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I WONDER WHO THE JEDI COULD BE...?
Wow. Rosaria Dawson played a decent Ahsoka Tano. I really miss Ashley Eckstein's voice work, but this older Ahsoka did well nonetheless.
Also, Dave Filoni! Of course, he directed this. Ahsoka's from one of the biggest characters from the critically acclaimed animated TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which he heavily worked on that elevated his name to the high regard it holds today.
I also liked that new planet, Corvus. It was just so dead, with all that dirt, green haze and leafless trees; mysterious and spooky. Also, the town that Mando enters is so menacing. The people who don't want to talk to him and the masked guards, with voice modulators reminiscent of the Death Troopers, made for such an ominous atmosphere.
I like how the only guy Mando talked to was the old Magistrate. They didn't need to tell us he was; they just showed him helping the townsfolk, instructing them and gets a set of robes put on him at the end. He also saved my boy's (Mando) life.
BABY YODA NAME DROP!!!
"Grogu"? that's Baby Yoda/the Child's name?! It's cute; I like it. I don't know if his name will reach most people, though. My friends might not believe me. I also liked his backstory and what Ahsoka decided to do with him. I mean it's obvious, given the way we've seen him around Mando, so her decision makes sense.
However, I'm confused as to why they call Ahsoka a Jedi. Didn't she leave the order? Didn't she get those white lightsabers to show she's not a Jedi (or Sith)? I thought she was in this grey area, that made her free from the Jedi and their dark past and burdens? The Star Wars wiki legit says she's a force-sensitive outcast (https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Force-Sensitive_Outcast#Ahsoka_Tano)
GRAND ADMIRAL THRAWN NAME-DROP. LET'S GO!!!
In the end, it was a solid (non-filler) episode. We got more worldbuilding, homages to established Star Wars material, and a fun, action-adventure set on a desolate, The Lorax kind of planet.
TECHNICAL SCORE: 7/10
ENJOYMENT SCORE: 8/10
[9.5/10] It will be hard to top “Into the Bunker” when it comes to momentousness. Our heroes journey into the underground hideout of the infamous author of the three journals. Dipper finally comes clean about his feelings to Wendy. And if that weren’t enough, Gravity Falls delivers and homage to The Thing featuring none other than Mark Hamill. We’re hitting epicness overload here.
But I think my favorite part of this one is simply how well it handles the long simmering Dipper/Wendy situation. There is something agonizingly relatable about being a kid and having a crush on someone who is a few years older, definitely unobtainable, and deep down in your heart, you know it wouldn’t work, but you still can’t help but like. Dipper’s nervousness between trying to express his feelings, realizing it’s a bad idea, and being spurred on by Mabel to just out with it so he’ll feel better makes you feel for the poor kid.
Not for nothing, this is a great Wendy episode and showcase for why Dipper would nurse his schoolboy crush on her beyond her fun slacker attitude. There’s a nice casual rapport with them, from laughing at cheesy B-movies together to being on the same page about going on neat adventures. More than that, though, Wendy is a badass. Between her using her lumberjack competition skills to open the tree hideout, to spelunking her way through the bunker, to getting into raucous combat with a shape-shifting monster, Wendy proves that despite her lackadaisical bona fides, she’s a capable, kickass champ to have in your corner when you’re in a tight spot.
It’s that fight with a shape-shifter that prompts Dipper to spill his guts. Seeing Wendy hurt or worse brings out a vulnerability in Dipper. He’s distraught and blames himself and laments that it happened before he had the chance to tell that he’s in love with her. Once again, you feel for the poor little guy, so anxious about sharing his feelings up to this point, trying his best to just move on and doing everything in his power not to come clean about his feelings, only to feel crestfallen over the fact that he might lose her entirely having never fully expressed how much he cares.
What a brilliant move it is to have the “grievously injured” Wendy turn out to be the shapeshifter in disguise, with the real Wendy right behind to hear the whole thing. While in other hands, the fake out could feel cheap, here it plays nicely into the established existence of the shape-shifter and the standard “Which one should I shoot?” trope. The move allows Gravity Falls to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to Dipper’s crush and his nigh-pathological inability to speak honestly about it.
Part of what makes it seem like fair play, though, is that Wendy and Dipper have an incredibly mature conversation about it afterwards. I love the reveal of Wendy saying that of course she knew, because she’d have to be blind not to. But she very gently explains that she’s way too old for him, and Dipper knows and acknowledges it. Her reassurance that he can handle any awkwardness, given how much weird stuff he’s already braved, is very wholesome. And I love the resolution that, even though their ages are too far apart to make an actual romance anything but creepy, she genuinely values Dipper’s friendship, thinks the summer was boring until he showed up, and would be legitimately upset to lose their companionship. It’s a great place to land, one that acknowledges why this crush is impossible, but vindicates that there is a wonderful connection between them, just not the one the twelve-year-old thought about in that way. I really admire the way Gravity Falls pays this off in a sensitive and uplifting way, rather than dragging it out for another season or otherwise turning it into wish fulfillment.
And by gum, that’s only half the episode! I cannot tell you how exciting it is to parse through all the major teases we get in this installment. The gang finding The Author’s bunker, replete with the same mysterious symbols and similar machinery to what Stan’s using is such a thrill, that makes it seem like the show’s truly advancing its mystery arc. Cryptic clues that The Author was planning for some kind of apocalypse, that they may have created the various creatures who lurk in Gravity Falls, and that, given the shape-shifter’s comments about them having six-fingers and the type of rubber gloves Stan used, may also have something to do with the suspiciously similar bunker under the Mystery Shack, get the mental gears turning.
I love Gravity Falls’ standalone episodes, but it’s also nice to feel like we’re making progress toward unraveling the big mysteries the show has been teasing from the start.
Plus hey, Mark freakin’ Hamill! He is, as always, great playing villains in animation, giving the shape-shifter a truly malevolent premise. And full credit to the design and animation team. Beyond showing that the shape-shifter has encountered the various supernatural beings of the town (include the “The Hide Behind” from the Dipper’s Guide shorts), they also come up with some fantastic Cronenberg-esque character designs for the shape-shfiters various other forms.
The shape-shifter material itself is pretty great. I love the way the show baits and switches us, with Wendy and Dipper seemingly running into The Author, with an appropriately steampunk-ish, eccentric explorer look that communicates the vibe of someone with all the answers to this strange place. But the moment Wendy smartly clocks the exact same man on a can of beans, and the guy blinks his eyes sideways, you know some freaky stuff is on.
The ensuing “Who’s the real _____” shtick is fun and spooky. As mentioned, it pays off well with the Wendy/Dipper situation, but even before then, the show does a good job of creating a paranoid atmosphere. Not for nothing, while far less dramatic, Mabel and Soos make for a great comedic pairing, (Soos’ failed attempt to do a rhyme had me in stitches) and Soos’ efforts to ensure he remained the right shape were great.
On the whole, this episode is a real homerun. It works on its own as a scary tale of a shapeshifter in a mysterious location tricking and terrorizing our heroes. It works as part of the show’s larger mystery arc, dropping some big clues and our way to a few more tantalizing questions. And it delivers the best ending imaginable to the long-running subplot of Dipper’s crush on Wendy, resolving things with sensitivity, grace, and heart. What a treat this show is, to be so good at story, character, horror, and humor all at once.
[9.2/10] Oh man, this is one of the show’s very first tour de force pop culture homages, and it’s still one of the best. Like the best Community parodies, it gets the details right. The way it captures the Goodfellas-esque montages of folks working the system, and voiceover to set out the hierarchy is pitch perfect. It mirrors the rise and fall of those wiseguys in a safely funny Greendale setting, while being self-referential enough about it to wink without winking too hard.
But it’s also just a great Greendale story. That’s the secret to these Community spoofs. Sometimes they’re just fun, but at their best, they used the sturdy structure from some other work to slip in strong emotional or character material within that framework. In this one, you have Jeff dealing with his own ego and control issues that are exposed when Abed takes charge. And for Abed, you have someone who has trouble connecting and relating to people feeling fully functional for once when the chicken game let’s him reduce human interactions to a series of inputs and outputs he can understand.
Their shared moment at the end is laugh-worthy but also potent. Jeff realizing he has the ability to connect with others, but isn’t always great at serving their needs rather than its own, and having the reciprocal semi-epiphany from Abed that he wants to help his friends but isn’t good at forging those bonds really works to deepen both of them and show bits of growth. Sure, its steeped in not just mafia movie tropes but all sorts of other pop cultural call-outs, but that’s Abed, and it works.
Plus, it’s just a damn funny episode. This is the origin of both “Streets Ahead” and “Annie’s Boobs.” The various things that sate the desire of the rest of the group, from Pierce’s entourage to Annie’s backpack to Troy’s monkey to Britta’s hair care to Shirley’s chicken-based flirting with a hunky classmate are each hilarious, and only topped when Abed messes with each of them to teach the rest of his crew a lesson. And the whole thing being part of a frame story where Abed is recounting this to the Dean while being questioned about missing hairnets puts an awesome button on the ep.
Overall, this is one of the first hints at Community becoming the intertextual but character-committed show that would allow it to break the trappings of its sitcom origins and really flourish, and it’s a treat to go back and watch that happening.
Gus Illusion: "Did we do bad?"
[Luz gasps.]
Everyone: "Whoa!"
Luz: [Pants] "Gus, you ran away so fast, but I didn't want to interrupt, so..."
[Luz inhales and puts her hand on Gus' shoulder.]
Luz: "I think you should go."Gus: "All right, I'm in. Where do we find these Galderstones?"
Amity: "If you give me back my hairband, I'll read you whatever book you want tomorrow."
Kid: "I can grow an entire forest and make my own butterfly sanctuary."
Amity: "Huh, the human world sounds... odd."
Luz: "Maybe it would be less odd if I showed you around someday."
[Amity sits up.]
Luz: "But, uh, let's turn back. I don't wanna push you."
[Quickly, Amity grabs Luz's arm and pulls her along.]
Amity: "We're getting that diary."
Bria: "Angmar!"
Angmar: "Hmm?"
Angmar: [Playfully] "I said you're on lookout duty. And if I catch you playing with any more bugs, I'll make you eat them! Okay? I believe in you!"
Gus: "No, this isn't right! I won't let you steal these."
Gus respecting the dead. I approve :)
I like the worldbuilding of past Illusionists and human citizens in Bonesborough. It makes the world feel more lived in
Malphas: [Deep voice] "Amity."
[Cut to daytime outside.]
Malphas: [Normal voice.] "I'm just, like, super disappointed in you. Like, I can't even process these feelings right now."
Stranger: "Oh-ho! I am the keeper of the Looking Glass Graveyard."
Amity: "Everything's changed since you came here. Being around you, it... makes me do stupid things and I wish it didn't."
[Luz & Amity tear up.]
Luz: "It's okay, I, uh—"
[Luz sniffles.]
Luz: "I-I do stupid things around you too, Amity."
Bria: "Why isn't my magic working?"
Amity: "So, how's it look?"
Edric: "It looks like you're about to get in big trouble with Mum."
[Emira slaps Edric.]
Edric: "Ow."
Emira: "I think it looks great. But, yeah, maybe don't tell her I helped."
Edric: "Bold move, sister."
Amity: "Uh, okay. Good to see you. Farewell forever."
8/10
Lilith: [Giggling] "Watching the ink dry is the best part."
Hooty: "Avenge me!"
[Hooty pretend dies.]
Hooty: "Bleh!"
Hooty: "Porta-Hooty, reporting for Hooty!"
Luz: "Ooh! A door fit for a tyrant!"
King: "Hehe, that's me!"
Eda: "Get out of here. I'll hold it back and meet you outside."
King: "Ah, no! Keep that thing away from me!"
King: "Eda was right, wasn't she? I was never king of anything. I'm nobody."
Luz: "You are somebody, and I love that somebody very much."
Eda: "You sure they'll be all right?"
Luz: "Hooty knows what to do."
[Hooty spitting maniacally.]
Eda: "You sure they'll be all right?"
King: "But I was too small to do anything."
King: "Someone called me their son. Luz, I think it was my dad."
8/10
[8.4/10] We live in the finite. Everyone reading this has a limited amount of time on this plane of existence. Maybe you believe there’s an eternal paradise waiting on the other end. Maybe you believe in reincarnation. Maybe you believe that we’re simply waves whose essence is returned to the fabric of the universe. Whatever you believe, almost all of us can agree that whatever we have here, our fragile world and fragile bodies, are not built to last.
That is both terrifying and maddening: terrifying because, like Janet, none of us truly knows what’s on the other side, and maddening because there is so much to do and see and experience even in this finite world, and given how few bearimies we have on this mortal coil, most of us will only have the chance to sample a tiny fraction of it.
So The Good Place gives us a fantasy. It’s not a traditional one, of endless bliss or perpetual pleasure or unbridled success. Instead, it imagines an afterlife where there’s time enough to become unquestionably fulfilled, to accomplish all that we could ever want, to step into the bounds of the next life or the next phase of existence or even oblivion at peace. The finale to Michael Schur’s last show, Parks and Recreation, felt like a dose of wish fulfillment, but with this ending, The Good Place blows it out of the water.
Each of our heroes receives the ultimate send-off. By definition, nearly all of them have found ultimate satisfaction, a sense of peacefulness in their existence that makes them okay to leave it, having connected with their loved ones, improved themselves, and accomplished all that they wanted to. If “One Last Ride” seemed to give the denizens of Pawnee everything they’d ever wanted, “Whenever You’re Ready” makes that approach to a series finale nigh-literal for the residents of The Good Place.
