Quick and Dirty Jupiterâs Legacy Review: They Did Josh Duhamelâs Fake Beard Dirty
In a lot of ways, Jupiterâs Legacy delivers: it is mediocre superhero escapism that spits out just enough plot twists to interest viewers. But in the ways in which art reflects reality, it is DUMB AS FUCK.
An ensemble cast of superheroesâJosh Duhamel, the only actor I recognized, plays the Superman-esque UtopianâI Â think I'd have been 10x more into this show if the fake beards and wigs were of a higher quality. And I mean that.
I would 100% dig a gray-bearded, long-haired, farmer Josh Duhamel... If only his fake follicles weren't so distracting. Maybe my standards are too high, as the muttonchops in the British dramas and mysteries I watch are top fuckin' quality, but I must not digress...
Like much of the work by writers I followed in the early oughts, this Mark Millar adaptation follows the various stages of life. Millar and other writers of his generation (and gender) have spread their tendrils throughout media the last 20 years as they chronicle the stages of their lives through pop culture: the manchild years, early marriage years, what it's like to have young children, reckonings with their own aging parents, and finally, what it's like to be an overbearing father with teenagers that hate you.
Mark Millar must have had teens that hated him when he was writing this initially*âor was recalling the ways his overbearing dad raised himâbecause the show is mostly about the family dynamics of Duhamel's character's family, which includes his spunky and faithful wife (Grace), too-hard-on-himself son (Brandon), and rebellious celebre daughter (Chloe). All of them have superpowers, and it's Duhamel's 120-year-old ass attempting to guide them responsibly through those powers. Comically, though the quality of the tantrums of the kids are analogous to teens, they are actually in their early 20s in the show.
(*Admittedly, I havenât read the 2013 comic series, and am not certain how closely the show follows it. So maybe the comic is more opaque in its intentions than the show đ€·âââ.)
The thing most people will hate about Jupiterâs Legacy is that there are multiple timelines. More than you can keep track of. Parceling out story tidbits seemingly at random. I'm ambivalent about this, tbh. I donât mind feeling lost in a plot, but I can see others having problems with the jerkiness these timeline cuts bring to the flow of episodes. Ultimately, the freedom to jump between 1929 (right before Duhamel and his super friends received their powers) and 2021 (and sometimes in between) ends up feeling like a crutch for the writers to lazily lean on. But, this is the quality I'd expect from Netflix, as they seem to prefer to waste money and not time. Were they less stingy with time, maybe the writers room could have had a few more months to work out tighter scripts with fewer flashbacks.
At the core of my problem with Jupiterâs Legacy, and the core of the plot of the show, is "the code"âa set of rules Jupiter's Legacy's senior superheroes created and follow. The code: supes do not govern, and they do not kill. The do not kill aspect don't sit right with me specifically. As times have gotten tougher in the show, the do not kill rule has gotten harder, and the younger, new generation of heroes is finding it more difficult to understand why it exists, let alone abide by it.
And, of course, an important character eventually does kill. And thus, this further complicates the world heroes and villains alike live in, and this is doubly true for Josh Duhamel's Utopian.
At one point in episode seven, while discussing the âno-killâ code with his sister, Utopianâs son Brandon says, "You have to make a choice, otherwise you're just standing by letting the world go." Which is ironic since this is a show that does not make a choice. What âchoiceâ do I mean?
Itâs difficult to watch a show about superheroes acting as world police without thinking about the real-world police. This is doubly true when one of the subjects is whether said superhero âworld policeâ (as Iâve dubbed them) should be allowed to kill dangerous combatants. The problem isnât that the show âtakes a sideâ when it comes to real-world violence. The problem is that the show pretends the subject doesnât exist. Violence at the hands of superheroes and the ensuing effects are just utterly outside of reality. Of course, this is escapism, right? But escapism or not, there are other ways the show attempts to parody the real world, from the strained experiences of an overbearing father and his kids to the portrayals of celebrity lifestyle through the Utopianâs super-daughter, Chloe. I think I case could be made that the âcodeâ is actually a fight against an increasingly fascist world (both on the show and in reality), but the metaphors get so lost in translation and muddled by real-world-problems that they seem meaningless to me.
Iâd love it if I could JUST view Jupiterâs Legacy as a clumsy metaphor for all of our daddy issues, but it lives in a world where police violence exists. And when itâs engaging not only with the concept of whether the powerful should kill but batshit ramifications of that violence, like the superhero trope of supervillain âescalation,â it becomes real hard to find the show compelling.
Ultimately, the overall story itself isnât about whether superheroes should killâwhich ends up being a pawn used by both sides for control and powerâŠbut that doesnât stop that single component of the show from being a distraction. By the time the last episode ended, I found that the way that the overall material had been handled left the Machiavellian plot twists inert. Which is not to say I saw them coming or did not see them coming, but to say that I just really didn't care.
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