Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In Amazon’s new batch of Tick episodes, which dropped today on Prime Video, every hero faces an identity crisis. Arthur (Griffin Newman) doesn’t want to be a hero and the Tick (Peter Serafinowicz) is a hero with TBD for an origin story. Overkill (Scott Speiser) reckons with his past while Dot (Valorie Curry) grapples with her rapidly-changing present. And The Terror (Jackie Earle Haley) tries to rebrand himself as a newer, cooler flavor of evil maniac. The introspection doesn’t stop there, either, because the back half of The Tick Season 1 gives its primary inhuman cast-member Dangerboat (voiced by Alan Tudyk) a deep dive of his own.
And oh, how gloriously insightful and weirdly profound that dive is!
Dangerboat spent the first half of the season stealing scenes in his role as Overkill’s mode of transport and de facto bachelor pad. Tudyk’s straight-laced delivery provided the overly macho gun-toting vigilante with a clinically sassy counterpart, as Dangerboat undercut all of Overkill’s attempts at gravitas. But as the rest of the cast spends this half of the season looking inside, Dangerboat follows suit and discovers something about himself: he’s gay.
“I have a very clear sense of self. I’m aware I’m a boat, but I identify as a male boat,” Dangerboat tells a befuddled (he is always befuddled, BTW) Tick in the first episode in the new run. “Specifically one who is capable of attraction for another male.” Tick then asks if he’s only attracted to other male boats, and Dangerboat says he doesn’t distinguish. But, he wonders, “can a boat be homosexual if the prefix is derived from the Greek word for ‘same,’ when clearly we’re not.” That “we” Dangerboat is referring to? It includes the Tick’s erstwhile sidekick Arthur.
That one scene sets up a subplot that goes places that plenty of superhero and sci-fi shows don’t go. Dangerboat–who requests to use the codename “Steve” when Overkill is radioing from missions–is kinda the Venn diagram overlap of two often-used characters. We see sentient vehicles all the time, like K.I.T.T. in Knight Rider or Benny the Cab in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? And we see plenty of humanoid robots contemplating the meaning of life (like Data in Star Trek or all the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica), and sometimes they even fall in love (Marvel’s Vision). But how often do we see non-humanoid artificial intelligences become so self-aware that they explore their own feelings of attraction and gender identity? I mean, outside of the Cars franchise where every character is a car. Dangerboat might be breaking some ground here!
Dangerboat’s journey doesn’t stop with that one curious convo with the Tick (which makes sense because the lovable big blue goof doesn’t understand much). We get to see Dangerboat interact with Arthur, which means we get to see a boat… have a crush… on a person? I’ve seen a lot of superhero stuff before, and I’ve never seen that. I’ve never seen a Quinjet pen a poem for Captain America. I’ve never seen the Millennium Falcon surprise Han Solo with some drug store chocolate. After watching The Tick, I’ve now seen what it would look like for someone (Arthur) if the room they were standing in (Dangerboat) was into them.
No spoilers, but, things do get weird for the two of them–and that’s because this whole dynamic is not a 1:1 map with reality. At no point during your dating years does your crush stand, physically, inside of you. And at no point in reality does your crush use you as a tool to perform daily hygiene, a function that Dangerboat provides for everyone in his metallic confines. See what I mean by awkward? Every time Dangerboat is on screen, specifically with Arthur, you are rapt by the unique awkwardness and at times cringey earnestness of what’s unfolding onscreen. Will these two ever get together? What does getting together with a boat look like? That’s a big question for Season 2 of The Tick!
And then there’s the whole “if robots are sentient and have free will and are capable of love, then doesn’t that kinda make them slaves if they’re treated like property?”
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So yeah, big questions for Season 2 of The Tick! But right now we have a show featuring a gay boat with a gay crush voiced with fussy wittiness by Tudyk and controlled by a fleet of puppeteers. That’s something I never expected, but it’s now something I can’t wait to see more of.
