Well, after a truly impressive run that’s given us huge, car based brawls, a lavish look at an apocalyptic America and bizarre new characters, it seems that Twisted Metal’s season season has finally slipped a gear and put out an episode that feels weirdly pointless. The jokes are still there and so is the gore (boy, is it), but considering how big and sprawling the show had managed to get, to suddenly constrict it into a nonsensical little episode that feels like a comedy slasher movie just feels like a massive step back.
However, while there’s no cars, no explosions and no real progression in the tournament, at least SDDNDTH gets a chance to focus on the characters and their various hang ups – but even here, Twisted Metal seems to lose some of the snappy idiocy that’s carried it this far and reveals some surprisingly lazy writing. An attempt to stretch the budget to fit the extended, twelve episode run or a sign that the air is finally starting to leave the tyres of one of TV’s most gonzo shows – fingers crossed it’s the former.
All the surviving racers in the Twisted Metal tournament are about to settle in for the night at the digs provided for them at Jaffe Campbell High School. However, while the air is abuzz with gossip about John and Quiet falling out about making vastly different wishes, malevolent big cheese Calypso decides to add yet another random bonus round to further test the mettle of his determined contestants.
Meet The Apocalypse Nine, a group of blank eyed killers who are all dressed up to look like crash test dummies and who have been let loose within the now-locked High School to whittle down the numbers of racers even more. The rules are simple: kill the nine, survive the night and when everything kicks off, both Mr. Grimm and Sweet Tooth gain something of an unfair advantage when rhe former is looked outside after a spot of night fishing and the latter misses everything due to his appointment with the doctor about his sterile testicles. However, everyone else has to work together to make it to tomorrow – no sweat, right?
Splitting into random teams when the chaos starts, we find John and Mayhem indulge in a spot of generational bonding as they debate who had it harder as a child while they find a gruesome use for a table saw in workshop, Quiet, Raven and Vermin team up and indulge in some warped girl-talk as they discuss whether John was selfish for choosing another wish. However, the remain group consists of Axel, Stu, Mike and Dave and while you’d think that have a huge, ripped dude with robot hands would be a massive plus when fighting lunatic killers, Axel turns out to have some major mental hang ups and believes that despite his vast size and strength, he can’t fight unless he’s drunk his gasoline. With murderers banging on the door, it’s time for Dave to shine and do what he does best – stage an intervention, but when daybreak comes, who will survive and what will be left of them?
While I understand that shows have to ease down to a lower gear to accommodate the allotted budget in order to have the appropriate moolah to (hopefully) stage a big, ballsy finale, sometimes I do wonder why you don’t just make less episodes just so you don’t get breaks of momentum in a show that thrives on speed. That’s not to say that SDDNDTH doesn’t have its merits, laughs and impressive spurts of gore; it’s just that considering how far the show has come visually and how big it’s scale has become, suddenly going all slasher movie on us feels a little lazy, especially when the episode displays some rather clunky plotting to only change the status quo of some of the cast.
For a start, I’ll just come out and say it. Having Mr. Grimm and Sweet Tooth left out of the round may preserve their grudge match for a later episode, but even for a goofy, cartoonish, black comedy based on a video game, the way it’s done is just dopey as hell. Calypso may be erratic as fuck, but would he really have started this secret round while Sweet Tooth had a booked medical appointment concering his barren balls (at night, no less) and Mr. Grimm was hanging around outside? If they wanted to suggest it was deliberate in order to shift the odds in favour of the Apocalypse Nine, that’s fair enough, but it’s never actually stated and just feels a bit sloppy. Additionally, while the Nine themselves look the part with dead, black eyes and crash test dummy markings etched onto their bodies, they’re not particularly memorable or formidable as they’re merely cannon fodder for our cast to kill while they bond. Finally, what with the first bout of epic action technically labeled a qualifying round and this announced as a bonus round, that means in eight epiodes, we’ve only had one official round – and of the three in total, only two have required cars. Now, I don’t know about you, but I was hoping for a Twisted Metal tournament and I really need the show to step things up and gives us more of what we were promised.
OK, rant over. Let’s move onto the stuff about SDDNDTH that works and it’s actually a neat idea to stage an episode that demands that everyone has to work together and build trust and friendships as they’ll all be required to kill one another very soon. John and Quiet have their latest spat and separate once again and eventually come together by the end after both parties discuss it with other people. Raven, surprisingly, has some personal insights as she also is trying to win the tournament to wish her high school friend back to life, but of course she delivers all this with her patented resting bitch face. The girly union gives us a bit more time with the bedraggled, lesser focused on form Vermin (even though Frostbite is an early casualty) and once again, the show does that thing where it stages a scenario that’s seemingly normal such as three girls from different social groups being forced to interact – but fills it with absolute maniacs instead.
This is especially true of the plot’s main thread which sees the immense form of Axel reveal he has long standing trauma from his transformation to a human vehicle that has him reduced to a quivering wreck if he doesn’t gulp down gasoline to make him “strong”. Cue some flashbacks that show that he once was a cake baker with a side hustle as a hit man (or is that the other way round?) but after a hit left a baby orphaned, he adopted it but lost the child in a raid by gang of Vultures. Obviously this will no doubt prove to be relevant later (who do you reckon the baby was, Vermin or Mayhen?), but the whole intervention scene proves to be the best moment by far of a weirdly underachieving episode.
Still, the gore is good, the needledrops are still on point (Axel rips a guy’s head off with his bare hands while “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” plays by the Crash Test Dummies) and the episode scatters a bunch of minor issues that’ll probably grow. But with Axel losing his only weakness, ex-cannibal Dave seemingly getting back his taste for blood and a barren Sweet Tooth adopting Stu as his son, hopefully the rest of the season can get back to its former glories before it becomes a case of Twisted Meh-tal.
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