Vixen: Episode 5

This is a couple of days late, but never mind!

We’ve finally arrived at the real meat of the story – which happens to take place in the penultimate episode. As I said last week, I've no idea how they're all going to wrap this up in under five minutes.

We left Mari being held at gunpoint by two hired thugs and a mysterious woman. Interestingly enough, Mari is pretty blasé about giving up the necklace in exchange for some information – in fact, she almost seemed keen to get rid of it were it not for the fact it refuses to unfasten.

Mari makes a bolt for the window, and just as I'm on the verge of wondering why the men don't take a shot at her – one of them does! And hits her! There's a spurt of blood and everything!

She wakes up some time later with her wound bandaged, and the woman watching over her. Oh, and by the way, she's been brought all the way to Africa while she was unconscious. 

The woman introduces herself as Mari's sister Kuasa, who was only four years old when Zambesi was attacked by local warlords. Their father was killed, and their mother fled with the infant Mari and the totem that was long-ago given to the village by the god Anansi. Its protection was bestowed on them exchange for their worship, but Kuasa was the one chosen to wield it.

She's been searching for it ever since, and the fact that it has recently bonded itself to her long-lost sister is just a minor detail. To dispose of her, she extracts a spider from a jar and has it bite Mari, which makes her dash into the desert a futile endeavour. As Mari collapses to the ground, Kuasa appears to claim the totem.

And again, I'm left wondering how on earth they're going to draw this to a satisfactory conclusion with just one episode to go.

Miscellaneous Observations:

Though this episode gave us a lot of answers, it was also riddled with plot-holes. Why did Mari's mother leave Kuasa behind? Why didn't Mari utilize her flying powers to get away from Kuasa's thugs? Why couldn't she outrun them in Africa when she could easily evade the Flash in Starling City? Why did Kuasa bother patching up Mari's gunshot wound if she was going to kill her anyway? And why take her all the way to Africa? If it was for the sake of that spider, surely it would have been easier to smuggle it to America rather than transporting an unconscious woman to Africa.  

There seems to be a lot more explicit violence in Vixen than there is on Arrow; not only with Mari being bloodily shot, but with a flashback to her father being executed at point blank range. It was the sight of the blood that startled me, as Arrow tries to keep most of its violence stylized and its blood content low – and yet Mari getting bitten by the spider was staged so vaguely that I wasn't sure what was happening the first time around.

A genuinely funny moment when Mari cheerfully plays dumb about Kuasa's intentions and bolts toward the desert.

Kuasa was voiced by Anika Noni Rose, a.k.a. Princess Tiana! I would never have placed her, and I thought she did a great job, especially with this line: "There is responsibility to the dead. Especially to the dead." I've no idea what that means, but it sounded damn spooky.