[7.0/10] Phew, this is a tough one to judge. It’s fun to see Jack reunite with the Scotsman as friends rather than rivals. It’s also neat to spend a brief stretch in the Scotsman’s homeland with his scruffy buddies there to joust and josh with Jack. Plus, the setup of the Scotsman needing Jack to help rescue his wife, especially when his local customs says he can only enlist the assistance of the stranger is a good one.
But maaaaaan do I have, uh, feelings about how the Scotswoman is portrayed. On the one hand, I enjoy her seemingly endless stream of insults. It was one of those elements that made Jack’s first encounter with the Scotsman so enjoyable, and one that naturally had to fall away a bit now that Jack and the Scotsman are on the same page. The steady line of jabs and digs from her mouth got a solid series of chuckles out of me.
Still, she is one big walking stereotype. The zaftig woman who’s constantly berating her husband and turns into a rage when someone calls her fat is such a hacky cliché. The show rescues it a little bit when the Scotsman and his wife turn lovey dovey in a way that’s unexpectedly quite sweet, and Scotsman’s beaming descriptions of his wife are both cute and funny. But that just makes it feel all the more crass when the joke is that after all of those glowing words about his spouse, she turns out to be a rotund, rotten-toothed behemoth. It feels pretty backwards.
At the same time, the action here is below the show’s usual standard. There’s still some neat design work on the two castles in the episode, and the garbled druid, but this week’s slicing and dicing of the Aku-bots felt pretty perfunctory.
Overall, this is probably my least favorite episode so far, one that has a few good ideas going for it, but loses them in a mixed bag (at best) of a character who turns out to be a punchline, and visuals that aren’t up to the quality the show usually has on offer.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2020-02-06T05:10:46Z
[7.0/10] Phew, this is a tough one to judge. It’s fun to see Jack reunite with the Scotsman as friends rather than rivals. It’s also neat to spend a brief stretch in the Scotsman’s homeland with his scruffy buddies there to joust and josh with Jack. Plus, the setup of the Scotsman needing Jack to help rescue his wife, especially when his local customs says he can only enlist the assistance of the stranger is a good one.
But maaaaaan do I have, uh, feelings about how the Scotswoman is portrayed. On the one hand, I enjoy her seemingly endless stream of insults. It was one of those elements that made Jack’s first encounter with the Scotsman so enjoyable, and one that naturally had to fall away a bit now that Jack and the Scotsman are on the same page. The steady line of jabs and digs from her mouth got a solid series of chuckles out of me.
Still, she is one big walking stereotype. The zaftig woman who’s constantly berating her husband and turns into a rage when someone calls her fat is such a hacky cliché. The show rescues it a little bit when the Scotsman and his wife turn lovey dovey in a way that’s unexpectedly quite sweet, and Scotsman’s beaming descriptions of his wife are both cute and funny. But that just makes it feel all the more crass when the joke is that after all of those glowing words about his spouse, she turns out to be a rotund, rotten-toothed behemoth. It feels pretty backwards.
At the same time, the action here is below the show’s usual standard. There’s still some neat design work on the two castles in the episode, and the garbled druid, but this week’s slicing and dicing of the Aku-bots felt pretty perfunctory.
Overall, this is probably my least favorite episode so far, one that has a few good ideas going for it, but loses them in a mixed bag (at best) of a character who turns out to be a punchline, and visuals that aren’t up to the quality the show usually has on offer.