And yet, there’s a sense of melancholy to it all, if only because every person who emerges from paradise at peace and ready to leave, has to say goodbye to people who love them. Most folks take it in stride, with little more than an “oh dip” or an “aw shoot”, but there’s still something sad about people who leave loved ones behind, and whom the audience has come to know and love, bidding what is, for all intents and purposes, a final farewell.
But The Good Place finds ways to make that transcendent joy for each of our heroes feel real. Jason...completes a perfect game of Madden (controlling Blake Bortles, no less). He gets loving send-offs from his father and best friend. He enjoys one last routine with his dance crew. He inadvertently lives the life of a monk while trying to find the necklace he made for Janet. It is the combination of the idiotic, the sweet, and the unexpectedly profound, which has characterized Jason.
Tahani learns every skill she dreamed of mastering (including learning wood-working from Ron Swanson and/or Nick Offerman!). She connects with her sister and develops a loving relationship with her parents. And when it’s time to go, she realizes she has more worlds left to conquer and becomes an architect, a fitting destination for someone who was always so good at designing and creating events for the people she cares about. Hers is one of the few stories that continues, and it fits her.
Chidi doesn't have the same sort of list of boxes checked that leads him to the realization that he has nothing more to do. Sure, he’s read all of the difficult books out there and seemingly refined the new afterlife system (with help from the council) to where it’s running smoothly, almost on automatic. But his realization is more from a state of being happy with where everything is, with what he’s experienced.
He has dinner with his best friend and Eleanor’s best friends and has so many times. He’s spent endless blissful days with the love of his (after)life staring at the sunset. His mom kissed Eleanor and left lipstick on her cheek, which Eleanor’s mom wiped off. I love that. I love that it’s something more ineffable for Chidi, a sense of the world in balance from all the bonds he’s forged rather than a list of things he’s done. And I love that he felt that readiness to move on for a long time, but didn’t for Eleanor’s sake.
Look, we’re at the end of the series, and I’m still not 100% on board with Eleanor/Chidi, which is a flaw. But I want to like it. I like the idea of it. And I especially like the idea of someone being at peace, but sacrificing the need to take the next step for the sake of someone they love. The saddest part of this episode is Eleanor doing everything she can to show Chidi that there’s more to do, only to accept that the moral rule in this situation says that her equal and opposite love means letting him go. Chidi’s departure is hard, but his gifts to Eleanor are warm, and almost justify this half-formed love story that’s driven so much of the show.
Unfortunately, no matter how much peace he finds, Michael cannot walk through the door that leads to whatever comes next. So instead, he gets the thing he always wanted -- to become human, or as Eleanor puts it, a real boy. Ted Danson plays the giddiness of this to the hilt, his excitement at doing simple human things, the symbolism of him learning to play a guitar on earth, on taking pleasure in all the mundane annoyances and simple fun and things we meat-sacks take for granted. Each day of humanity is a new discovery for Michael, and there’s something invigorating about that, something heightened by his own delight at not knowing what happens next in the most human of ways.
The one character who gets the least indication of a next step is Janet. We learn that she is Dr. Manhattan, experiencing all of time at once. We see her accept Jason’s passing, hug our departing protagonists, and take steps to make herself just a touch more human to make her time with Jason a little more right. But hers is a story of persistence, of continued growth, in a way that we don’t really have for anyone else.
Along the way, the show checks in with scads of minor characters to wrap things up. We see the other test subjects having made it into The Good Place (or still being tested). We see Doug Forcett deciding to party hard now that he’s in Heaven. We see Shawn secretly enjoy the new status quo, and Vicky go deep into her new role, and The Judge...get into podcasts! As much as this show tries to get the big things right for all of its major characters, it also takes time to wrap up the little things and try not to leave any loose threads from four seasons of drop-ins across the various planes of existence.
That just leaves Eleanor. She takes the longest of any of the soul squad to be ready. She tries, becoming okay with Chidi’s absence. She overcomes her fear of being alone. But most importantly, she does what she’s come to do best -- help people better herself. There’s self-recognition in the way her final great act, the thing that makes her okay with leaving this plane and entering another, is seeing herself in Mindy St. Clair and trying to save her. The story of The Good Place is one of both self-improvement and the drive to help others do the same. Saving Mindy, caring about her, allows Eleanor to do both in one fell swoop.
So she too walks through the door, beautifully rendered as the bend between two trees in a bucolic setting. Her essence scatters through the universe, with one little brilliant speck of her wave, crashing back into Michael’s hands, reminding him of his dear friend, and inspiring him to pass on that love and sincerity back into the world. It is, as trite as it sounds, both an end and a beginning, something circular that returns the good deeds our protagonists have done, the good people they have become, into some type of cycle that helps make the rest of this place a little better.
Moments end. Lives end. T.V. shows end. The Good Place has its cake and eats it too, returning to and twisting key moments like Michael welcoming Eleanor to the afterlife, while cutting an irrevocable path from here through the crash of the wave. It embraces the way that the finite gives our existence a certain type of meaning, whether we have a million bearimies to experience the joys and wonders of the universe, or less than a hundred years to see and do and feel whatever we can. And it sends Team Cockroach home happy, wherever and whatever their new “home” may be.
In that, The Good Place is a marvel, not just because it told a story of ever-changing afterlife shenanigans, not just because it tried to tackle the crux of moral philosophy through an off-the-wall network sitcom, but because it ended a successful show, after only four seasons, by sending each of them into another phase of existence and made it meaningful. There’s a million things to do with our limited time on this planet, but watching The Good Place was an uplifting, amusing, challenging, and above all worthwhile use of those dwindling minutes, even if we’ll never have as many as Eleanor or Chidi, Michael or Tahani, Janet or Jason, or any of the other souls lucky enough to be able to choose how much eternity is enough.
[8.6/10] So there was a post on Reddit the other day, asking when movies stopped showing people getting into elevators. OK, it’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it. Movies used to show their characters walking to the door, walking down the hallway, getting into the car, stopping for gas, rolling on, arriving at their house, opening the door, and boom, that’s how you got to the next scene. Then, Godard happened, and suddenly you just cut past that stuff. The character was just in one room and then in the next and with a brief establishing shot or transition or even nothing more than the switch of backdrop, we eventually trust the audience to understand that the character did all that boring stuff in the meantime.
It’s the grammar and literacy of film audiences, and it’s just baked into our brains at this point. You don’t need to be told that Michel Poiccard didn’t apparate from one part of Marseille to another. We understand it intuitively in a way that audiences in the 1960s didn’t because we were raised on it. Maybe not to the degree that BoJack Horseman was raised on film and television, but still we know.
There are expectations on how this whole T.V. show thing works. Even in the post-Sopranos, peak T.V. era where everyone wants to do something a little differently, there’s basic rules for what television is, and how its deployed. You may not have A-plots and B-plots. You may not have three cameras or rising and falling action. But there are rules, damnit, and you’d better abide by most of them or risk alienating your audience (or taking refuge in being confusing which means your show is daring and smart).
And one of those rules, not in so many words, is don’t just have your character stand around and talk to the audience for half an hour. Save it for your one man show. Leave it on the stage. But for television, you need dynamism, you need things happening, you need multiple characters and incident and developments or people will get bored. You can’t leave your main character naked out there, especially in an animated show, when you’re not even limited to sets or locations or visual variety in the way that live action does.
But BoJack Horseman does. It gives you 21 uninterrupted minutes of its title character giving his mother’s eulogy, recounting his family history, doing a gallows humor-filled stand up routine, and processing the death of a woman he hated but still wanted approval from in one giant stream of consciousness presentation.
There’s interludes of humor in the form of those black comedy bits and the occasional musical accompaniment gag. There’s a cold open that flashes back to a glimpse of BoJack’s emotionally screwed up and emotionally screwing up father, and of BoJack’s first taste of how he thinks he’s supposed to process his mother’s absence. But for the most part, it’s just BoJack, in a room, practically talking directly to the audience, for a whole episode.
It is bananas. You could perform it as a monologue for your high school. You could print the whole thing out and turn it into one of those giant movie posters where the words make up the imagery of the film in some kind of literary pointillism. You could listen to it in the car and not miss much beyond the occasional coffin-side glance or impressionistic moment. It’s not something that had to be on television, that could only work in this medium.
And somehow, that’s what makes it feel as bold as it does, because it chooses to set aside all those tools in the T.V. toolbox that help make us feel things: the sad music, the hauntingly lit scene, the expressive reactions of other characters. It eschews using those same sweetners that help keep up the audience’s interest during a half-hour sitcom: scene changes, change-of-pace sideplots, pure comic relief. And instead it just gives you a sad, messed up horse on stage, digesting his relationship with his parents in real time for what is an eternity on television, and hopes it can keep your attention, make you feel BoJack’s pain, and thread the complex emotional and familial needles the series has been toying with for four and half season, with words alone.
Television is, as BoJack and BoJack wink at, considered more of a writer’s medium than a visual medium like film. That’s changing, but it comes from the fact that television started out as something much cheaper, much faster, and much more disposable than its cinematic brethren. There wasn’t money or time to worry about fancy images or incredible sets or stunning cinematography. You needed to film twenty something episode in about as many weeks and do it on the budget provided, which meant the spark had to come from the talents of performers like Lucille Ball and the skills of writers who could make three cameras and two rooms feel like an entire world.
That’s the advantage of the T.G.I.F. shows that Horsin’ Around is spoofing. Yeah, it’s easy to make fun at the laugh track or the outrageous situations, or the cornball humor. But those shows emerged from a long and proud tradition, of folks who may have been doing what they had to for a paycheck, but who also made some magic with the meager tools at their disposal, who taught a generation of latchkey kids and people whose lives were far removed from the ease and security of a T.V. family what good could look and feel like it.
It’s a feeling that BoJack has been chasing for his entire life, and it’s led him here, to twenty-minute half-rant/half-confession delivered to his mother’s coffin. And in those twenty minutes, he chews on his confused feelings about his parents, the way that he doesn't so much mourn his mother but mourns the end of a possibility for love from her than he didn’t really believe in in the first place, the way that he tacitly admits his father taught him not to rely on her or anyone, the way he acknowledges the screwed up solace in admitting that you’re drowning together as a family, the way he cherishes those brief respites when you can stop and see your family being as graceful and happy as anyone else’s, the way we confuse and expect big gestures in lieu of the everyday work of being good, the way we look for hidden depths and transcendent meaning in coffee mugs and I.C.U. signs and sad horse shows that may or may not be able to sustain them.
He does it all from a podium, a lecturn, a stage, that lets all that raw emotion and complicated feeling spill out and just sit there with the audience. There’s no subplot to cut to, no wacky interlude from Todd to take the edge off, no break from a man making peace with the fact that he’ll never make peace over this. It’s just there, in one big dose, for BoJack and the audience to have to swallow at the same time, in a way that T.V. almost never makes you do.
T.V. is usually gentler, easier, more escapist than that, even at its most challenging and un-user friendly. If you watch the 1960s Star Trek series you can see the wild new locales the show journeys to every week, the occasionally repetitive but differently-flavored guest stars who would arrive on a daily basis to fight our heroes or help them or just create a problem for them to be solved. And if you watched long enough, you would recognize that every other episode seems to have Captain Kirk schmoozing, smooching, and seducing his way out of (or into) whatever the problem of the week is.
It’s easy to write of Kirk as a womanizer until you realize that T.V. was different in the 1960s. However more colorful and adventure-filled Star Trek was relative to the twenty-minute speech of “Free Churro”, it was also meant to be disposable, watched once and never seen again, before Netflix binges or home video or even syndication were reasonably expectations for people to string all these disparate stories together in one cohesive whole.
You realize, then, that Kirk wasn’t meant to be a lothario in a series of continuing adventures. He was meant to be a passionate man in a bunch of disconnected stories that happened to feature the same characters. He didn’t leap from bed to bed -- he was just fated by the laws of television to find The One over and over again, because like BoJack says, and the arrival of the Starship Enterprise in last year’s Star Trek Discovery vindicates, the show just goes on.
That’s what we do when people die. We try to make sense of their life, and our relationships with them. We try to take all those individual moments that they lived, all those big events, and the moments that we shared with them, and sew them together into some sort of narrative that makes sense to us.
But lives aren’t stories. They don’t always have happy endings, or arcs, or resolution. Sometimes they just end. Sometimes you only see part of who your parents were and are and try construct the rest into something you can extract meaning from. Sometimes you only feel the ways your absent friends shaped you, or scarred you, and try to understand how and why it happened now that they’re no longer around to be asked. Sometimes you take that rush of moments and try to build it up into something you can wrap your head around, a series of episodes with lovable characters and continuity and choices that are as comprehensible as they are kind.
And sometimes, someone important in your life is gone and everything’s worse now. There are rules for television, unwritten stricture for how we communicate with one another in the medium, expectations that the audience can walk in with that may be subverted but have to be respected.
But life and death have no rules other than that each of us must experience both, however brief or painful or confusing that may be. And there are no rules for grief, the process by which we try to come to terms with a parent’s death, the marks their presence and absence have left on our lives. So BoJack Horseman breaks the rules of television, stops telling us stories, and just gives us twenty minutes of raw, writerly confession and digestion, as interconnected and familiar and yet unknowable as the real life tangles of being alive and watching someone die, without the comforts the glowing screen normally provides its hero, or its audience.
