Unlikely as the premise is for The Tick, it made sense in 2016. The pilot was directed by Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan‘s cinematographer, who shot all three entries in the Dark Knight trilogy. The first episodes feel like they’re trying to take the Tick in a similar direction, offering a more believable way to tell a story about a giant blue superhero who says things like, “Crime, nastiness and evil rear their fowl odorous heads in every corner of the globe, and that’s saying something because globes don’t even have corners!”
Pretty quickly, the show did away with that conceit and allowed the Tick to live in the world. However, it never abandoned the mental health aspect. In fact, it expanded to show how not just Arthur, but everyone—Dot, Overkill, even Superian—had some failure haunting them, some sadness they couldn’t shake. Thus the heroism of the Tick is less about his powers and more about his indefatigable commitment to doing good. He’s completely unbothered by disappointment or confusion. For example, when Arthur’s stepdad (Francois Chau) greets the hero by exclaiming, “Look at you,” Tick gleefully doesn’t stop to suss out the meaning. He just responds “Impossible!” and carries on.
The Tick’s embrace of all his weirdness became less a coping mechanism for living in an awful world, and more of a model for making the awful world better.
Going Sane in a Crazy World
Despite its gritty premiere, the final episode of The Tick features a host of superhero tropes. Supervillain the Duke (John Hodgman) has infiltrated the S.H.I.E.L.D. pastiche A.E.G.I.S., undermined the new Flag Five, and sent agents to kill Arthur’s family, all while Superian has an existential crisis on the Moon. Instead of leaping into action, however, Arthur and Dot get overwhelmed by past failures and mistakes, the same feelings of inadequacy that stall Overkill and Miss Lint’s turns toward heroism.
As always, Tick responds to the crisis with a monologue, full of hyperbole and mixed metaphors. But this time, there’s something truly inspirational in his garbled words. “The truth about the truth is that it’s a choice,” he declares. “Choose love or choose fear. Everything else is up to destiny.”
It’s a silly statement, to be sure, and the show recognizes the self-help cliches in Tick’s speech, just as it does the purple prose he usually spouts. But in that moment of self-doubt and despair, anything positive seems silly. Moreover, the fact that Tick says it with such sincerity, without even the hint of apologizing for who he is, becomes inspirational. As he’s done from the first episode, Tick invites Arthur to be who he is: not a broken man who copes with his trauma by dressing up like a moth/bunny, but a human who has both experienced hurt and makes weird, wonderful choices.
