Webseries: Vixen S:01 E:06 & Season:01

Episode Title: Episode 6
Original Airdate: 9-29-15

As I suspected (though I could have easily just Googled it to find out as well), this was the last episode of this webseries to wrap things up before the CW shows proper start their new fall season next week, this finally rounds out Mari’s origin story to end with her being a fully fledged Vixen, in costume, in Detroit. As this is a very short webseries, I’ll also share my thoughts on the “season” as a whole right after I take a look at the episode. And as usual, since CW Seed doesn’t have any embedding feature, you will have to click the link to watch it on their site, or you can watch it if you have the CW Seed app.

Click here to watch Vixen episode 6

Even though Mari’s sister Kuasa had taken the totem away from her in the last episode, it turns out that Mari really is the chosen one of the tribe. Anansi speaks to her through the plains animals who help her out by basically just causing a distraction. Even without the totem’s powers, Mari is able to kick Kuasa’s ass, have the spider bite her, and take the totem back in the span of about fifteen seconds. The fight was fun, but like many things where this webseries was concerned, it was over very quickly. She also gets to spend a moment with her adoptive father that helps to calm things down after the fight and helps give her a bit of a human moment after all of this fighting and superhero business. She essentially spells out that she is going to be a fashion designer by day, and a crimefighter at night, and being a crimefighter helps give her the purpose that she felt like she has been lacking for all these years. And the season ends with a fun moment between Mari talking with Flash and Arrow that helps the show end on a comedic beat as Flash lets slip Cisco’s name for her which she does adopt as her own.

This series as a whole boils down to essentially a single 25 minute episode, give or take a few minutes and it pretty much does feel like a single episode of a half-hour cartoon pilot with a few extra commercial breaks. Since I have been watching it with week-long commercial breaks it’s felt rather incomplete, which I suppose is how webseries can work, but I’m a bit more used to the other type of webseries that still tells a complete story in a shorter amount of time. This is intended much more to be seen as a complete piece rather than piecemeal. I haven’t gone back and watched the series as a single episode with the brief breaks of the credits and switching to the next episode, but I can imagine that it would flow together much better.

Mari as a character works well, I’ve mentioned before that there are very few heroes of color, very few female heroes, and female heroes of color are almost nonexistent. So it’s always good to see more representation, even if it is in a limited space rather than a full fledged series. There aren’t any ratings numbers for this webseries so there’s no real way to know how popular this show is until CW announces whether or not she will be continuing in another webseries or appearing in live action on Flash or Arrow at some point later on in this season. Hopefully she does because she is a pretty decent character and would be a helpful addition to the Flarrow family even though I’m not entirely sure that her totem abilities would work visually in the same way that they are used in the webseries. All in all, it reminds me of some of the DC Showcase short films that they used to include with some of the DC Animated movies a couple years back where they would give some of the lesser heroes some time in the sun like the Specter, Jonah Hex, and Shazam.