[9.5/10] If there has been one thing consistent about Aang from the beginning, it’s that he follows his own path. From the minute we met him and he was more interested in riding penguins than showing spiritual reserve, it was clear that this was an Avatar who did not fit the mold. There was a uniqueness to him, a purity, that belied the chosen one bearing he had to carry.
That’s what stands out in Avatar: The Last Airbender’s wide-ranging, epic, moving finale. More than the moral turmoil that Aang had experienced in the last few episodes, more than the massive battle between the forces of good and the comet-fueled Fire Nation, there is a young man, making a choice because it’s what feels right to him, what feels true, and it is that trust in himself, that commitment to being who he is, that sees him through.
What is almost as impressive about the final two episodes of A:tLA, which essentially constitute one massive climax for the whole series, is how they manage to give almost every notable figure in the series something meaningful and dramatic to do. The episode truly earns the epic quality of its final frame, whether it’s focusing on the Order of the White Lotus retaking Ba Sing Se; Sokka, Toph, and Suki trying to sabotage the Fire Nation air fleet; Zuko and Katara confronting Azula; or Aang having his showdown with Ozai. The combination of all these great battle, all these profound and grand moments, make for an endlessly thrilling, dramatic finish for this great series.
The siege of Ba Sing Se mostly serves as a series of fist pumps for the viewer, getting to watch these trained masters face their foes with ease. Like the rest of the episode, it shows off the visual virtuosity as the series pulls out all the stops for its final battle. Jeong Jeong redirects fire with awesome force. Bumi launches tanks like play things with his earthbending. Pakku washes away enemies with a might tidal wave, and Piando slides on the frozen path over the wall, slashing away at Fire Nation soldiers all the while.
And Iroh? Iroh breathes in the power of Sozin’s comet. He creates a fireball that bowls through the walls of the famed city. He burns away the Fire Nation banner that hangs over the palace. It is a sign that for as much as A:tLA is a story of the last generation letting down the next one, there are still members of the old guard there to fight for what’s right and make a stand for a better world.
That world is threatened by the Fire Nation Air Fleet. In truth, the cell-shaded CGI war balloons look a little dodgy. Something about the animation is a little too stilted, to where when the cinematography is cool, the computer-generated elements stick out like sore thumbs and hurt the immersion of the show. Nevertheless, there is something truly frightening about Ozai and company at the head of those ships, imbued with power by the comet, launching these fireballs and streams of flaming destruction down on the land below. It is a terrifying image that brings to mind footage from Vietnam of fire raining from above. As much as the cel-shading looks a little off, the imagery of the elemental powers used in the episode is awesome, in the original sense of the term, provoking terror and astonishment.
Thankfully we have our two favorite badass normal folks and the resident (and as far as we know) only metalbender to help destroy the fleet. It is a nice outing for Sokka, Toph, and Suki, who find a way to not only contribute to the great war effort, but to have moments of risk and drama where you wonder if they will make it out alive or not, featuring big damn hero moments for each of them.
It’s hard to even know where to begin. There is Toph launching the three of them onto the nearest ship, turning into a metal-coated knight, and neutralizing the command crew. There is the hilarious interlude where Sokka manages to lure the rank-and-file crewmen into the bombing bay with the promise of cakes and creams, with the lowly henchman making extremely funny small talk before being dumped in the bay. It’s nice that even in these heightened moments, the show has not forgotten its sense of humor.
But that humor quickly gives way to big risks and bravery from the trio. I appreciate that Sokka’s ingenuity gets one last chance to shine, when he’s inspired by Aang’s “air slice” and repositions the ship he’s piloting to cut through the rest of the fleet, downing as much of it as possible. That move, naturally, leads their vessel to go down itself, and the big escape separates him and Suki.
Still, Sokka and Toph are undeterred, and after some close shaves, Toph uses her metal-bending abilities to change the fin on another airship to send it into its neighbors. Again, it’s nice to see the show, even in this late hour, finding creative uses for its characters’ talents, which give each of them a chance to have a hand in saving the day. That includes Sokka and Toph finding themselves pursued by Fire Nation soldiers, and Sokka getting to use both his boomerang and his “space sword” one last time. And when despite having taken out their pursuers, it still looks like all is lost for the pair, there is Suki, having taken command of another airship, there to save them from their tenuous, dangling position.
It’s a superb series of sequences, one that manages to combine some incredible in-the-air action and combat with character moments that feel true to the people we’ve come to know over the course of the series. Toph still has her smart remarks; Suki still manages to be in the right place at the right time, and Sokka, far from shrinking from the moment as he feared after the invasion, employs the creative solutions to difficult problems that have become his trademark. It is a great tribute and final triumph for all three characters.
But they are not the only trio of Avatar characters who find themselves embroiled in combat on the day Sozin’s comet arrives. But far from the larger-than-life, heroic tones of the battle in the skies, the fight between Azula, Zuko, and Katara has an air of tragedy about it.
What’s impressive is how, so near the end of the series, A:tLA can make the audience feel for Azula, even as she is at her most deranged and dangerous. It is late in the day for a character study, and yet we delve into Azula’s broken psyche in a way that the show has only toyed with before. What’s revealed is scary, but also sad, the pained cries and last gasps of a young woman who never really had a chance, who was brought up by a tyrant like Ozai, rather than a kindly old man like Iroh, and it left her damaged and alone.
It also left her paranoid. One of the defining leitmotifs of Avatar: The Last Airbender is the way that Aang, despite being the chosen one, laden with a solitary destiny, has found strength in his connections to his friends, who sustain him in times of doubt and difficulty. The finale underscores the importance of that by contrasting how Azula alienates everything approaching an ally she has, and it leaves her not only vulnerable, but deeply suspicious, until she loses her grip on her own sanity.
That’s dramatized in the way she banishes a humble servant girl for daring to give her a cherry with a pit in it, in how she banishes the Dai Lee for fear that they will turn on her the way that she got them to turn on Long Feng, in her equally harsh banishment of her twin, elderly caretakers (or at least one of them), when they express concern for her well-being. Though Mai and Tai-Lee have only small roles to play in this episode, the force of their presence is felt in the way that their betrayal of Azula leads her to believe that everyone is a backstabber or turncoat in waiting, and that, poetically enough, becomes the source of her downfall, to where when the threat truly emerges, she has no one there to help and protect her.
And yet, that is not the deepest depth of her loneliness. In a particularly difficult moment, one where Azula has taken out her anger on her own hair, she sees an image of her mother in the mirror. It is a bridge too far, the ultimate pain that Azula has refused to confront, replaced with ambition and intimidation so as not to have to face it. But that vision represents a knowing part of Azula, one that understands how she’s succumbed to fear and paranoia, one that cannot help but feel the hurt of the belief that her own mother thinks she’s a monster, and one that knows despite that, her mother still loves her, something that makes that pain all the more unbearable.
It also makes her less capable, less focused, less ready to face her brother in a duel. Zuko sees the way that his sister is slipping, and is willing to face her alone in the hopes of sparing Katara since he believes he can win. Their fight is a beautiful and tragic one. The combination of Azula’s blue flame and Zuko’s red one echoes the red and blue dragons that reinvigorated Zuko and Aang’s firebending abilities, and which represented the conflicting sides of Zuko’s own psyche. The opposing forces swirl and twist in the field of battle.
But unlike the rest of the episode, this is not played as an epic confrontation. It is played as a moment of great sorrow. While the whirl of the fire blasts rings out and the structures around the siblings singe and crackle, wailing violins play. Azula cackles and cries out, her eyes wide, her smile crooked, her demeanor unhinged. Zuko is not simply conquering an enemy who has tormented him since he was a little boy; he is doing what he must do against someone who has everything, and yet has lost everything, including her mind.
That just makes Azula all the more dangerous, but that ends up making Zuko all the more noble. While Azula is wild and unsteady, Zuko is prepared, baiting his sister into trying to blast him with lightning in the hopes that he may redirect it and end this. Instead, Azula charges up her power and, at the last second, aims it a bystander Katara rather than her brother. The move throws off Zuko, and in the nick of time, he dives in front of the blast and absorbs the electricity to spare Katara. It is the last sign of his transformation, an indication of his willingness to sacrifice himself for one of the people he once attacked himself. It is a selfless gesture, and a desperate one, that shows how Zuko’s transformation is truly complete.
It also leaves Katara fighting a completely mad Azula all by herself. I must admit, I was mildly irked when Zuko cast Katara aside and intended to fight Azula solo, sidelining one of the show’s major figures, but I should have known better than to think the series would avoid giving her one of those vital moments of glory and bravery.
With a dearth of water in the Fire Kingdom capital, and Azula too crazed and unpredictable to fight straight up, Katara must also be creative. Her water blasts turn to steam against Azula’s electric fury. But Katara is as clever as she is talented, and in yet another inventive way to defeat the enemy, she lures Azula over a sewer grate where, just before Azula is able to launch a deadly attack, Katara raises the water and freezes the both of them in place.
Then, in a canny move, she nabs a nearby chain, uses her waterbending abilities to move through the ice, and confines her attacker so that she is incapable of doing any more damage. It is an imaginative way to end the fight, one that show’s Katara’s resourcefulness and gives her a much-deserved win. She heals Zuko, who has truly and fully earned her respect and admiration. Azula has only earned a bitter end – her manic screams devolve into sobs, the loss of so much, the crumbling security of who she was and what she was fading away, until all that is left is a pitiable, broken young woman.
Azula has been a one-note villain at points in the series, one whose evil seemed inborn and whose nature left her without some of the complexity that other figures in the series have possessed. But here, she becomes a tragic figure, one who has committed terrible deeds and who tries to commit more, but whose being raised to obtain power at all costs leaves her unable to enjoy or sustain the only thing she’s ever wanted, and utterly alone.
Aang, on the other hand, is trapped between two things that he wants very badly: to defeat Ozai in order to end this war and save the world, and also to avoid taking a life. Their confrontation lives up to the billing and hype it’s received over the course of the series. The mountainous range provides the perfect backdrop for their fight, with plenty of earth and water for Aang to summon as he combats the series’s big bad at a time when Ozai is infused with the tremendous power of the comet.
The two dart and dash across those jutting rocks, a furious ballet accented with mortal, elemental beauty. Ozai declares that Aang is weak, that he cannot defeat Ozai, particularly at the height of his powers, and despite the realization that this is not the kind of show where the hero fails in the final act, you fear for Aang, for what will be required of him in order to end this. This is, after all, not how this fight was supposed to happen. Aang was supposed to have mastered all four elements, to be Ozai’s equal, not a talented but inexperienced young upstart trying to best the man who has conquered the world.
So in a difficult moment, he retreats into a ball of rock that provides temporary but needed protection from Ozai’s assault. It calls to mind the big ball of ice that Aang retreated to a century ago, a safe haven when the weight of the world became too much for him, and he hid rather than rose to face it. It cements the possibility that Aang is not ready for this, that he was never ready for this, and for all the good intentions he may have, he will pay the ultimate price for that.
Instead, when Ozai penetrates the rock and sends Aang flying, he reaps more than he bargained for. The former Fire Lord’s blast shoots Aang into a nearby rock, and as a sharp point digs into the scar from where Azula nearly killed him at the end of Season 2, it triggers the Avatar state.
Aang emerges from the pile of rubble that the gloating Ozai approaches. Aang glows and speaks with a voice of thunder and fury. Ozai comes at the demigod with all his power but Aang slaps away his flaming blast with the back of his hand. The Avatar assembles the four elements, bringing them to bear against his opponent. He surrounds himself in a bubble of air; he summons earth, fire, and water in rings that surround him. He comes at Ozai with his full force, sending him reeling through rock and rubble, confining him with the land itself. Aang raises this swirl into a knife’s edge, driving it down into his prone opponent.
And then, once more, at the last minute, he stops. The whirl of elements turned into a lethal weapon evaporates into a harmless puddle. Aang stands, unable to do it. Even in the moment where he seems poised to fulfill his destiny, Aang cannot bring himself to snuff out a life in this world. It is against everything he believes in, everything he stands for. Ozai declares that even with all the power in the world, Aang is still weak, that his inability to do what must be done to his enemy renders him lesser.
It is then that Aang finds another way. He confines Ozai using the earth itself once more, rests his hands on Ozai’s persons, and begins to bend the energy itself. What ensues is a spiritual struggle, one that matches the confluence of red and blue that signified the two sides at war within Zuko. For a moment, it appears as though even in this, Ozai will triumph, that the red glowing embers that represent the cruel spirit of this awful man will overtake our hero. It’s rendered in beautiful hues, a burst of light erupting across a dark landscape.
But Aang is not to be overcome. The outpouring of pure blue light emanates from his body. He will not be moved, not be altered, not be changed. Instead, it is Ozai who falters, his ability to bend fire, his tool for committing all of this evil, is taken away from him. The threat is over; the war is done, and Aang has fulfilled his destiny, on his own terms.
There is release, a chance to reflect and take stock and enjoy the glow of having completed this difficult journey. Aang and Zuko speak to one another as Roku and Sozin once did – as friends. (Incidentally, the also confirm that the entire series took place within just a year, which seems kind of crazy.) They embrace, the two young men who were once bitter enemies now trusted allies. Mai and Tai Lee are released and seem to have new destinies themselves. Zuko credits The Avatar to a throng of people at his coronation as Fire Lord, and he is not surrounded by Fire Nation loyalists, but a balanced group of supporters from all nations, there to help rebuild the world. “The Phoenix King” promised to burn down the old world and make a new one from the ashes, and in a way, he has made good on his promise, albeit not in the way he intended.
