1x13 Tantrum

[8.0/10] I liked both halves of this episode, but thought they were a weird fit for one another through much of its runtime. Virgil struggling with how to cope with the loss of his mother on the anniversary of his death is one of the series’s strongest storylines yet, but it’s an odd mesh with him facing a thinly-veiled version of The Hulk. Likewise, a young man pushed to succeed by his parents whose frustrations turn him into a rage monster is a nice “high school as horror” type conceit, but seems like a strange combination with a story about mourning.

And yet, “Tantrum” finds a really neat inflection point between the two of them. In an old home video, one that Virgil hesitates to watch, his mom responds to one of his own titular tantrums by just letting him cry it out and get all his crankiness out of his system, rather than fighting it. He uses that same approach with Thomas Kim (and his purple muscular equivalent), letting the guy work through his frustration over field trips, docked points on school essays, and people “goofing on him,” on his own instead of trying to fight him. It’s a nice way to illustrate the theme that Virgil’s mom is still with him, someone whose instincts and lessons are still helping her son, and connect the two parts of the episode.

Granted, there’s some not great cultural stereotypes on the Thomas Kim side of the episode. It traffics in “Asian parents pushing their kids to succeed with unreasonable standards” pigeonholing which, however sympathetic the episode is to Thomas, plays as more than a little insensitive.

Still, seeing Static vs. an ersatz Hulk is entertaining enough, and the show finds escalating ways to make their stand off hit closer to home. The amusement park backdrop gives the two metahumans a few extra toys to play with, and even though the minor mystery element is a little silly (Gee, I wonder if the villain is actually the just-introduced other student whom he resembles!), it works well enough.

But the real highlight here is Virgil processing his mother’s death. While the “talking to a grave” conceit is a cliché, the story of Virgil not wanting to think about his mom, even in the lead-up to her memorial, comes from a very real place. His angst toward his sister, the understanding from his dad, and his eventual speech about realizing that her spirit lives on make for a series of great human moments from him. It’s a lot for any young man to lose his mother, and the episode makes the most of that to deepen Virgil and tell a great story about him coming to terms with that loss in a positive way.

Overall, this episode has a couple of strange bedfellows, but makes sense of them in the end and does its deepest dive into the show’s main character yet.