IF YOU SEE SWAMP THING, SAY SWAMP THING: THAT'S A WRAP!
It's over! It's done! The show we watched for fun!
There's no more Swamp Thing now because it's o-ver!
He was strong and he was super! He was a truly tubular tuber!
But he's cancelled now and resting in the clo-ver!
Durock remains gigantic, Chapman's been cast in Titanic,
But in a warehouse in the famous Sunshine Sta-ate,
Are what remains of Houma town (everything not nailed down)
And a salad suit inside an unmarked cra-ate.
Will Swamp Thing return some day? Or will the suit end up on Ebay?
Is this truly the end of the hero of whom we si-i-i-i-ing?
This valiant vegetable platter is the only hero who matters!
SO...
After three seasons of some of the most baffling (if sometimes endearing) television ever to be committed to the medium, the 1990-1993 USA Network late night Swamp Thing series is drawing to a close. Farewell, sweet swamp prince, may a flight of swamp angels sing you to your swamp sleep.
What can you expect from the series finale of a show like Swamp Thing? What's the proper send-off for a show like this? Will there be closure? Did they know in advance that this episode would be the finale? Did they even know that they were filming this show for broadcast? Many many questions remain unanswered.
Surely, the best we could hope for is that, at the end of the episode, Swamp Thing will walk away into the swamp, then turn at the last moment and smile at the audience, then wave, and then the shot freezes as the credits roll, and also that maybe before that the episode does a Murder on the Orient Express riff for no reason? I think that would be nice.
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| Exciting headlines in today's Louisianan Daily Wet News. |
Anton Arcane's life story is being brought to the big screen! But the project is riddled with problems. The film's producer is a phony, the director is a diva, the script is garbage, and the leading man is vain, arrogant, disrespectful ... and dead!
On the set of "The Latent Great: The Anton Arcane Story," no one's getting along very well. Producer "Mickey Paradise" (Tom Nowicki) uses the shoot as an employment agency for the aspiring actresses who hang off his arm (that his wife doesn't know about), director Lazlo Stein (Randy McPherson) bemoans every little change to his vision for the script, and lead actress Jennifer Bloom (Tracy Roberts) is drowning under a Southern accent that's just too big for her.
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| They also never stop shooting right down her cleavage. |
Worst of all is big-time star Tod Michaels (Rus Blackwell), the lead actor who can't recite (or remember) the flamboyant dialogue of Anton Arcane. He also disrupts shooting for petty concerns, rewrites his lines on the fly, mopes, pouts, and insists on playing the role of the villainous scientist sleeveless. I'm sorry, we already have a sleeveless guy, and his name is Will Kipp, and he's not here today.
Arcane himself is particularly unsettled by the antics of his on-screen stand-in. The sinister scientist has been flitting around the set like a moth with a glorious mullet, trying to ensure that his dignity and glamour are maintained -- if not magnified -- on the silver screen. The producer, the director, and the leading lady are all on Arcane's page, but Michaels' antics cause constant headaches for Houma's resident villain.
Returning to his trailer to shake off the frustrations of the day, Arcane opens the door only to find a lot of dry ice -- and also, to his shock and surprise, the dead body of Tod Michaels!
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| Sorry, I think this is actually a shot from the 1979 Kate Bush Holiday Special. |
From that moment, the story takes on elements of a gritty police procedural, with several cast members interviewed in a smoky room against an empty, black backdrop. Very black box theater. Very artsy.
Arcane grimaces and huffs his way through the inconvenient interview. Graham, while lauding his boss, pretty much makes an airtight case against Arcane. Thanks Graham! Lead actress Jennifer Bloom is also grilled under the lights although what actually happens in that scene is Tracy Roberts gets a camera lens shoved down her cleavage some more. At least they're hanging a lampshade on it, I guess.
Also interviewed is series regular Tressa Kipp (Carrell Myers), who hasn't been around much lately and also wasn't anywhere near the murder scene and has no motive, so she shouldn't be a suspect at all. Nice to see her again, though.
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| "And another thing I hate about my role on this show..." |
With the lead actor dead and the movie's future in doubt, Arcane steps in -- to play himself! The newly-case film proceeds unabated with the producer's blessing. In fact, everybody pretty much accepts it on the face of things. They didn't even take a day off after the murder. I bet they don't have SAG in Florida.
They apparently also don't have a writer's guild. Sometime in the night, a shadowy figure is visiting the set and dropping off deeply-rewritten script revisions. And they're a boffo smash!
“It’s fabulous," declares director Stein, seeing more than a movie in it -- "Maybe a pilot!” Meanwhile, actress Jennifer Bloom, playing Arcane's wife, cries out in shock when she realizes that her character will be “Trapped in a plastic tube for four years – in a coma!”
Arcane is less excited about the script revisions, as they seem uncomfortably intimate with Arcane's vile history. His schemes, his plots, his evil experiments -- and the attempted murder of Dr. Alec Holland! -- all there in black and white, including Holland's transformation into the Swamp Thing!