There is such hope and catharsis in these last scenes. Aang is at peace, his mission complete, freed from the burden that created so much hardship over the past year. Zuko too is in a place of calm, having restored his honor and ascended to the throne, though not as the vicious ruler his father envisioned, but as the kind and noble man his uncle did, one ready to lead his people to a new era. After one hundred years of war and bloodshed, there is the hope that this new generation, one that has tried to cast off the scars and mistakes of the past, can make a new way forward.
We also get one last scene of Team Avatar as we knew them – simply enjoying one another’s company. Iroh plays music, the rest of the gang chats, and Sokka creates an embellished, mostly inaccurate drawing that he defends in his trademark way. This is a family – an unlikely one, filled with individuals collected from across the world from different backgrounds and temperament, but one that, through their shared vision and efforts and care for another, really did manage to save the world.
Aang gazes upon this scene lovingly as he walks out to see the new day and drink in the peace of his surroundings. Katara follows him, and in a wordless scene, with the glow of golden clouds behind them, the two embrace, and then kiss.
It’s the one scene in this finale that I do not care for. As I’ve said before, despite Aang’s crush, the chemistry between him and Katara always felt more friendly, even motherly, than romantic, a childlike crush Aang would need to one day move past than the trappings of true romantic love. It sends the series out on something of a false note, albeit one that the show has teased many times over the course of its run.
Still, it represents the larger idea of the episode – that even with the weight of the world on his shoulders, Aang chooses his own path, one true to who he is and what he believes. I’ve expressed my skepticism about his unwillingness to take Ozai’s life, but however foolhardy it may seem at times, it is a reflection of the young man who never seemed like the Avatar he was supposed to be, who instead, forged his own way. That way was often off-beat, confused, and at times, well-meaning but foolish, but it was always a moral one, and more to the point, one that reflected the unique attitudes of the young man who carried them.
He chose to run rather than be sent on his Avatar training. He chose to fight rather than sever his connection to the people he cared about. And he chose to find another way rather than violate his personal, ethical code against killing another human being. In the end, he became his own sort of Avatar, one that did not simply accede to the will of destiny or expectation and tradition but instead made his own way without sacrificing the purity of his spirit or his convictions. There is something admirable, something true in that, and it makes for a satisfying finish to this incredible series.
Avatar: The Last Airbender truly deserves that superlative. Though the series took some time to find its voice, eventually it would flesh out an incredible world, filled with well-developed characters, a deep, generational lore, and a core cast who grew more multi-dimensional and complex as it progressed. The show deserves to take its place among the great stories of chosen ones, the stellar, epic tales that offer hardship and hope, struggle and success, tragedy and triumph. With an attention to detail and character that made those larger-than-life events meaningful, it captures an amazing journey. The series is the story of a collection of young people, amid a war and a struggle they are not quite ready for, renewing the promises that this world can offer and discovering who they are in the process. In that, they returned harmony to the four nations, and to one another, and that’s what makes A:tLA so great.
[8.5/10] How would you build paradise? It’s something that seems more complicated than a sitcom can handle, but as I’ve said before, The Good Place isn’t an ordinary sitcom. The great thing about “Patty” is how it gives our heroes a taste of the thing they’ve been working toward for so long, shows us how it could actually be miserable, and then gives us a most unexpected solution to the problem that ties in with past events. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a masterstroke, but it’s definitely a pretty impressive feat for a show grappling with what it would really mean to live in paradise for eternity.
It’s also damn funny! I think The Good Place is the only show on television that can make me laugh with references to professional wrestling (that bedpan is a big deal) and references to classical philosophy (Chidi’s “neoplatonic” line was a hoot) in the same episode. The glassy-eyed denizens of paradise, blankly asking for things or describing their mundane lives was amusing. And the little details of The (real) Good Place were very funny. (I particularly liked the candies that allow you to perfectly understand Twin Peaks.) Throw in the joyful mishmash of our heroes’ favorite things in the party, and you have a real comic winner on your hands.
The episode keeps the comedy flowing while still tackling its thorny problem. It starts off letting our heroes enjoy some richly deserved rewards and fun after all they’ve been through. Chidi’s nerdy excitement at meeting “Patty”, Michael getting sworn in by The Good Place council, and Jason getting to go go-karting with monkeys are all fun bits.
But then the show slowly but surely lets you know something is off. Tahani’s conversation with one flat affect paradise-dweller is disconcerting. Janet’s interactions with another Good Janet (and low key disdain for the other Janet) are a worrying sign. And when Patty herself warns Chidi of the dangers of this place, things kick into another gear.
(As an aside, Lisa Kudrow is a nice get for Patty, and her ability to convey the “joy zombie” vibe while also convincingly discussing “word piles” is outstanding.)
It’s a bold stroke to suggest that eternal happiness would eventually becoming numbing. The idea that you can do anything, so eventually you do everything, and become bored and lifeless is another interesting, sort of existentialist take on Heaven. I really like the idea that the problem is infinity -- that eternal life makes it seem like you have nothing but time to fill, and that over time, that sense wears you down.
So it’s a strange but fitting solution that Eleanor comes up with -- you give people the freedom to die. The show dances around it nicely, but it ties back to the idea that the prospect of an end helps give existence meaning and purpose. Sure, it happens a little fast that everyone in The Good Place feels better, but it’s another bold idea, one that ably solves the problem the episode set up.
I don’t know. At the end of the day, I just like how much this show is saying something about morality and life and existence. I don’t always agree with every point or laugh at every joke or buy every argument. But it’s using the sitcom form to comment on grand, eternal questions and conundrums in a way that is usually funny, sometimes oversimplified, but also usually a bit profound too. “Patty” is a great example of that, where the show uses humor and its wild premise to make a big statement about what elements are necessary to make human beings truly happy and fulfilled. The joy, and the enemy, is time.
[9.5/10] Holy hell. This was incredible. I love that after A New Hope pulled a lot from classic Japanese films like Yojimbo and The Hidden Fortress, the franchise is coming full circle. Japanese artists are now translating the tropes of Star Wars back into a feudal Japan setting, and it could hardly be cooler.
The art here is just gorgeous. This is the most beautiful blend of 3D animation with 2D flourishes since Klaus. The choice to go black and white, with only electronic things like lightsabers, droid lights, and whistling birds appear in color creates a striking aesthetic. And the design choices are downright stunning, from straw-covered R2 units, to the force-sensitive combatants and their artistically-conceived hair and clothing, to vehicles, weapons, and whole species reimagined with an ancient Japanese flair.
The basic premise works just as well. The notion of a Sith warlord coming to harass a humble village, while a calm ronin springs into action to save the innocent from their oppressors, fits wonderfully into this new rendition of Star Wars. That’s no shock. Episode IV reinterpreted a number of standard ronin tropes into a space setting, and watching those tropes reabsorbed and remixed back into a feudal setting is a thrill.
The action here is top notch. This is one of the best lightsaber battles we’ve seen in ages, with stellar choices in the blocking, shot-selection, and choreography. I love the little choices like letting the “camera” focus on the Sith’s hood floating away in the wind while we only hear the sound of her clashing with the hero. There’s a real mood and atmosphere which adds to the epicness of the confrontation. Intensity in the pace, eye-catching poses, and clever shifts and ruses to get the upper hand all make this a stand out among Star Wars skirmishes.
I’m also a big fan of the texture to this one: little moments that don’t contribute that much to the fairly simple “story” but which add color and intrigue to the world the characters inhabit. A ten-year-old being the chief because his dad’s asleep or ran-off, the hunched tea-maker fixing the droid, the bounty hunters fighting back against the Sith are all little details, but make this world feel more alive and lived-in beyond the immediate story.
On the whole, this is one hell of a coming out party for Star Wars: Visions. I’ll confess, I’m not much of an anime afficionado. But “The Duel” is enough for even a relative neophyte like me to sit up and take notice.
[7.1/10] Pick an ending, am I right? First it’s having to remove the soul stone from Mega-Ultron. Then it’s removing all the stones. Then it’s getting them in the infinity smasher. Then it’s using Hawkeye’s Zola arrow on Ultron. Then it’s Zola and Killmonger having an uber showdown. Then it’s Cosmic Dr. Strange trapping them in a pocket universe. Then it’s The Watcher having planned it all this way from the beginning.
It’s a little exhausting, making it feel like we didn’t really build to any of this, but rather, it just happened by fiat. The best you can say is that The Watcher picked these folks knowing the progression and so saw the parts they would play, but it’s not especially clear how and why this was the necessary path or that these were the necessary people to walk it.
(As an aside, why Gamora? I know there was one episode of What If? that didn’t get made because of COVID and other timing constraints. Was it hers?)
Still, some of the interactions are fun. Thor-as-Sterling-Archer is still a hoot, and his happy-go-lucky dopeyness around the other “Guardians of the Multiverse” made me laugh. I also loved the bond between Captain Carter and Black Widow. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is one of the MCU’s better films, and I wouldn’t want to trade it, but this finale definitely made me want to see more adventures of Peggy and Natasha as a team.
And there’s some solid emotional stuff here. Cosmic Strange getting a little redemption after his early mishap is a nice beat. The stinger with Captain Carter getting to see her lost love again much as Steve did is a nice touch too. And I like Black Widow returning to the Avengers-less timeline from episode 3, finding a new home and place to belong, with that being the abiding moral of the series. The overall themes and character beats work well.
It’s just the big climactic battle -- which in fairness, is most of the episode -- that falls flat for me. There’s some cool visual moments, mostly in the way of Cosmic Dr. Strange channeling the dark forces with some multicolored splendor and turns into a tentacle monster. For the most part, though, it’s just a bunch of undifferentiated fireworks and fisticuffs without even the imaginative fun of The Watcher and Ultron’s smash-tour through the multiverse. It wasn’t bad by any means, but nothing we haven’t seen before, without any new twists or wrinkles to set it apart despite the advantages of working in an animated medium.
Overall, I still enjoyed What If? quite a bit as an entertaining lark. The anthology format is a good one for a comic book universe, and several of the remixes were inventive and clever. It’s just the attempt to put them all together, and leave several of the stories unfinished so that they could be concluded in the grand finale, that I’d count as a misfire.
[8.7/10] I’m not sure I’ve seen a show re-pilot so successfully before. The way this episode told and retold all the events of Version 2 of The (Faux) Good Place from so many different perspectives was masterful, and helped give us continuing insight into how each of the characters work.
I was particularly impressed at the branching narrative of the episode, which took care to use the same basic events to springboard from one character’s story to another, and reveal their inner “themness” even when pointed in a different direction.
It’s particularly neat how Michael calculated to make each new situation even more miserable than they were in the last simulation. Eleanor has to give speeches and face the guilt of being crowned (well, sashed) as “best person.” Indecisive Chidi has to deal with the incredible difficulty of choosing his soulmate, and then has to deal with the fomo and regret of likely ending up with the wrong person. Tahani has to deal with difficulties that are frivolous, but nevertheless bother her, making her upset about things she shouldn’t be upset about like the size of her house or the height of her soulmate or the having to wear cargo shorts, and torturing her even further because she can’t reasonably complain about them. And Jason, who enjoys being able to be his real self in his “bud hole” has to live with a complimentary baby sitter there to ensure he lives the quiet life.
It reveals Michael’s, and the show’s, great understanding of these characters, knowing exactly how to twist the screws on them in creative ways that really seize on the things that will truly bother them.
It’s also really interesting getting to see behind the curtain of the demigods/demons/whatever in charge of the torturing. The fact that Michael is on his last chance here, and risks “retirement” if he fails, creates stakes for him as a character too, and the fact that he tries to slip the fact that he failed under the rug in front of his boss produces a ticking time bomb that will no doubt go off halfway through the season.
It’s also fun seeing the “actors” struggle with their parts. Real Eleanor (whose real name, I think, is Vicky) being perturbed at how she’s been demoted in the narrative, going so far as to create a limp and a backstory is amusing. Details like the bearded guy being so interested in biting, or Eleanor’s “soulmate” constantly going to the gym, or other folks just not understanding why they can’t resort to regular torture gives Michael the beleaguered middle manager vibe trying to wrangle all his unruly employees, which is an amusing look. The overall comedy for the show even seems to have improved.
Plus, the episode is propelled by Eleanor’s discovery of her note and attempt to piece the mystery together. I have to say I’m impressed that the show didn’t use the note and the investigation to fuel the second season as a whole. But turning it into a quick turnaround case-solve for Eleanor just creates more possibilities going forward. Joss Whedon is known to have said “play your cards early, it makes you come up with more cards,” and with this sort of virtuoso episode, I’m excited to see what new cards The Good Place comes up with in its second season.
[8.5/10] I’m assuredly overrating this one because of the reveal, but to put it in Shyamalan terms, what a twist!
What’s great about the fact that our heroes are, and have been, in The Bad Place this whole time is that it recontextualizes everything we’ve seen in a reasonably believable way. Sitcoms are founded on conflict, and we, the audience at home, had every reason to believe the glitches in the system were just part and parcel of the usual sitcom necessity of having some conflict to motivate the action.
