ve seen a thousand times before.
Next episode is the last one, so let’s just get this exercise in mediocrity over with and put this season out of its misery. Perhaps then we can all move on with our lives and pretend we weren’t mildly invested in a show that promised so much and delivered so very, very little.