Furious about the revisions' revelations, Arcane blames the rewrites on Swamp Thing, using Swamp Magic, which is just insane. How does he think this works? Is Swamp Thing showrunning a room full of talented root vegetables?
In any case, Swamp Thing is no less eager than Arcane to have his secrets revealed on the silver screen (given the last two movies, you can see his point).
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| A scene I could watch all day: Graham empties half a craft services table into his pockets. |
Swamp Thing investigates the set after dark in an attempt to catch and reveal the mystery scriptwriter, accompanied by Tressa since she happened to be here. Arcane, focusing more on the murder that happened earlier, launches a Poirot-esque scheme to uncover the killer.
Performing a "new scene" of his own construction, Arcane stands before the assembled cast and crew to announce that he has figured out the identity of the murderer. At the moment of revelation, Graham -- hovering around all the electric equipment as he often will -- shuts down the lights. Everything goes black! And the killer will certainly use the opportunity to escape, right?
Well, no. Because, when the lights come back on, Arcane finds himself facing ALL THE GUNS! Every member of the cast and crew -- heck, maybe even the craft services guy -- is holding a gun on Anton Arcane.
Why? Because they ALL killed Tod Michaels! They ALL hated him! They ALL had a reason! Tod Michaels was killed by something like forty people working together.
They ORIENT EXPRESSED him!
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| Oh, and this is what Jenny's FACE looks like! |
And now, Anton Arcane knows too much, and they'll have to kill him too!
It's at this moment that Swamp Thing busts onto the scene out of nowhere. Rather than confronting the film crew directly -- risking public exposure -- Swamp Thing takes Graham's positions at the lights, rips a huge cable out of the wall and shoves it into the wet swamp ground -- electrocuting everybody in that sitcom version of electrocution where you just make a funny face and shake a lot, and not the real kind of electrocution where you empty your bowels and die.
Liberated from making a face/emptying his bowels and dying is Arcane, who has been wisely standing on a wooden box to deliver his speech. It's like I always say: "it's always lucky to stand on a wooden box in the swamp."
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| Graham, glowing with that light from within. |
The final few moments of Universal Studios' Swamp Thing are for closure.
Graham is revealed to have been the shadowy figure behind the too-true-for-comfort rewrites of The Anton Arcane Story.
Knowing that his boss would be furious if he ever discovered the truth, the wily Graham burns and buries the evidence -- further rewrites, and his sneaky black overcoat. I hope he wasn't keeping any craft services in the pockets.
His deeds were shady and mysterious, but his heart was pure, as I often say of Graham. “I just wanted the world to know how great a man you really are,” he says, of Arcane, reaffirming his status as the goodest judy of all.
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| Epilogue: |
Aaaand ... well, that's about it. Most of the remaining cast members -- if they're even in this episode -- properly fuck right off, presumably to continue circling the same swamp drain they've been doing since 1990.
With his chance at cinematic fame spoiled (until 1997, anyway), Arcane is evidently content to nurse his uninterrupted run of something like 70+ foiled schemes and go home. He arrogantly swans back to his compound, intent on making more mutants, torturing people, locking them in tubes -- whatever he feels like doing. It's his compound.
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| "An unbroken streak. Sweet." |
Tressa Kipp, whose presence in the story seems like a courtesy -- Myers, Chapman and Durock were the only actors to appear in both the first and final seasons -- simply wanders off between scenes. That's fine. Can you imagine if they wrote her out? What a clusterfuck that would've been. After everything she'd been through, a sneaky exit out the back when no one is looking is the best ending you could've composed for Tressa Kipp.
I think its fair to say that she's handling her resentment against Arcane, who'd earlier abducted her younger son Jim and forced him into slavery in a South American mutant mine, pretty well. She could have slipped into the crew and shot him while everyone else was holding guns on him, and no one would've known better ... except the swamp.
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| It's "Kipp." |
Will Kipp, Tressa's sleeveless stepson, received his farewell in the previous episode, getting to do something he'd never done before -- be smarter than someone else. Presumably, he's continuing his education as Swamp Thing's sidekick, Swamp Boy.
Dr. Ann Fisk continues to secretly work with Swamp Thing to return him to his human form, whom she loves. Then again, Ann Fisk was in five episodes and none of them were shown in order, so maybe she's yet to meet Swamp Thing.
Lastly, of course, there's Swamp Thing himself. With the film production shut down, his secret is safe (for the moment), leaving him the liberty to work on a cure.
"For now," he muses as he walks toward the swamp, where he keeps all his aphorisms, "The truth about Arcane will remain secret, but one day the details will be known..."
He pauses, turning to smile at the audience over his shoulder (gasp), and wave goodbye (GASP!), he concludes "I can only hope that by then my battle will be over and I will again be human.”
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| "So long, swamp jerks!" |
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