But “Michael’s Gambit” turns metatext into text, revealing that the character conflicts and frustrations that the main characters have been through is not merely an incidental result of some unexpected error, but rather a deliberate attempt from the architects (in some ways, a stand-in for the show’s writers) to make the characters torture one another.
It adds a creative spin on everything we’ve seen so far. (Though I do wonder if, on rewatch, everything holds up to scrutiny.) I particularly love the conclusion that despite the consequentialist good she did, Tahani’s efforts weren’t enough to get her into the real Good Place because her motives were corrupt, and that Chidi’s obsessive morality and indecision led to him hurting everyone close to him. That helps us to see these seemingly enlightened characters in a different light, which is what good writing does.
Some of the initial business where the gang is debating who should take the two slots to The Bad Place is a bit tedious, both because the logic used is pretty weak and it retreads some of the feeble love triangle stuff from before, but where it leads is outstanding.
I particularly love the idea that the Bad Place architects, and Michael in particular, are going out on a limb with this. The notion of finding new and creative ways to torture people, and trying to come up with a perfect vicious cycle with these four people completely redoes the show’s premise and gives it tons of interesting new places to go.
In addition, it provides a promising reset for Season 2. Eleanor’s own gambit is a clever one, and I’m excited to see how it all shakes out.
Overall, the laughs weren’t as strong as I might have liked, but this is a brilliant twist that I absolutely did not see coming, so the show gets points for a genuine surprise that makes me see the prior twelve episodes differently.
(And hey, let’s throw out some additional wild speculation while we’re at it. Maybe in this afterlife, people don’t get sent to hell to be punished necessarily, but to be given the chance to improve and earn themselves a place in Heaven. Each time, our heroes get the chance to be a little better and get a little closer to eternal reward. Granted, I totally whiffed on the twist here, so take my predictions with a grain of salt, but still, throwing it out there anyway!)
[9.7/10] This episode clearly deserves a longer review, but what I’ll say for now is this:
This may the best parody of anything ever. That’s bold talk, I know, but there’s just such genius in how Harmon and company distill down the tropes and quirks of the Ken Burns-style Civil War documentary and meld it with the insane world of Greendale. The talking heads, the text messages as letters, the sound design over still images, it’s all just perfect. The show captures the rhythms of those documentaries perfectly, in a way that elevates the homage even if you’re not intimately familiar with the source material. There’s a specificity to everything that really works.
And while four characters get most of the spotlight, it’s a nice outing for the rest of the cast too. Shirley is great as one of Troy’s lieutenants, and her descriptions of the battles is a comic highlight. Pierce’s staypuft-esque pillow weapon is a neat way to integrate him into the episode. Chang’s “interns” being enlisted as kids who know nothing but pillow fighting is a fun conceit. And Britta’s blurry, poorly framed photos are a laugh every time.
But what elevates this episode above Community’s other fantastic parodies is that it uses these events for pathos and meaning, not just for comedy. There’s something inherently absurd, and yet so true to form, about Troy and Abed having this massive bedding war. The show plays around with their usual shtick, but also goes to some real places though.
My favorite of these is the intercepted/exchanged letters. Abed’s description of Troy’s fears is funny, but you get why it hurts. And their later exchange -- “You weren’t supposed to see that”/”You weren’t supposed to think those things” -- feels true to real fights between friends. Troy’s response is just as cutting, telling Abed that no one else will have Troy’s patience with him, playing on Abed’s own insecurities in a remark intended only to hurt. There’s a truth to the way that fights between friends are the most painful, because by the very act of friendship, you’ve made yourself vulnerable to someone, and there are few things that sting as badly as someone using those vulnerabilities against you.
What I forgot about “Pillows and Blankets” is how good Jeff’s arc here is. I’d remembered the silly emoji-laden conversation with Annie, and his “it really summed it all up” ending, but I’d forgotten that he has his own journey here. It’s about him deciding to use his words not just to benefit himself, but to do good in the world, or at least for two people he cares about. As is often the dynamic on the show, Annie gives him the moral disapproval and nudge that motivates him to make the change, and it culminates in something outstanding. Cool, detached, self-serving Jeff not only plays along with the “imaginary best friend” hats, but uses his speechifying skills to bring Troy and Abed back together, to do something selfless. It’s some of his most meaningful growth in the whole series.
Of course, it’s wonderful to have Troy and Abed reunite in that fashion. It’s pretty plain, even for a bold show like Community, that they weren’t going to break up arguably the show’s best duo forever, war or no war. But having their friendship on the line in this skirmish, and having them continue to whack each other with pillows so that friendship never has to end, is a way to thread the needle between Ken Burns style “futility of war” missives and the heart that exists between these two lovable weirdos who don’t want to let one another go, even if it means extending their fight to accomplish that. It’s a nice note to go out on, one that deftly puts an end to their feud while staying true to what started it and who these characters are.
(And as an aside, the closing pledge drive mini-skit is a delight to anyone who’s watched a regular array of PBS.)
This is truly one of Community’s high water marks, a mix of parody and character stories and high concept arcs brought together to make something hilarious but touching all the same. Greendale’s Civil War becomes the Civil War, realized in the goofiness, pain, and sincerity of affection between two young men who need one another more than they need to set a record, or stand by their principles, or to win.
[7.5/10] I like the solution to the problem. That counts for a lot. Being convinced, if not exactly persuaded, by the group’s perspective on a new version of the afterlife is a pretty big achievement for The Good Place. The show had its work cut out for it when the powers that be decided they needed to replace the afterlife point system.
I’ll be honest that I don’t necessarily buy it. But you know what? That doesn't really matter. I like it, because it works as the culmination of everyone’s experiences. This group got rebooted time again, they got a second chance to improve themselves and become better people, and they use that experience as a model to help others do the same. Tying it to Janet’s experience is the icing on the cake. The notion that she’s been through this too, in her own way, and come out a more complex and understanding not-a-person is superb. Plus, Eleanor treating the “vague memory” of what happened pre-reboot as the equivalent to a “voice in your head” is a nice callback to her own experience.
Whether or not this system would actually work or be fair or anything like that as a real moral philosophy is beside the point. It’s functions nicely as the combination of what our heroes have learned, and I like it for that.
The problem is that this is basically one big ten-minute explainer. The show does its best to spice it up with the usual array of gags and with a cameo from Timothy Olyphant (a great bit, incidentally.) But the truth is that a lot of this episode is just stress testing a philosophical idea. I am 100% down for that! But it doesn't necessarily make for riveting television.
That said, there’s still a lot of fun to be had in this episode. The Judge and Janet going through the different Janet voids is a real treat. (I was particularly a fan of Disco Janet’s void.) Sean screwing with our heroes and wrecking little glass sculptures is a lot of fun, and again, Olyphant does a great job as the “guy without a dog in this fight” who nevertheless questions the plan. And Tahani’s gags about being unable to pull off the “mod look” got a laugh out of me.
There’s also some nice character moments. I like the brief bit of time the show takes to check in on Eleanor and Chidi’s relationship. Eleanor understanding justice and Chidi finding that hot is super cute. Chidi no longer being indecisive once he’s experienced 800 lives and possibilities is great. And the way the two are so matter of fact and “coolsville” about saying “I love you” is really nicely done.
The episode even does a good job of dealing with the process part of things. There’s a decent laugh to The Good Place crew agreeing to the plan without even hearing it and capitulating without getting anything in return from Sean. And I like the explanation that Sean will agree to this because he likes fighting with the good guys, that it’s fun in a way the trillionth corkscrew of an eyeball isn’t, and that his letting Michael’s original neighborhood go through was a sign that Sean knew the current system wasn’t working. “You’ve Changed, Man” does its homework, you have to give it that.
The catch is that I just walked away a little unmoved. While the proceedings are a little rushed, on the whole this is a well-built episode of television, that hits a lot of nice beats for its characters, and finds a satisfying answer to the major problem it set out. I just found myself saying “That’s nice” or “That’s clever” much more than I felt myself buying into the episode or losing myself in what it was doing.
That’s no sin, but for a show so wild and often heartfelt, a good part of this one felt academic. Still, there’s four more episodes for The Good Place to build on this, and I have high hopes for the finish!
Meh. Quite the collection of overdone cliches:
-- It's a crime drama, about a family!
-- The eldest is in charge, but is not the brightest so covers it up with bellicosity. That combination can't possibly lead to trouble.
-- Our protagonist is ambitious, ruthless, and smart. That combination can't possibly lead to trouble.
-- The youngest is dumb and violent. That combination can't possibly lead to trouble.
-- Fortunately, they're surrounded by good women, if only the boys will listen to their wisdom.
-- It's got a beautiful woman, but she's on the side of the law. Oh no! Surely she won't fall for the haunted bad boy.
-- The saintly friend wants nothing to do with the family's evil ways. I'm sure he won't be pulled in.
-- The copper sent to stop them is just as ruthless as they are. What nuanced levels of morality!
-- It's set in olden days so it can be "gritty" and "edgy" with it's violence.
All in all, I liked it better when it was called Ripper Street. I'll watch more, but only because my brother recommended it. If it ends up good, great for me. If it ends up bad, I can berate my brother for his poor taste. Also great for me.
[8.5/10] What I like about speculative fiction and other imaginative stories is that so often, they’re better at getting to the human condition than their down-to-earth brethren. The Good Place is a high concept story about people trapped in the afterlife with champagne-bringing ants and magically appearing and exploding motorcycles and impossible spa days. But it’s also about self-improvement and feeling useful and dealing with complicated, sometimes unfair emotions, something this series can capture in a way that’s much harder without the sort of bizarre setups at play.
That’s why my favorite story in this one is Eleanor’s. I found myself spending much of the episode asking -- why is Eleanor so dead set on stressing out Chidi. It seemed to come from a good place (no pun intended) of believing that he needs to be put into pressure-filled situations to bring out the best and most “help your fellow man” ethical in him, but she seemed to be going overboard for reasons that were opaque to me.
The episode lays it out explicitly -- she did it because she’s angry at Chidi, angry at him for leaving her and getting to enjoy this blissful new life in paradise, even though she knows he did it for a good reason and that the current bliss is not his fault. But not only is she dealing with these complex emotions; she’s had the person who she would go to deal with them ripped away from her, which just makes her all the more frustrated, on top of her guilt for feeling that way. It’s a complicated cocktail of conflicted feelings, one that are so achingly human, and hard to articulate without the handles of mind-wipes and out there magical scenarios.
But they’re also somehow truer and more affecting that way. The turn in the episode is Eleanor breaking down when she realizes what she’s putting the man she loves through. It’s a great performance from Kristen Bell, and it’s what help makes her sympathetic here. It ends in a great pep talk from Michael, one of understanding and empathy, and it ultimately helps us understand Eleanor, and what she’s going through as a person, much better. Truly great.
On top of that, it’s just a funny episode. Chidi and Jason is a pairing we don’t get especially often, and so the dynamic of Jason’s general recklessness and impulsiveness mixed with Chidi’s usual anxiety and cautiousness leads to a lot of great comedy between the two. Chidi trying to cover for and restrain Jason is a laugh every time. And Jason by himself is superb here, between his thinking every time someone needs his help, it must be to open a jar, and his repeat motorcycle explosion.
But the B-story is nearly as good. I like Tahani’s plot and epiphany here especially. Her efforts to ply John with the exclusive celebrity treatment he was denied in life make for some amusing back and forth between them. But when she tries to turn their friendship and pivot toward self-improvement, he’s resistant. The great thing about that is 1. John has an unexpectedly legitimate point that while she was living it up with fortune and fame, he worked his behind off (albeit in a kind of shady industry) to build something on his own, and 2. Tahani is right that despite being on opposite ends of the spectrum, they were both made unhappy by their obsession with fame and exclusivity.
The result is a little tidy, but I like Tahani reaching John through her understanding that obsession with status leaves you lonely and unfulfilled. And while it’s a little convenient, that being the thing that spurs John to apologize for his mean comments is a nice touch. Plus I love Janet as Tahani’s supportive girlfriend.
Overall, this is The Good Place at its best, taking the fantastical and ridiculous and finding the real, human truth underneath it, that’s harder to uncover in more staid circumstances.
[8.6/10] I have to admit, I am a complete sucker for this sort of thing. I love the novelty of a television show or movie reinterpreting its own story as though it’s a story being told in-Universe. From C-3PO recounting the events of Star Wars to the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi to Arya Stark watching a stage play of the events of Game of Thrones, there’s just something about a story exploring how stories distort and reimagine and reshape real events and people for the sake of poetic license that really works for me.
And it worked for me here! For one thing, I love how meta this whole damn episode is. It’s not the sort of thing you can do too often, or your story becomes a little too much of an ouroboros, but once in a while, it’s a delightful opportunity for comedic reflection. (Though Community made a cottage industry out of it.) I laughed out loud at Sokka talking about the play as the sort of “time-wasting crap” he misses. I really enjoyed the touch that the poster for the show mirrors the cover of the AtLA DVDs. Even just the show being split up into three acts, or Suki noting that Teem Avatar gets beaten a lot, was a nice, self-reflective touch.
I also love the craft of the way the episode turns its story into a stage play. Having Aang be played by a woman on stage, Peter Pan-style, is an inspired move. The attention to detail in how bending was portrayed on the stage – with colorful ribbons and other stagecraft, was very creative. And most importantly, it worked as both a parody of Avatar’s story, of theater conventions, and the way that real events become exaggerated when committed to fiction.
