"Look at me! I have so little impact that when I'm gone, it'll be like I never even existed! Doesn't that sound fulfilling?""The Stink" is sort of fascinating to me. Whereas I can chalk my more impartial reaction to episodes like, say, "The Pact" to their more derivative material, "The Stink" is its own beast with an interesting satirical target—my brain in the middle of exam-prep mode (compounding onto my already-existent propensity to over-explain) wants to label it "hypocritical environmentalism" which isn't quite right—but something about it never really worked. It simply didn't add anything new, especially in regards to Mr. Small, feeling weirdly stale despite otherwise going all-in.
That's not to say that Gumball balked at the chance to play with its commentary, because it found a great equilibrium in deploying its satire without any heavy-handedness as to ensure its failure. Writing an episode about environmental issues is a task that almost always results in a stilted PSA, but the show knows better, concentrating on the moralistic dilemmas of them as opposed to the good-old "We suck at taking care of the Earth" shtick. And true to fashion, we don't really end up with anything more by the end of the episode; "The Stink," in other words, is the show's latest deep-dive into cynicism, and it's particularly raw.
With that in mind, I think the first half of the episode was the most successful. While it aligned more with the usual tone of the show without being much of a departure from the norm, it was a fun exercise in flipping through as many targets as possible and nimbly taking strikes. Granted, the main crux of Gumball and Darwin's argument—that nothing is truly without a footprint if you draw everything out—is overplayed and expected, but all of the small details were enjoyably incisive. That Mr. Small's favorite organic supplier and tea shop are both quietly subsidiaries of Chanax is a nice burn, and the show piles on by highlighting their shadier business practices. Is it preposterous for someone to end up being charged extra for those fuzzy feelings on the inside? Yes. But it's not far off from how the industry actually works, and I appreciated the nod. The specificities Mr. Small delves in, too, as to disprove his policy of not harming a single living thing by means of ridiculous technicalities, are pretty fun too.I'm not as sold on the second half of the episode, though. What it sets up is interesting, with Mr. Small basically being chewed up by nature over and over again by increasingly innocuous creatures; the very moral principles he follows in looking out for the world are pathetic in the face of how the world actually works, and it's a delightfully harrowing realization. But the show never really focused on how his character was degraded by the circumstance, and right when it gets engaging, the focus shifts back to Gumball and Darwin.
It's not that they don't work, but they are by far the least interesting element of this episode, and there's not enough going on around them to make up for that. The chase sequence suffers a lot, too, in its predictability. We know the creature chasing the kids is going to end up being Mr. Small, so it's just a matter of waiting for the reveal, which takes a bit too long to reach and without much of a pay-off. The ultimate ending, though, is a nice return to the show's sharpness, with Mr. Small accidentally killing a mythical creature he admired from the start of the episode with a trap he had previously set up. At this point, even his return to moral principles fails him, so he's just left returning to life unchanged, settling on lesser harm over the unachievable belief of no harm at all."The Stink," as an episode, is fine, and it does what it wants, but there's something about it execution-wise that just feels a bit shallow. I'm not saying that episodes have to always bring something new to the table to work (like "The Anybody"), but there's even less here to really appreciate. It's a surface-level take on something that we already understood of the show's characters, and that sense causes the episode as a whole to slowly fizzle out. That doesn't equate to a dud, but as a whole, there's just not much to say.
Notes and Quotes:-There are separate recycling bins for paper, plastic, cards, greeting cards, cardboard, board games, storyboards, metal, heavy metal, thrash metal, rock, soft rock, soft toys, and bees. I wish I was in the writer's room when they chained all that stuff together, clears throat and gestures at blank résumé
-I think there was a slight issue here, though, in spinning Gumball as recklessly sanctimonious without much of a purpose. I have a generally high tolerance in terms of characters being depicted as unflattering, because that mirrors reality (nobody's perfect), but in "The Stink," he just didn't really serve a purpose in aggressively trying to disprove Mr. Small. Sure, he has a turnaround that prompts him and Darwin to try and find him, but there's no reason he has to take on the attitude in the first place, and it wasn't exactly a necessary evil for the episode to work. (With that being said, I loved that first scene of Gumball ceremoniously attempting to recycle a bottle, making for a nice and quick character study with a gorgeously-animated nebular pastiche.)
-The animation recycling joke took me a second to get but it was brilliant. I don't miss you, Season 1.
-"Why did you run?!" "You counted down! Who does a countdown to nothing?!" "Lonely people on New Year's Eve?"
-"This has been the hardest eight months of my life." "You've been gone half a day." "I fear I will not survive another winter."
For the last Gumball review of "The Shippening," CLICK HERE.
Hey, wait a minute. I thought this was pre-empted by yet another episode of Teen Titans Go! Where did you see this?
ReplyDeleteIt got leaked.
DeleteI didn't think you were going to give this episode such high note considering how it was overtly conventional, it didn't have a very humor or a highly exciting plot.
ReplyDeleteSeems that they are playing it safe again, not venturing into experimenting more risky ideas but it was understandable in this chapter that they did so because talking about enviromentalism without being PSA is no small merit, and that's what surprised me.
This episode never builds big expectations but nevertheless I wasn't that disapointed with the ones that I had. The fact that "the stink" didn't involve many or any fart jokes or cringe humor was good, the problem is that, after seeing where was the story going it suffered of predicability, I even though about the outcome of seeing the real creature after discovering Mr Small wasn't one, it's naturally what is expected to become the punchline. It was the cynicism of it all and how it didn't end up being PSA-ish but rather a satire of those exagerated enviromental atitudes that some companies/people agressively promote what gives this episode some merit.
The animation recycling joke? do you mean the one when Mr Small was talking and they used the same old background? Yes, that was clever but I feel this lacked of clever jokes overall resulting derivative, although there are ones that work at the begining, most of them when they are at the store bashing tne scheme of those eco-friendly overprice stores, I also liked the Star Treck reference but I admit it wasn't that funny for the ones who don't know the show.
Quoting the words of a friend with an account of Glass, this episode is the next in a series of episodes with a steady quality, good and enyojable, but doesn't excels and isn't part of the best of what this show has offered.
A "B-" for me isn't a particularly high note; it suggests that an episode is passable, if not overly conventional. But as you said, "The Stink" just doesn't find a strong tone in the same way that other conscientious episodes do, and that causes the episode to have a very watered-down feel to it. The show needs to reflect more of its own identity in a scenario like this, and the lack of that distinctness creates an air of pleasant familiarity but nothing else.
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