I grew up loving Johnny Quest’s zany pulp adventures. Skull Island feels like an updated version. Unfortunately, two episodes in it feels like the writers only updated some of the original concept and didn’t go far enough. It gets enough right that I’m still hoping that’ll change, but…

Look, here’s the starting premise. Two fathers and their two sons, exploring the world in search of cryptids, begin the story at sea on a research vessel in the South Pacific. They’re looking for some kind of sea monster. When one of the sons pulls a mysterious shipwrecked girl out of the ocean, adventure ensues!

As a logline, this is a perfect Johnny Quest homage.

It’s quick. It’s pulpy. It references classic weird science pulp adventure. It checks off the genre boxes and wastes no time before rushing headlong into action. It looks pretty! And… it flubs writing solid female characters. So far.

I feel like whoever wrote this took a series of tropes off the shelf and crammed them into a female character without doing anything to individuate those tropes or to make the character more than those tropes. The show updated a lot about the original Johnny Quest—which is good—but while the writers had lots of ideas elsewhere, they ran out of oomph after adding women. It almost feels like they said, “alright, female character: check. What’s next?” and didn’t bother to make those women feel real, human, or believable.

I want to like Skull Island.

No.

I want Skull Island to merit me liking it.

I’m going to keep watching the show, because it’s YA/MG adventure fiction and I want to know what people are making in that genre. But as of the finish of episode two I have serious reservations. Those reservations make it hard to enjoy the rest of the show.

I enjoy the two fathers. I like seeing the potential subtext between the two sons, with one possibly gay son who maybe has the unspoken hots for the other son. If this isn’t canon, I’ll be disappointed—it’s currently the interesting dynamic for the two sons. Of course, if it is canon, the gay son will probably be disappointed too: the other son apparently likes “any girl, every girl” and might at most be bi.

I like the setting the show has created, and I’m not going to spoil it beyond telling you that it delivers on its pulp adventure promises.

But the fact that our mysterious shipwreck survivor (Annie) is shaping into a manic pixie fight girl, with approximately zero depth conveyed so far, is disheartening. I understand the writers’ desire to create mystery and withhold information from the audience, but they’ve done that so far by shortchanging her as a character. It hurts to watch.

I’ll keep watching, as I said, but I’m not expecting much. The writers have had opportunities to give Annie a greater sense of depth. They could have chosen slightly different ways to present the tropes they used for her. But they haven’t, and they didn’t. So while my hope is that the first two episodes give way to more development for the erstwhile manic pixie fight girl, I’m not going to hold my breath.