That comes through most in how all of the show’s protagonists are caricatured in the stage version of their lives. Sokka as a guy who cannot stop making meat jokes, Katara as someone who’s always crying and making speeches about hope, and Zuko as someone constantly talking about his honor are mighty fine one-note parodies of our heroes. The dialogue and delivery of the show is hilarious, and it provides a nice opportunity for AtLA to make fun of itself, but also to have its characters make fun of each other, with Toph in particular saying there’s a lot of truth on that stage.
That feeds into the way that the show, cartoonish and outsized though it may be, feeds into everyone’s insecurities about who they are and how others see them. The silliest of these in Sokka crying at the story of Princess Yuweh. It’s a broad moment where she’s talking about having eaten pickled herring, but the magnitude of that event still affects Sokka.
The most heartening of them is Zuko regretting the way he betrayed his Uncle Iroh. As silly as the two are portrayed here, it has enough of a ring of truth that it serves as a reminder to Zuko of one of this greatest regrets. He’s still tortured by what he did, and it’s a nice way to show that even silly or inaccurate art can move us or affect us when it touches on something sensitive in our pasts or personalities. But I love the way Toph reassures him that by staking out his own path and joining Team Avatar, Zuko has redeemed himself with his Uncle even if he doesn’t know it. It calls back nicely to Toph’s conversation with Iroh, and her “sign of affection” for Zuko after telling him that he was all Iroh talked about is a sweet moment all around.
The trickiest of them was Aang being upset by the depiction of Katara and Zuko as romantic in the stage show, with stage-Katara talking about Aang as being nothing more than a little brother. It plays into his concern that he is not masculine enough and that his crush does not see him as anything more than a little kid.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not big on the Aang-Katara shipping business. I never really felt the chemistry between them (save for the moment in the titular Secret Tunnel) and as much as I enjoy the relationship between the two characters, it never really scanned as a believably romantic one, which makes all the teasing and agonizing over Aang’s crush on Katara kind of dull to me.
On the other hand, there’s a realness in their scene together outside the theater. Whether or not they make sense, there’s truth in a young kid having a crush on an older girl and worrying that he is not seen as mature or manly enough to cut the muster. (Hell, it happened with me and my wife!) Aang’s pain and frustration at caring for Katara and his distress when it’s not clear that she returns his feelings, feelings he blocked his charka for, are sympathetic.
But so are Katara’s, who very reasonably says that there are much bigger things going on right now than their romantic feelings, and that she is unsure of how she feels. The heightened environment of being on the brink of war and conflict, is not always the best environment to find your true feelings. As much as the last episode set at ember island devolved into overwrought Dawson’s Creek-style teen angst, this felt realer and believably awkward and painful for both Aang and Katara.
And yet for as funny an episode as this is, and as much as it leans into the character’s feelings about themselves and others, the end turns to the greater task at hand. The depiction of Azula slaying Zuko, and Ozai killing The Avatar, are clearly disquieting to the Aang Gang. The theme of the evening has been the way that even this exaggerated show reflects a truth that can unnerve our heroes. Seeing visions of their own failures and deaths is just as worrisome, evincing a fear that the future these men and women on stage are depicting will have as much truth of the real world in it. It’s a chilling reminder of the magnitude of what’s to come, and the threats that lie ahead. Art, as Shakespeare put it, holds up a mirror to nature, and sometimes the reality of what it reflects can rattle us, in the best and worst ways.
[9.1/10] Beautiful. That’s the first word that comes to mind here. It applies to the art, which trades the series’ autumnal colors for a winery pallet. It applies to the confrontation with The Beast, which plays on the light and shadows that have defined the antagonist here for ages. It applies to the maturation of Wirt, who accepts responsibility and comes into his own here, but only to save his little brother and with the help of his unexpected friend.
That’s the most heartening part of all this. When we start the show, Wirt is timid, does whatever anybody else says, and is reluctant to do or face down much of anything. He’s also ready to be rid of his brother, ready to blame his energetic younger siblings for his own reluctance.
But in the culmination of his journey here, Wirt shows a backbone. When The Beast beckons him to transfer Greg’s spirit into the lantern, to become the new lantern-keeper, to devote his life to wandering the woods and gathering elderwood trees to fuel it, he initially relents. Until, suddenly, he stops. He declares “That’s dumb” and rejects the devil’s bargain. Instead, he means to look after the brother he cares about, however he has to, but he’ll set his own path, not the one anyone else sets out for him.
It’s rousing to see Wirt not just shrug off his instructions and do what he thinks is right and wise rather than just what’s asked of him, but to also do it in order to protect Greg. Greg is especially sympathetic in his near-death state, pleading with his brother to return the famed “rock fact” rock to its rightful owner and lamenting his one ethical lapse. Greg is such a sweet innocent, even when cavorting with the devil, that you just feel for the poor kid.
So does Wirt. Watching him and Beatrice try with all their might to free their young compatriots is sweet and harrowing. Seeing Wirt apologize to his brother for all of this is heartwarming. Seeing him gather Greg’s frog and Beatrice in his arms as he trudges to rescue his sibling is the culmination of Greg’s reluctance to be a joiner this whole time.
It’s also a nice outing for The Woodsman. There’s a shock to the realization that he is what Wirt could become if he persisted like this, little realizing that he holds the actual power. His willingness to blow out the lantern, thereby defeating The Beast (who’s extra creepy here), even if it costs him his daughter is tense and a little sad, yet also just as inspiring, given that it’s his own self-actualization after cutting through the devil’s lies.
What follows is just as beautiful. We get hints that it may have all been just a dream, but maybe not. Wirt and Greg are rescued back in their suburban homes. Wirt develops the chutzpah to ask Sara to hang out and appreciates his brother’s recovery. All of the folks that we met along the way are shown enjoying their lives after Wirt and Greg touched them. The Woodsman reunites with his daughter. The rock fact rock is returned to his rightful place. And, most importantly, Beatrice and her family are restored to their human forms (though not without an amusing and persistent connection to the phrase “eat your dirt”).
All of these things carry with them a sense of peace, a wholesome feeling that all has been set right in the world. Beatrice made good on her effort to make up for her mistakes. Greg is still the lovable and curious scamp he was before. And Wirt is changed by this experience, someone more willing to embrace at least a smidgeon of his brother’s self-possessed qualities and utter confidence when something is truly important to him. It’s been quite a journey, and the change, commitment, and new selves that emerged from it, real or not, are inspiring nonetheless.
Over the Wall was the perfect fall watch for yours truly. It blended lovely rustic imagery with loony, classic cartoon gags and absurdity, while wedding both to some real character arcs and introspection for Wirt in particular. It’s an imaginative world that tracks with the creative teams history with Adventure Time, conjuring a new world and beaucoup delightful characters to populate it. Glad for this sweet and moving miniseries with such inventiveness and heart.
9.5/10. I have never seen Glee, so a lot of the direct parody was over my head, but this is such an enjoyable episode. Having the show's X-mas episode turn into a cross between Glee and Invasion of the Body Snatchers was an inspired choice that both makes the holiday-themed story both distinct and gives it a direction as the episode progresses.
The songs themselves were unique and each had their own shade of humor. The two stand outs in my opinion were Annie's (in a perfect parody of the weirdness of songs like "Santa Baby"), and Shirley's (which perfectly seized on her character's achilles' heel). But the episode had lots of great Community wordplay ("well-documented historical vanity" is just a hilarious phrase in and of itself), and ridiculous moments like Britta "singing her heart's song." Everyone in the cast was on point. If I have one small nit, it's that Taran Killam occasionally went a little too broad in his performance for my tastes, but he did capture the "bright-eyed psychopath" role well.
Of course, Community being the quality show that it is, still manages to ground the outsized premise in something character-based. Abed wanting to spend the holidays with his friends, and worrying about making things darker when trying to make things brighter, culminates in a heartwarming moment of the gang showing up at his apartment. Sure, it's a bit easy, but it absolutely works as a great capper to tremendously creative and amusing holiday episode.
7.8/10. A vast improvement on the opening pair of episodes. I liked both the A-story and the B-story here, as both added depth to the protagonist and the antagonist of the show thus far.
Aang visiting the Southern Temple, and realizing that only is everyone he knew and trusted gone, but they were murdered, is a pretty intense story. There's something that always gets me, whether it's anticipatory or imaginary nostalgia, about stories of a lost civilization, a way of life that was stamped out. The great design on the Air Temple evoked this very well, with glimpses of the old air bending monks, and things like the circle of stone avatars which evokes a certain generational legacy and spirituality without having to underline things too much. At the same time, I appreciate the notion of Aang as someone with "phenomenal cosmic power" but a great deal of immaturity, to where times of great emotion and stress provoke his avatar powers to come forth in a way he can't quite control. I'm sure there's a metaphor for kids not having control of their tempers or emotional stability just yet, but I think it works well just as text too.
That said, not everything in that part of the story was great. Sokka's entire M.O. in the episode being endless attempts to try to get something to eat got old fast, and made for a pretty weak attempt at comic relief in the midst of some legitimately interesting mythology and worldbuilding, not to mention character development for Aang. Beyond that, Katara telling Aang that she knows he lost his family, but that she and Sokka are his family now felt really rushed and trite. And as cute as Momo is, I don't know that we really needed a Disney-esque animal sidekick.
But the B-story picked up a lot of slack on that front too. Again, it's nice worldbuilding to show that Prince Zuko isn't a monolithic villain, that he is, in fact, something of an outcast within the Fire Nation, who's challenged by his people's generals and ostrasized by his own father. It makes him sympathetic rather than the one-note villain he's been thus far. In addition, I loved the story told in his fight with General Zhou, where he's initially overwhelmed and emotional, but finds his focus and uses the basic to recover his pride and win the match. It was a well-animated segment (and I enjoyed the design work in this episode overall even when the animation left a bit to be desired) that hewed toward emotion and flow over pure visual spectacle. To the same end, I love the hint that Prince Zuko's uncle has more power and ability than he lets on. The old master who's obfuscating goofiness and hiding his true abilities is a trope, and the hint of it here is intriguing.
Overall, it's still early, but this is the first episode that's made me excited to see what else the show has in store. Hopefully it's a harbinger of great things to come.
Very interesting coming back to this one having finished the whole series. What's funny is that I expected to have more affection for this episode given how much I came to care about and enjoy these characters in the subsequent 60 episodes of the show, but I ended up pretty well agreeing with my original review. If anything, I probably feel even more strongly that this is a pretty subpar introduction to a superlative series.
Oh sure, it sets up the basic dynamic of the show well enough. Aang is a spritely kid. Katara is determined but a little lost. Sokka is...way more of a jerk than he would later develop into. And Zuko is intense and angry and determined to catch the Avatar. But everyone on the show seems much more childish and caricatured than they would become. The animation is less finished and there's less aesthetic beauty than the show would hone later. And above all this just seems like a paint by numbers chosen one story to kick off a series that is anything but.
Rest assured, if you heard the hype and walked away from this opening chapter underwhelmed, you're not alone and not unjustified, and the show gets much, much better.
Brett: "In the '80s everyone has a clique. Nerds, jocks..."
[Nerds and jocks laughing. Mayors laughing maliciously.]
Brett: "... evil mayors who wanna tear down the rec center."Kid: "We're not answering any questions from adults, not until this town lifts the ban on dancing."
Glenn: "I had to stay three hours late to supervise the brats I sent to detention, but then they kept coming of age!"
Andre: "This town is racist as hell. Everyone keeps bowing at me. A kid challenged me to a karate fight, and everytime I say something, somebody rings a gong."
Gigi: "Mmm, mmm, mmm. I thought I raised you better than this."
Brett: "Okay, Brett, it's no big deal. You just wanna stay here longer with your friends. Just a couple spritzes of Nostalgia Max, and they will love it here as much as you do."
Blockbuster Man: "What do you want to see?"
Reagan: "Everything."Myc: "Seriously?" [Chuckles.] "No wonder your dad left."
Kid: "That's it!" [Tires screech.] "Fuck you, Myc!" [Myc flies off bicycle and soars like E.T.]Reagan: "Brett, what's with your whole 'Firestarter', Slimer vibe?"
Myc: "Tragic, dead at 40."
Reagan: "Hey, fuck you."
Review
What a predictable yet great episode. No, seriously, the entire story is surprising. Actually, it's what "WandaVision" should've been but just wasn't. This is great. More of this please.
"I am a trainer. I literally train swordsmen." — Urokodaki
Something tells me the Japanese word doesn't translate well into English.
This episode is strange because I like it more than the previous two, but it's got some weird flaws holding it back. I'm going to go through them now, but please note that I can criticise something I like; it doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it. Anyway, let's dive right into my first problem.
The first is Sabito's dialogue.
"A man shouldn't whine. It's unseemly. ...No matter how you suffer, bear it in silence... if you're a man. If you call yourself a man. Slow. Weak. Immature. That's not what you call a man."
Now, I don't mean to sound like an SJW, but these kinds of comments (verbal abuse) can be pretty harmful. Especially since this series' target demographic is 12-18-year-olds, who might have a lot going on physically and mentally, lines like, "A man shouldn't whine." and "bear it in silence." are unhelpful. Please, if you're struggling with something, whether that be physically, mentally or both, seek help: talk to your friends, close ones, your family, or seek professional help. I was hesitant to criticise this element at first, but seeing how it got Tanjiro to complete his task, I see this as a ruthless fantasy that will only harm adolescents in the long run. It makes this plot so straightforward, anyway.
