We’re in the final straight now as the final three episodes of Twisted Metal’s second season have all dropped on the same day, allowing fans to literally speed through the rest of the show all the way to the end. Of course, as I’m reviewing this thing an episode at a time, it’s still going to take me a little while longer to cross the finishing line, but it’s obvious that we’re now in a place where the cast list is now in dire peril. Yep, as we’re coming down to the wire, it’s time for the murderous tournament to claim some of the more A-list characters and it’s here where things should get really interesting.
However, Twisted Metal is notoriously tricksy enough not to serve up everyone into the fire in one go and while half of the group are tearing lumps out of each other in the midst of a visually pleasing, but utterly deadly Watkins Storm, the other are settling some outstanding matters in the form of a makeshift murder trial.
After their post-prom gassing, half of the surviving racers awake behind the wheels of their vehicles in preparation for something Calypso ominously calls the “lightning round” that will see them tear around a fighting arena that’s about to be stricken with one of those freakish Watkins Storms. However, while you’d think that adding the presence of lethal weather would be enough of a wildcard, the true rules of the game prove to be reliably more insidious. In every car, each driver has a card with the name of another racer on it and that’s who they have to successfully hunt and destroy if they hope to move on to the final round.
With John and Quiet separated into their own cars, everyone finds out who they have to target in order to proceed, but due to the bonds that have unavoidably been formed, there’s a certain amount of apprehension as the lightning bolts start flying and the machine guns start rattling.
Meanwhile, Calypso has only inserted half of the drivers into the mix as he’s some pressing matters to take care of elsewhere. Separated from the others are Sweet Tooth, Stu, Mike and Mr. Grimm who have to answer for the death of Dave as his non-tournament death of the lapsed ex-cannibal breaks one of Calypso’s most strict rules. As this makeshift investigation goes ahead and Stu is betrayed by his teeth perfectly matching the bite mark discovered in Dave’s butt, he hurriedly tries to explain the chain of events that led to the accidental impaling of Dave’s eyeball. However, while Stu manages to clear his name and seemingly heal his rift with Mike, there’s still one more order of business to take care of and that’s Grimm’s spiteful immolation of Sweet Tooth’s best friend, Harold the paper bag. With no real defense other than it was just a paper bag, Grimm has to pay a devastating price – but back in the chaos of the tournament, shots are taken and sacrifices are made as the numbers continue to dwindle.
After two while epiodes that cheekily chose not to feature vehicles in this adaption of a vehicle-based video game, Twisted Metal finally goes back to its roots by dropping us once again into the middle of a knock down, drag out bout of carmegeddon that sees a welcome call back the colourful carnage that comes with the purple-hued lightning strikes of a Watkins Storm. However, while the other demolition derbys up until now have been strictly every man for themselves, the twist this time is that each driver only has one person to gun for which manages to boost the tension no end. You see, we’ve now got to a stage where I actually care about these deranged yahoos – yes, even Vermin I suppose – but we’ve now come to the unavoidable point where we have to start eliminating fan favorites. Well, actually – that’s not entirely true because in an act of narrative schadenfreude worthy of Calypso himself, the writers have manages to extricate a bunch of characters out of the round to answe for the abrupt deaths of both a cannibal and a beloved brown paper bag.
I have to say, one of the reasons that I know that Twisted Metal is a good show is that it keeps constantly breaking and contradicting it’s own rules and promises in order to take some weird plot-based turns, and yet it’s rarely gotten on my nerves whenever it does so (although episode 8 came close). So while John, Quiet, Mayhem, Vermin, Raven and Axel fight for their lives surrounded by more lightning strikes than the Flash doing jumping jacks, Sweet Tooth, Grimm, Mike and Stu are rather unfairly given a pass as Calypso once again flamboyantly exercises his will. The ultimate result, other than seeing Stu’s face shoved into the butt-cheek of a dead man and Sweet Tooth accusing Grimm of racism after he states that Harold is only “a brown paper bag”, is that Calypso “removes” all of the souls that Grimm’s been removing from his victims. Of course, things are up in the air whether or not Grimm can actually do these things, but the biker himself certainly believes he’s been stripped of his multiple personalities.
Back in the war zone, it’s time for some characters to take the ultimate pitstop and first out is Vermin who gets blasted by Raven’s superweapon, lands on John’s bonnet, falls off at high speed and then is cooked by a lightning strike. It’s taken a bit of time, but Raven has finally maneuvered herself into becoming the show’s primary antagonist as she not only takes down Vermin, but out of sheer spite, she not only takes out Mayhem, but manages to eliminate Axel too when the human war machine sacrifices himself to save the youngster after recognising her as the baby he saved all those years ago. However, in yet another slice of Twisted Metal fuckery, Mayhem is only incapacitated and if I’m supposed to believe that Axel is genuinely dead, then I also believe that Ken Wantanabe was actually Ra’s al Ghul in Batman Begins.
Still, it leads to the episode belatedly earning it’s title as we get a tiny bit more insight into what make Mayhem tick after we discover that her wish simply was finding a place where she feels she belongs, but after her elimination from the tournament, she feels abandoned by both John and Quiet. However, after stumbling upon Calypso’s secret lab, she discovers that he’s creating a final boss (Minion, I’m guessing) to end the tournament with a bang. However, the final twist is that she overhears John and Quiet admitting that they were the ones who sabotaged her car back in the first round and as she’s too mature to realise that A) they were protecting her; and B) she’s already found a ace to belong if only she’d give it a chance, she neglects to warn them of the danger and leaves the school.
While I’ll admit that M4YH3M doesn’t quite take full advantage of the genuine emotion that built up last episode by chickening out a little on some of the eliminations, did you really want someone like Axel to die outright without any possibility of coming back? Still, the action is fast, the comedy is good and we’re still managing to get a surprising amount of character progression out of a bunch of unhinged, yet loveable freaks. Two episodes to go and we’ve got everything to play for.
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