Review: Deathstroke – Knights & Dragons Part 1

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Slade Wilson is a loving husband and father to his wife Addie (who is also his former superior officer who trained him in his previous military life) and his son Joe. However, what they don’t know is that Slade has taken on a secret life as a paid assassin called Deathstroke, but disguises it as simply being a “businessman”. He does his work better than most due to an experimental serum he was given in the army which allows him to heal his injuries very quickly. One day, his work follows him home, as an adversary known as The Jackal breaks into his home, attacks Addie, and kidnaps Joe in order to get Slade to join his organization, HIVE. With the exposure of his secret life, he’s lost Addie’s trust, but he rushes to save Joe. Sadly, while he’s able to keep the boy from being killed, he’s unable to stop the kidnappers from slicing Joe’s vocal cords, rendering him mute.

Ten years later, Addie has kept Slade out of her and Joe’s lives, though this changes when another force, the new forces of HIVE led by an enigmatic “HIVE Queen” kidnap an older Joe AGAIN, though this time because his genetics through Slade have somehow managed to give him special abilities as well, though his are overloading him. Addie decides to begrudgingly ask for Slade’s help, but Slade soon finds that the Queen is actually his illegitimate daughter Rose who is actually working WITH Joe, now going by Jericho, to kill their father. Caught off guard, Slade is unable to stop them from gunning him down, sinking into the ocean below.

OUR TAKE

Okay, so…end of series? It does seem pretty unlikely that this show would kill off the title character after just one episode, especially with his established healing factor, but it does seem odd that they’d end it with him being seemingly killed. On a related note, it’s been said this series will be twelve episodes long, though the runtime of this “episode” seems similar in length to the compilations of 5-6 minute episodes of OTHER DC animated series on this streaming service. So maybe this is just the first half, not a single episode on its own? I guess we’ll find out depending on whenever the second half comes out, which I imagine won’t be this time next week.

It’s also interesting that DC’s next animated series in this format seems to NOT be even remotely related to the Arrowverse as Vixen, The Ray, and Constantine have been, especially with the big “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover event that’s currently going on over there. It’s been quite some time since we checked in with that version of Slade and when I first heard of this show’s announcement, I figured that was where that was going. But turns out, no, this is some totally new version of Slade voiced by Michael Chiklis with slightly tweaked version of his comic backstory, which is slightly more tweaked than the version of him from DC Universe’s Titans, but NOT as tweaked as the one from Arrow. The main difference being that Rose, usually his youngest child, is made his oldest through an affair, with Jericho being his youngest (as well as having a ton of powers he did not have originally). Poor Grant (his actual oldest) gets ignored again.

But regardless of the background and adaptation comparisons, how is the show on its own? Well, it actually seems to be structured pretty well as a single chunk than it would as six individual pieces, though the ten year time skip is a little jarring. It does well in telling a story completely about Deathstroke without needing to throw in vague connections to his history with the Teen Titans, which is good when you’re selling a show strictly focusing on that character because it makes it accessible to new viewers. And all the actors do a more than competent job. So, this seems to be a solid series so far, which is probably all I can ask for at this point in time. We’ll see if they stick the landing with the second half whenever that comes out.