The next is a less extreme, but still one that's more of a personal distaste: burn-out. Overworking yourself can kill you. The director of my favourite Ghibli film, Yoshifumi Kondō, died due to overwork.
"Doctors said that the aneurysm had been brought on by overwork." - Wikipedia
His death made it very clear to me that by pushing your body and mind to the brink, you can "work yourself to death". So don't do what Tanjiro did; you may end up doing more harm than good. I'm not saying you should never push yourself, but if you think you should take a break, or find people worried about you, then maybe you should. Again, it makes the plot so straightforward; just work harder, and you can do anything!
The last is a minor nitpick, but it made the episode somewhat unsatisfying for my taste, and this one is the off-screen development. Missing out on Tanjiro's one year of training with Urokodaki was okay because it doesn't tie into his character development. But when he's training with Sabito and Makomo, I want to see how he improved. Otherwise, we're missing out on seeing his growth. Instead, we only see the aftermath. So it's a little unsatisfying when he trains off-screen and challenges Sabito one day and wins straight away. Ever heard the saying, "it's about the journey, not the destination"?
Despite my complaints, this is still my favourite episode so far. It actually tries to get Tanjiro to do something other than walking to a place but shows him taking the time to improve. Although it falls flat for me, that's not to say I didn't enjoy this episode. I'll say that these episodes are getting better, but I've yet to see one that doesn't have issues like these.
TECHNICAL SCORE: 6/10
ENJOYMENT SCORE: 7/10
9.1/10. A great way to kick off the new season! I often have a problem with the plots of shows and movies involving magic, because all too often, the answer to any magical problem or magical bad guy is "we just have to use a deeper/older/stronger magic to defeat it!" and that feels like a narrative cheat. What I liked about "The Avatar State" is that it not only addressed this problem head-on, but grounded it in Aang's fears and his emotional state. It's a nice way to add to your show's mythos while also developing your characters.
Which is to say that I really enjoyed the A-story where the Earth Kingdom general is trying to figure out how to provoke Aang into the Avatar State. There was solid comedy in the initially attempts, whether it was a caffeinated tea that sent Aang into overdrive, an attempt from Sokka (who seemed to think it was like the hiccups), and a goofy ceremony culminating in a sneeze. But I loved the twist that if the Avatar State was a defense mechanism, the Earth Kingdom general was going to attack Aang.. It led to one of the series's best setpieces, with those rolling wheels creating some very cool moments and some of the best action choreography we've seen thus far, and the fact that it was Katara being at risk that prompts the avatar state is a nice touch, that speaks to who Aang is, namely that danger to himself isn't enough to let him reach that emotional state, it's danger to people he cares about, which is appropriately noble.
I also appreciated the specific mythos reveal that if Aang dies in the avatar state, it's the end of of all Avatars. Again, it's nice to have a backstop to the uber-magic here. In some ways, the Earth Kingdom general has a point, that if the Avatar State could be provoked and controlled, it would turn the tide of the war, so why shouldn't they use it? The fact that, as Avatar Roku explains, the Avatar State condenses the powers of all the former Avatars' past lives gives a spiritual bent to these abilities, but also would make for what amounts to a cheat-code that could end this game right now. But the fact that every time Aang enters the Avatar state, he risks leaving the world without an Avatar (and we've seen the results of the lack of an avatar for a mere century) provides a good rationale not to get into that state too hastily, even beyond the hurdles of it being a defense mechanism.
But beyond just explaining a plot point, the episode does a nice job of making the story and emotional one as well, with some thematic heft to boot. It's not hard to draw parallels between Aang's Avatar state and nuclear weapons in World War II. The idea that the Earth Kingdom general wants to use these awesome powers to end the war in one fell swoop, that despite the destruction and unpredictability of it, he points to those who are injured and dying in the fight every day, calls to mind similar discussions in the 1940s over whether to use the atom bomb. It's a legitimate question, and the dialectical forces within Aang -- one part of him that wants to end the war as quickly as posible, one part that wants to do things "the right way" as Katara puts it, and one that's worried about what he becomes when he goes into that state -- make for convincing turmoil and a legitimate issue.
That last part brings it back to Aang as a character. There's a sense that he fears giving over to the Avatar state, that he doesn't know what he becomes, can't control himself, and causes pain and destruction. It scares Katara, and it scares Aang. The idea of possessing that sort of power, but unleashing an unpredictable force every time you use it is a responsibility that would weigh on anyone, let alone a twelve-year-old. The way the episode lingers on Aang's concerns helps make this a great one.
And I haven't even mentioned the B-story yet! While we don't know much about the Fire Princess yet -- just that she's a perfectionist and that her firebending manifests as electricity (which is, let's be honest, pretty cool) -- the idea of home as a false promise for Zuko is a powerful one. The Princess is still a one-note villain, but Zuko started out that way too, and what humanized him was the sense that he wasn't a bad kid, just somebody who desperately wanted to earn his father's approval, get back in his good graces, and be allowed to return to his home.
The prospect of that is tantalizing to him, to where he's willing to ignore and even disdain Iroh for suggesting it might be illusory. Of course, one of the guards slips, the ruse is revealed, and it leads to another pretty awesome battle that's mixed with the one in the Earth Kingdom. Seeing Iroh go all badass to defend his nephew is a treat. (I don't know, there's just something about old, seemingly decrepit guys secretly being badasses that works for me. See also: the silly scene where Yoda fights Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones and Morgan Freeman in Million Dollar Baby). The fact that Iroh pretends to believe in the message the Princess brings is a nice touch, and the actor who plays Zuko does a nice job of conveying the betrayal and abject disappointment each feels.
That leads to the incredible scene down by the river where Zuko and Iroh slice off their topknots and drop them in the river. I'll admit, part of the significance comes from my having seen the middling Oscar flick The Last Samurai, but even without that, it's clear that this moment represents Zuko confronting the fact that home will never be there for him. It's a severing of his last strands of hope to get back his esteem in his father's eyes, and a realization that he is no longer a part of the Fire Nation, no longer a part of his family, no longer his father's son. He is something else now, something lonely, but his eyes are open. That's big stuff.
Like I said at the top, this is a hell of an introduction to the new season, and wiped the sour taste of the terrible live action film out of my mouth. Here's hoping it's a sign of good things to come!
7.5/10. Neat episode, if a little standard-issue. While I'm obviously firmly on Katara's side, the whole "old master won't train girl, but then she proves herself" feels played out, though obviously not to an audience of children who are being introduced to the trope. That makes it fine for that part of the audience, but a little unadventurous for its more mature viewers.
Still, the conflict was solid even if it wasn't stellar. The fight between Katara and the old Water Bender in particular was a great sequence, with the ice-to-water phase changes particularly well done. This show has gotten quite good at staging action and finding creative uses for the various bending abilities. The ways the episode showed members of the Northern Water Tribe raising and lowering their walls or moving through the canals of the city were inventive and shows the time and care the series's braintrust has put into thinking through what a society of people who could control water and ice would look like.
And while the main Katara story was a little trite in conception, I actually liked the resolution to it a lot. The episode set up the reveal nicely (though it tipped its hand with the shot of Katara's necklace during the fight.) The fact that the Old Master turned out to be Gran Gran's former beau could have been a cheesy bit, but tying it to the idea that Gran Gran left because she didn't want to be bound by the strictures of the Northern Water Tribe, and that being what changes the Old Waterbender's heart is a deft move.
As for the other stories going on during the episode, Sokka falling in love with a Princess was fine, though again not especially compelling. It's another stock plot, but Sokka's delightfully inept attempts at courting give it a lightness and charm that make it works. And Zhao piecing together that Zuko is the Blue Spirit, trying to have him killed via the pirates we met several episodes back, only for Uncle Iroh to surreptitiously smuggle him onto Zhao's ship as Zhao leads a fleet to attack the Northern Water Tribe comes off more like table setting than anything, but it has a lot of intrigue and some cool moments in between, so it gets a pass too.
Overall, a nice setup for the season finale!
[7.5/10] There’s a good term paper to be written on why we as a culture are so drawn to stories of supernatural occurrences in small towns. Maybe it’s because the distance from big cities gives cover and plausibility to magical or spooky goings on where the public writ large wouldn’t know about them.Maybe it’s because, as shows like Twin Peaks established, they can be a means to process the real life dark things that can happen in these idyllic locales Maybe it’s because we still idealize them as “real America”, so when something goes wrong there, it feels more tragic and more senseless.
Whatever the reason, in its opening bout, Stranger Things channels all the tropes from Stephen King, Stephen Spielberg, David Lynch, and a dozen other cultural touchstones about unexplained happenings in small town America. This is plainly a pastiche, one that’s counting on its audience’s affection for a particular time and place and genre, but also using them to good ends.
It sets up various cliques and interested parties, quickly establishing the different centers of gravity in the town. There’s the quartet of geeks who play DnD in their parents’ basement, get excited about ham radio, and unsurprisingly based on those first two points, get hassled by bullies at school. There’s the older sister, Nancy, who’s trying to stay devoted to her studies but finds herself both excited and made uncomfortable by Steve, the popular boy who’s taken an interest in her.
There’s Hopper, the drinking, smoking, layabout sheriff who’s suddenly faced with a case far more serious than an owl attacking someone’s hairdo. There’s Joyce, the single mother of two trying to make ends meet and understandably devastated and scared by the disappearance of her son. There’s Mr. Clarke, the encouraging science teacher who has a kinship with the nerds in his tutelage. And there’s other parents, siblings, and townspeople the show can pick up or put down as the story unspools.
Most of these characters play on tropes and archetypes: the dorky kids, the good girl sister, the donut-dunking local officer, the single mom scraping by, and so on and so on. But Stranger Things is remarkably efficient in using those tropes to fill in the gaps and get the different corners of the show up and running in one forty-seven minute opening jaunt. Not all of them get as much depth as Joyce in the early going -- and her memories and search for her son is the most emotionally-involving and, not coincidentally, realest aspect of this first outing. But each has potential, and the lines that run between them, or could in the future, are clear and compelling.
What’s particularly striking, though, is how restrained but effectively the show weaves in the supernatural into what could work just as well as a regular missing child story. We see the effects of whatever creature is haunting these woods. We hear breaths and watch lights flicker and watch as panicked scientists are seemingly consumed. But Stranger Things achieves most of this through suggestion, with electricity humming or shorting, mysterious agents preparing for something awful and doing things that are even worse, and a mute little girl who appears to have powers of her own.
Eleven is the most fascinating element of this first episode. Without a word from her, “Vanishing” makes you care about her plight, wonder about her connection to these bizarre goings on, and fear who or what might be after her. There’s some kind of linkage between her ability to stop a motorized fan and the lightbulb-blasting effects that whatever’s really happening at the Department of Energy outpost here. There’s also some kind of experiments or other horrors being visited upon her that makes her so ready to run. With those two elements combined, hers is the right mix of sci-fi intrigue and empathy-inducing character introduction.
The chief move that Stranger Things makes in its first chapter is to get us to sympathize with something or someone and then show it tragically taken away. The audience cares about the titular disappearance of young Will Byers not just because it’s sad anytime a kid goes missing or it's easy to feel for his distraught mom and older brother. We care because he had the opportunity to cheat at Dungeons and Dragons and instead offered scrupulous honesty -- because, as Mike points out, he could have saved himself and instead put himself at risk to protect others. We only get a short amount of time with him, but it’s enough to establish that he’s a good kid and understand why his family and cohort are so anxious to save him.
Likewise, we don’t get much of Benny, the restaurant owner. We just see him looking after a young runaway, giving her free food and ice cream, taking care with the woman he thinks is a social worker because he doesn’t want to scare the child who’s unexpectedly come into his care. We see, in just a few short scenes, that he’s a good person, which lets us know, in no uncertain terms, who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, and what’s at stake when the suits come in, guns blazing, and take him out, sending Eleven running.
Maybe that’s the biggest draw here. The setting of a small town in Indiana gives us potential to have a distinctive ecosystem of kids and adults where mysterious things can go down amid cover-ups and disbelief. But it also conveys a certain innocence, a certain uncorruptedness, within this way of life, that tugs at your heartstrings and makes you that much more invested to see if that innocence can be rescued.
The makeshift heroes and unwitting victims in the stories the Duffer Brothers are pulling from have a mixed record in terms of undoing the evil that’s befallen their friends and their town. We can only hope that Will, and Hawkins as a whole, fare better than Benny did. Either way, I’ll keep watching.
[8.1/10] I owe The Owl House an apology. When Luz discovered that Emperor Belos was Philip Wittebane in “Hollow Mind”, I found it anticlimactic. More than that, I didn’t get why Luz took it as such a devastating revelation.
“Thanks to Them” provides a satisfying answer: because she helped Philip find The Collector, because she blames herself for setting into motion all that he’s done since, and because she’s worried her friends will hate her for the part she played in the difficulties that have steadily exploded since.
It’s her big struggle in this season premiere. Belos may have been thwarted, but things seemed potentially dire in the Boiling Isles when they last left, the witchlings are stranded here, and all of Luz’s efforts to find a way back for them have been for naught. It’s understandable that she’d be down on herself, worry that she’s made her friends’ lives worse through her mistakes and association with them. The teenage experience is one of heightened emotions and stepping into the big choices of adulthood for the first time. Luz is sympathetic in her concern that she’s screwed everything up, and relatable in her worry that it’ll make everyone reject her.
