VIXEN Kicks Off

Really, Vixen, you have five minutes per episode. Five minutes to tell a compelling piece of a story. Five minutes to get my attention and keep my interest enough to come back to see what happens next.

And what do you do? You do the one thing that irritates me the most in television — you start with an action set, and then interrupt it to go back in time to the beginning of your story.

I hate that.

Let me be clear. I absolutely loathe that, and between the time jump and both Flash and Green Arrow chasing Mari across the rooftops with their mouths hanging open in perpetual surprise… yeah… that could have been better.

Outside of that, I think the show — for the most part — does a good job setting up the fact that Mari McCabe has a history, and that it’s one of those “checkered pasts” that come with a troubled superhero character. This five-minute bit shows that Mari spent time in foster care, her foster mother is dead, and the magic totem is a “family heirloom” about which she has mixed emotions.

She gets locked up, and when her foster father posts bail, she goes her own way, only to find herself face-to-face with thugs, generally of the type you’ll expect to find in anything produced by James Tucker. They’re foul-mouthed, taking the show into PG-13 territory and pulling yet another animated project away from kids.

Besides that, we have the cliffhanger of Mari with a gun in her face, on top of the earlier three-days-from-now cliffhanger where Mari’s falling from the roof of a building after evading The Flash and Green Arrow.

I hope it gets better.