This article contains a mild spoiler for "Twisted Metal" season 2.
Video game adaptations are all the rage in Hollywood. Long gone is the time when even the announcement of turning a video game into a film or TV show was considered instantly doomed by audiences. Nowadays, video game movies break box office records, while shows receive critical acclaim and earn awards. There are cinematic games like "The Last of Us" that just copy and paste the story onto the screen with minimal change, but also games with light
plots that require more thought put into translating gameplay into a cohesive movie, like "Mortal Kombat" or "The Super Mario Bros. Movie."
In a way, video games are the new comic books, and just like comic book movies are full of references for hardcore fans to delight themselves with, so do video game adaptations have plenty of references to their source material. These can be cameos from the game's original voice actors, to homages to specific aspects of the gameplay, and more.
Then there's "Twisted Metal," the Peacock show developed by Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, and Michael Jonathan Smith, starring Anthony Mackie, which adapts the video game franchise of the same name created by David Jaffe and Scott Campbell. The games revolve around demolition derbies where players drive vehicles and try to murder each other with a variety of weapons in a tournament made up of weird little guys, eccentric killers, and racers that navigate the wasteland. The show, however, takes a different approach, with the first season being essentially a fetch quest, focusing more on developing original characters and its post-apocalyptic world. Only now, in season 2, the show is building up to the titular Twisted Metal tournament.
When it comes to Easter eggs, "Twisted Metal" takes them to a very meta — and confusing — level.
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You Want Some Twisted Metal In Your Twisted Metal?
"Twisted Metal" has plenty of callbacks to the video game series of the same name, from appearances by some of the best-known cars to beloved characters like Sweet Tooth being a big part of the first two seasons. Now, season 2 is doubling down on this, introducing characters like Mr. Grimm and Axel, as well as Dollface.
In the season 2 premiere, which finally looks and feels like the original game, we follow Mackie's John Doe as he lives inside the walls of New San Francisco, a walled city where life remains as it was before the apocalypse. Inside, we get a brief shot of a case for the 1996 "Twisted Metal 2" game. Now, this is most likely a fun reference for eagle-eyed fans, but it is also so meta as to break the world of "Twisted Metal." That's because, while John is an original character, the "Twisted Metal 2" game specifically features the character of Axel on the cover, and the premiere for season 2 introduces Axel (played by Michael James Shaw), as well as Twisted (Jamie Neumann) from season 1.
This means Axel already exists in the video game years before someone with that name and specific characteristics — his mechanical arms and weird vehicle contraption. Let's unpack this. Are we led to believe people actually played a video game named "Twisted Metal" in-universe decades before the world ended? Was the game as popular in the show's universe as in ours? If so, then the likely conclusion is that the Axel, Twisted, and even Sweet Tooth from the show were simply huge nerds before the world ended and decided to make a video game character their entire personality. Because the apocalypse happened around 20 years before the show's start, every adult we meet was a teenager back then, so they could definitely have been obsessed with "Twisted Metal" and just saw an opportunity to pull the most dedicated cosplay ever.
"Twisted Metal" is now available to stream on Peacock.
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Read the original article on SlashFilm.
