Amphibia Review: Lost in Newtopia / Sprig Gets Schooled

"TEAM P'ANNE FOR LIFE!" "...Our team name's bad." "Yeah, could be better."

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As Hop Pop says at the start of this week's batch, we've got a few days to kill before Amphibia dives back into the nitty-gritty, and that can only call for one thing: filler episodes! Sure, the term has some fairly negative connotations, but there's nothing wrong with loosening up and being able to indulge in the sense of fun at the heart of the show. That's something that both "Lost in Newtopia" and "Sprig Gets Schooled" set out to do, and while they're no great shakes, they make for pleasing enough episodes to hold us over while continuing to key into the fun in our change of setting.

"Lost in Newtopia" feels like a direct follow-up to last week's "The Plantars Check In," giving Anne and Polly a chance to cut free in Newtopia and try to experience the city as locals (and even, amusingly, holding Sprig back after his big solo outing). It's a pretty decent conceit, and most importantly, a great opportunity for Amphibia to actualize the sorts of ideas that powered its conception in the first place; more than any other episode, it's most certainly an ode to Matt Braly's childhood trips to Thailand and the outsider feelings that coincided with them.

While that undeniably adds to the intrigue of "Lost in Newtopia," the main power source of the episode is the infectious energy between Anne and Polly as they twist their foibles with Newtopian culture into claims of authentic thrill-seeking. Polly, especially, is a character that I've been pretty routinely tough on, but I feel like pairing her up with Anne makes a strong case for her that she can be used to pretty great effect regardless of her shtick. All we've seen from Polly before are episodes built on her being at odds with those around her ("Girl Time," "A Night at the Inn," "Truck Stop Polly"), and that's a strange fate to befall a character who thrives on others; matching her with Anne, then, is a pleasant surprise that pays off in dividends and keeps things cruising along at a fun rate, even if there's not a ton of complexity to the narrative of the episode.

Realistically, "Lost in Newtopia" is nothing more than a chance to see how the characters interact with their new environment, though it lacks any deeper intent, and that feels a little odd for a show like Amphibia that regularly manages to weave something meaningful out of its even goofier plots. The game of the episode is simply a matter of "what goes up must come down": Anne and Polly aim to experience the city as locals while being blind to its culture and peculiarities, causing them to wreck property at best and commit acts of sacrilege at worst. Every scenario is fun, and there's no shortage of hilarious detail work—a tail store clerk joining into Anne and Polly's tail chant for the heck of it, guards calling off their chase after the two due to laziness—but the fact that the episode doesn't have anything to communicate leaves something to be desired outside of the events that bookend it.

Considering his absence across the last few episodes, it makes for a pleasant surprise to see the robot that began its pursuit of Anne and the Plantars in "Fort in the Road" again; the role he'll play in Season 2 is as mysterious as ever, but he provides a nice jolt up top. The little scene between Marcy and King Andrias at the end is a similarly nice surprise that further etches out the connection between the two characters while feeding into the mystique of what the series is setting up. Everything else in "Lost in Newtopia" is trivial, but pleasant.

Similar vibes push "Sprig Gets Schooled" to the finish line, though it suffers from starting at a less engaging place. Being in Newtopia certainly enables Amphibia to play with different storylines than what we could get at Wartwood, but while the idea of Sprig getting enrolled into the most acclaimed university in the region is uncharted territory in the context of the show, it's an awfully uninteresting premise for the most part. We know that Sprig, by virtue of being who he is, won't be able to adapt to his surroundings, and it's pretty easy to recognize what things are building up to as far as a resolution is concerned. The lack of agency Sprig has throughout most of the episode, too, put at the mercy of his uni prep, means he can't commandeer it into anything as delightful as last week's "The Plantars Check In."

What keeps the episode afloat are the moments of heart that manage to penetrate the roteness of its premise. Although Anne and Polly merely dawdle at the sidelines attempting to break into the university in hopes of experiencing the debauchery Anne was promised in movies (an interesting parallel to her faith in the accuracy of low-brow cinema in "Swamp and Sensibility," perhaps), Hop Pop makes the most of the screentime he's given, wallowing in the sentimentality of his belief that Sprig has grown up before his eyes. As funny as it is for him to misinterpret Sprig's misery as happiness, it also speaks to how much of a loving family man Hop Pop is, proud but wistful to see Sprig accomplishing what he never could. That gets mirrored nicely, too, by the fact that regardless of how discontent Sprig is, he wants to pull himself through to make Hop Pop's dreams for his grandchildren come true.

The fact that Professor Herringbone, the headmaster of Newtopia University, is so supportive of Sprig in spite of his quirks is small but sweet as well, keeping "Sprig Gets Schooled" a step above the purely oppressive atmosphere similar episodes in other shows have taken advantage of. Putting all of those character beats together in the climax, with Sprig staging an escape when the university seems to imprison him, allows for a more nuanced ending: Hop Pop concedes that he's not ready to let Sprig go, and in light of Sprig demonstrating his ability to evade campus security, Herringbone assures him that his offer of admission still stands in the future. There's ultimately only so much you can do with the idea at-hand, but Amphibia is able to at least make some nice statements in the process.

While I feel like this was a fairly forgettable week of Amphibia punctuating such a routinely impressive season, there's still no small shortage of things to respect. We'll just see how the show progresses from here, and how it continues to explore its downtime.

FINAL GRADES:
"Lost in Newtopia": B+.
"Sprig Gets Schooled": B.

For my review of the last two episodes, "Scavenger Hunt" and "The Plantars Check In," CLICK HERE.

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