This is The Owl House, a warm supportive show, so savvy fans know things are, in all likelihood, headed for acceptance and affirmation rather than guilt and blame. (See also: the endearing part of the “What I did on my summer vacation” montage where Luz comes out as bi to her accepting and supportive mom.) But it’s still a good way to root the epic threats and challenging predicaments of the show’s major arc coming to fruition in something personal and understandable, one of the show’s strengths. It gives the wide-ranging events covered of the show’s new format an emotional throughline that helps the special feel unified.
Honestly, how well The Owl House pulls that format change off may be the most impressive part of an all-around outstanding episode. “Thanks to Them” has to tell a new story in an almost entirely new setting (something the show struggled with in “Yesterday’s Lie”, cross-pollinate a number of characters who’ve barely bumped into one another before, establish the Hexside crew in their new digs, cover the passage of time, resolve Luz and her mother’s reunion, and build toward the series’ endgame with only three installments’ worth of real estate left.
That it could succeed at all with so much ground to cover would be commendable. That it does this all so well, without missing a beat, is a hell of an achievement.
It succeeds in big ways. One of the big boons of the show is that despite the big threats, it’s a cozy show with characters you want to spend time with. “Thanks to Them” doesn’t skimp on the fact that Willow, Gus, and Amity miss their parents, in the same way that Luz missed her mom on the other side of the portal. But it also seems like a blast to basically have a kid clubhouse for several months, with your best friends all living under one roof. The little bits of Willow’s scrapbook, the montage of the crew thinning and working together, the glimpses we get of hijinks make it feel like one big sleepover you’d love to have gotten to join in when you were a kid.
If I had a complaint about season 2, it’s that Gus and Willow’s stories got a little downplayed in favor of other characters, (and to a lesser extent Amity’s stories as well), but I like the collective story they get here. On the one hand, they’re having a blast. On the other, they’re plainly more than a little homesick. On a third (magical demon hand), they’re good kids who are doing their best to adjust and repay Camila’s kindness and cheer up Luz.
One of my favorite parts of this one is the magical shoe being on the other foot here. It’s a shame that The Owl House’s third season is limited to a few specials, because I'd love to see more episodes centered on the witchlings getting used to the peculiarities of the human realm the way Luz did the Boiling Isles. There’s a lot of fun to be had, and even some sweet moments like Luz showing Amity some non-boiling rain. The fact that they have to navigate it in order to solve the rebus puzzle they find beneath the floorboards of the abandoned house serves the humor (from them not fitting in at various human spaces), plot (decoding the puzzle to help locate fuel for another portal), and character (them working together in the hopes of boosting Luz’s spirits.)
There’s some good lore additions going on as well. Masha, the Halloween tour guide and Jacob’s replacement at the historical society all but confirms that Hunter is a clone of Philip Wittebane’s brother Caleb. There’s also strong hints that Belos’ beef with witches stems from the fact that Caleb left him after falling in love with one, which is an interesting angle that would tie into the LGBTQ themes of the series. And, naturally, the reveal that magic comes from the Titan itself, such that mere proximity to TItan’s blood could be enough to get Luz’s powers to work in the human worlds is a hell of a twist.
Those twists have big import for Hunter, of course. As an inveterate Trekkie, I love that he gets obsessed with the “Cosmic Frontier” series (and seems to have admiration for an ersatz Ensign Rutherford). But on a broader level, I like the idea that he loses himself int his world and even cosplays as a way of trying on a different self. More than any of the others, he feels at home here. As he admits to Gus, when eh was in the EMperor’s Coven, he knew who he was and what was expected of him. Now he’s on his own, with the joy and terror of dictating his own destiny and purpose. The idea that ti’s a safe way to try out his true self, with bumpers big enough to keep him safe, speaks to the escape and representation I suspect many viewers feel for The Owl House itself.
To the point, I love how supportive Luz is when she realizes that Hunter literally and figuratively feels more comfortable behind a mask, and gives him one to put him at ease. And there may be no more touching moment in the show than Luz telling Hunter he’s family now, the kind of acceptance and kindness he never got from his biological family, and the poor young man breaking down in tears from the force of the moment.
But as much as I adore Hunter’s progression, I think my favorite part of this one is the exploration we get of Camila. Maybe it’s because I’m a lot closer to her age than Luz’s at this stage of my life, but it’s honestly lovely to get to see things from the mom’s perspective with complexity and empathy.
In particular, I love the choice to account for why supportive, accepting Camila would choose to send her daughter to the human equivalent of a conformatorium camp. Camila’s nightmare about it is heartbreaking. You can see her lauding her daughter’s offbeat creativity, defending her against tsk-tsking parents, and earnestly trying to do what’s best for her little girl.
But you can also see the powers of intolerance and conformity box her in too. You can see the legitimate suggestion from the outside that some of Luz’s “acting out” could be a product of grief over losing her father. You can see Camila trying to keep a stable school environment for her daughter. Most of all, you can see Camila recalling her own bullying as a child (see also: her nervous response to Hunter finding the ostensibly hidden Cosmic Frontier materials), and not wanting her daughter to suffer the same thing.
Seen through that lens, the “reality check” camp is not the oblivious act of a parent who doesn’t get their kid, but instead a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency measure by a loving parent, worn down by the same traditional forces Luz is resisting, trying to protect her child from the worst.
It’s easy for me to sympathize as someone who cares deeply about a bevy of lovable, off-beat youngins’ who come from nerdy stock, since I too worry about the challenges they’ll face in a world that tends to punish, rather than celebrate, difference. And it’s also easy for me to sympathize with Luz, since I too was an offbeat kid whose oddball interests and occasional (read: frequent) lack of tact made it tough to make friends or fit in. This is a familiar story, in a good way, which makes it resonant across the generational divide.
Which is why I like how the climax of this one brings all these threads together to bridge that gap. The return of Belos is terrifying. It’s terrifying because the simple fact of him surviving and making it to the human world is concerning in and of itself. It’s terrifying because he possesses Hunter, once again corrupting this kind soul. And at a base level, it’s terrifying because he returns to his palisman-strocity form, does fearsome battle with our heroes when they’re caught off guard, and most harrowingly of all, mortally wounds Flapjack.
I’m legitimately pretty impressed that a Disney show went there, even if Flapjack’s wounding and death is done in tasteful, impressionsitic terms. It makes sense that Belos would crack into one more palisman. But it feels tragic because Flapjack was this angel on Hunter’s shoulder, nudging him gently toward a better path. It was a pure force for good, one who stayed persistent in its efforts to help when it would have been all too easy to just fly away. Its sacrifice, its willingness to give its life so that Hunter can regain hsi, is an ultimate act of devotion, one made all the more heartening, and all the more heart-rending, by the choices that led Flapjack to that point.
Not for nothing, the battle where Flapjack perishes is another superlative outing visually for the show. The animators always bring their A-game to these big showdowns, and this is no exception. The fluidity of the magical chaos, the fight for the vial of titan’s blood, and the sense of genuine peril is all there in the imagery at play.
But so is the storytelling. Things come to a head when Luz’s role in Philip’s rise comes out in the open. Instead of the judgment and excommunication she expects from her friends, she gets absolution and encouragement. I love the theme expressed in that -- that it is no sin to make an honest mistake, and that it’s a sign of courage and character to keep standing up for what’s right despite that.
There’s a lot of adolescents who need to hear that. It’s easy to beat yourself up for missteps, especially when you're young and everything feels like the end of the world. The idea that it’s okay to mess up, that you can still learn from your mistake, and you don’t have to bear it for the rest of forever, is wholesome and uplifting. And the understanding Luz gets from her support system that Belos’ whole deal is tricking people, and the confirmation that they still love her for who she is, remains heartening.
Especially when it comes from her mom. Camila gets her own bit of redemption here. Let’s be real, it’s nuts that after witnessing a demon monster pop up and threaten the children in her care, Camila’s response is, “Time to take them back to a place where they’ll face many more of them!”
But granting the premise of the show, and understanding that it probably wasn’t going to end in the human realm, it’s just as rousing to see Camila not only support Luz returning to the demon realm, but come join her. It is, in a roundabout way, an apology for trying to send her to the “reality check” camp in the first place, an affirmation of the helpful experiences her daughter had on the other side of the portal, and a crucial recognition that, despite Luz’s sad diary entries, there’s never been anything wrong with who she is.
It’s a lot to tackle in forty-five minutes. And I do still wish we got a full season to explore these ideas in more depth. But damn if The Owl House doesn’t make it look seamless, and feel moving, in the process.
[7.5/10] Failure is hard. It’s an obvious statement, but how it impacts us, how we respond to it, is telling. As we start the last season of Avatar, Zuko won his fight; Aang lost his, but they both feel like they failed.
It’s easy to understand why Aang feels that way. Ba Sing Se has fallen, as the twin grannies declare in colorful fashion, and the Fire Nation looks to have all but fully won this hundred-year war. Aang was there. He tried to fight it, and in the end, he couldn’t prevent it.
So when he has to hide his arrows to pretend to be dead, he pushes back on it, because it’s a reminder that everyone knows he failed, that he failed to stop this from happening 100 years ago, and he couldn’t stop it from happening again. It causes him to push his friends away, to try not to bring them down into his failures or make them, as he tells Katara, have to clean up his mistakes.
Zuko won, and he should feel victory, but his homecoming is bittersweet. It’s too much too soon to say that his conscience is bothering him, but as he returns in glory, he realizes that the event which has restored his honor may be a falsehood. He remembers Katara’s magic healing water, and knows that Aang may still be alive.
That creates a tinge of hollowness to everything. He is once again the Fire Prince. He faces his father, the one who scarred and banished him, and is welcomed, treated as someone who has come of age and regained his birthright.
But Zuko didn’t slay the Avatar. As Azula seems to suspect, based on her giving him the credit, maybe no one did. Though Zuko has everything he wanted so badly for these two seasons – his father’s respect, the chance to return home, the adoration and respect of his people, it all feels empty, because it’s a house built on sand.
Meanwhile, we get little bits of exposition to let us know where we are and how things have changed since we last saw Team Avatar. The conceit that they’ve captured a fire nation ship with Hakoda (Sokka and Katara’s dad) is a good one, providing plausible cover for them to move through the fire nation and creating some new dynamics. Sokka is his usual comic self, taunting and then thanking the irony gods. Toph is still a fun addition to the crew. But the best new detail is the relationship between Katara and her father.
Holy hell Mae Whitman! I must admit I mostly know the voice actress who does Katara from Arrested Development, and almost by design, she doesn’t get a chance to do too much there. But there is such hurt and power in her words when she confronts her father for leaving. There is a depth of feeling in the performance, the way she projects the way that Katara understands that her father had to leave them, but also the pain she felt from having to be separated and, in a sense, dealing with the loss of both her parents. It’s complex writing of a complex situation, and Hakoda’s response is age appropriate and heartening, but man is it a dynamite performance from Whitman.
Her sense of loneliness when Aang leaves speaks to the thing that Aang has that Zuko no longer does – friends and support. Zuko cannot trust his sister, who’s doublecrossed him plenty. He cannot trust his father, who banished him in the first place. Maybe he can trust Mai, since they apparently are an item now, but we only see her offer meager support here.
Aang, on the other hand, has Roku and Princess Yue, to remind him that Avatars before him have failed, and that he’s already saved the world once. It’s easy to lose perspective, carry your failures too heavy, and forget your good deeds. And he also has Team Avatar. The group hug at the end, after Aang accepts his new position in the world and is surrounded by the people who care about him and want to help him, is a sweet image, one that suggests the thing that gets us past failure are the people who love us whether we win or lose.
[7.4/10] The A-story here is a little Chang-heavy for my tastes. I know he’s supposed to be annoying/terrible, especially early on, but his jerkassery and racism makes me really just want him off my screen. But I like it as a Jeff story. Jeff hangs out with Chang to soothe his Spanish teacher after a marital separation and reap the benefits of exemptions from Chang’s draconian assignments, only to realize that he’d rather reunite Chang and his wife and get everyone in class off the hook, than have to continue being Chang’s friend just to reap those rewards. It’s a nice instance of Jeff “kind of” doing the right thing for the group.
The B-story, with Troy and Abed trying to recover their lab rat despite Troy’s rodent-phobia’s is a lot of fun. I like the emotional throughline of Troy having to learn to make sacrifices for his friends rather than the other way around, and the American Tail references worked for me hook line and sinker. Plus, Donald Glover’s line read for his remark about Abed dropping the subject was hilarious. It’s a good physical comedy/noise-making episode for Glover in general.
The C-story was good too! It’s rare that we get a Pierce/Shirley story at all, let alone one that doesn't just devolve into sexual harassment. Pierce’s public speaking tips are fun, and the pair have a good comic energy. Shirley embracing Pierce’s tips at the end, right down to a hilarious “Heeeeeeere’s Brownie!” reference, and succeeding, was a good beat.
The more marginal stuff in the episode is all good too. I like the running gag about Pierce thinking Jeff’s ability to get laughs comes from his chair. People pointing out Jeff’s fake outrage and argument tactics is superb. The Dean’s “go green” efforts are a hoot, right down to the “This better not awaken anything in me” line. And the montage that connects Chang’s salsa dancing, Shirley’s presentation, and the meaningful “Somewhere Out There” duet is very well done.
Overall, too much time with Chang, but otherwise a very nice episode.
