The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Revolt

"STOP OBJECTIFYING OBJECTS!"

Remember how, in my last review, I said that when all is right, Gumball's writers sure know how to make an episode fly? Yeah... this is what happens when that fails.

Gumball is, indisputably, a show that puts comedy first, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Whereas cartoons are generally headed in a more serious, narratively-driven direction, Gumball is one of the last strong shows working episodically with the central focus of being fun, and that prevents it from being as weighed down as its contemporaries in the sense that anything can happen. While that usually plays out to the show's benefit, though, there's a lot of ways it can go wrong, with writers instead using the opportunity to go sloppily apeshit in pursuit of some self-destructive idea that works against the show, because as I said, anything can happen, right?

"The Revolt" isn't just one of those episodes: it's the epitome of everything going as roughly as you could imagine. It suffers every single issue that a Gumball episode possibly could, and whereas there's quite a few episodes that unfortunately fall victim to a few issues, "The Revolt's" licked a few too many doorknobs, and it's just sweltering with grotesque infection.

And here's the thing: I don't particularly enjoy having to write negatively about the show, especially in knowing that so many people who work on it appreciate these reviews, so let me be clear: I, by no means, am out to insult anyone's work. Creating an 11-minute episode of a show from start to finish like Gumball is hard to do, and the fact that the writers, artists, animators, and everyone else involved are able to create something like it is a testament to how wonderful of a show they can put out. But as much as I hate disparaging an episode like this, I'd hate lying to myself about it more. When the show's crawling up its own ass with a little too much excitement, I want to be able to call that out: I'm pulling the red card on this one.

This is what happens when the show wants to make a point but has no idea how, and ultimately favors humor instead that works against said point. It's a rare occurrence, but this time, "The Revolt" attempts to call out virtue signalling and speaking on behalf of those being discriminated against, though through the conceptualization of Darwin attempting to deliver peace unto the mistreated objects of Elmore. There's already a sort of logical inconsistency to the episode—what even qualifies as an object? Why are some objects alive while others are dismissed even by the objects themselves?—and while that serves to demonstrate how ill-advised of an idea "The Revolt" has from the get-go, it's one of the episode's lesser problems.

There's definitely a satirical point "The Revolt" wants to make, and it had a chance of being fairly incisive, but it serves no point in the plot aside from advancing it into irrelevance with the reveal that the objects decide to revolt when they discover that people have a tendency to throw them out while they're still usable. Suddenly, none of the character work Darwin is forced to carry even matters. None of the build-up or conversation points Gumball brings up over the past seven minutes even matters. Nothing about the episode matters. It's lazily nihilistic, disguising its apathetic efforts as satire when it has no message it wants to get across. Cue the episode doing another of its numerous montages, though this time set to jarringly unfit synth music.

I suppose it was pretty clear upfront that the nexus of this entire episode was some writer coming up with the phrase, "Stop objectifying objects," and everyone else just piling on ideas until there was enough bloat to make an episode out of it, but the ending is so out-of-sync with the rest of the episode that anything it had going for it completely dissipates, and all we're left with is Darwin being sodomized with a pencil, which... I feel like there's a sort of gross, gray area for that type of joke, though I suppose even the faintest bit of shock to the system, by that point, warrants merit. It certainly doesn't help wash down the fact, though, that the writers have fallen back on their habit of taking advantage of the status quo in lieu of making an ending that reconnects the dots.

And yet I feel like the most disappointing thing about "The Revolt" is how much effort was put into such a dully-executed idea. The idea that the objects of Elmore have life is already derivative in and of itself, being pulled directly from Season 2's "The World," but no matter how decadent this episode tries to get to elevate that premise, with its dramatic Les Misérables-esque musical numbers, and countless montages, and attempts at dark and off-color humor, there's no chance for it to succeed. Instead, it exists in the shadow of other episodes that it wishes to join as an ambitious misstep.

Notes and Quotes:
-"Just let them do their jobs. Trying to convince them otherwise is like trying to stop a soccer mom from asking to speak to the coach: it's not gonna happen."
-"Look, these objects don't know any better. They're like British people in the sun: they don't miss what they've never seen."
-Personally for me, the only joke that really registered was Gumball ordering a new phone and discarding his own one in only a few seconds at the worst time possible: quick, to-the-point, and silly.
-Gen Z Reality Check: I'm sure many other people my age have explored themselves and their anatomy with pencils, but keep it dull. Or use one of those Squiggle Wiggle pens.

FINAL GRADE: D+. This is the worst episode of the series that I've ever had to review. While "The Revolt" can easily be accepted as simply a mistaken one-off that doesn't represent the quality of the series as a whole (and in the grand scheme of things, that's what I'm choosing to do), it just serves to exemplify what happens when every little thing about Gumball goes wrong, with misplaced intentions getting lost in pursuit of poorly-constructed humor. While I might've been a little bit less critical of the episode had it come out earlier in the show's run, the fact that it exists as one of the last entries into the series makes it nothing more than an unequivocal disappointment and a weirdly graceless blemish on the series' name.

For the last Gumball review of "The Heart," CLICK HERE.

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