Amphibia Review: Quarrelers Pass / Toad Catcher

"Do you have to do this every single time?" "Honestly yes, repetition helps it stick."

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A new week, two new episodes. It's hard to really draw a connection between our latest set, but to me, they represent the show at its highest degree of functioning, yielding a solidly fun, character piece for the Plantars in the front, and setting the stage for the quieter ongoing narrative going on in the back. Let's dive in.

"Quarrelers Pass" is the more inconsequential of the two episodes, but it's still enjoyable in its own right, despite being fated to fly under the radar. Its set-up is incredibly simple: Sprig and Polly's quarreling reaches the point of becoming a hindrance on Anne and Hop Pop's enjoyment of their journey to Newtopia, and when their path splits into two (though with both looping back in on each other), they decide to separate themselves from the pair and set them out on Quarrelers Pass, "a road of reconciliation for weary travel mates." Sprig and Polly, then, are tasked with hashing out their problems and getting to the other side in one piece.

In light of how I was fairly critical of Polly in her episode from last week, "Truck Stop Polly," I think it's worth commenting on the fact that she works in this episode to astonishingly great effect. Part of that is probably how much of the episode is ingrained in her caustic tone and unstable relationship with Sprig, which is the perfect vehicle for her personality quirks, but more importantly, it's neutralized by Sprig clapping back. "Truck Stop Polly" struggled because there was nothing she could bounce off of, instead having her spend almost 11 minutes talking to herself, but we're able to hit the ground running with someone else in the mix to help power the episode along and create a fun dynamic.

It also helps that, even if there's a lot of bickering between Sprig and Polly, "Quarrelers Pass" is quick to ensure that proceedings won't just consist of them being angry for 11 minutes. Instead of relishing in their antagonistic relationship, it actually has them get into a nice stride throughout most of their journey and indulge in a fun friendship song, only to pettily burn out that goodwill in a critical moment. Considering that outcome would be the same if Amphibia instead opted for a hate-fest, I feel like there was a nice level of maturity to how it went about with those themes and circumvented the potentially tedious nature of its conception.

I also quite liked how the idea of quarreling in general exceeded merely Sprig and Polly's conflict. While a part of me was expecting that Anne and Hop Pop, separated from the two, would end up erupting into some unprecedented spat, "Quarrelers Pass" opted to instead have Hop Pop be awkwardly and hilariously inept at small talk in his inability to cope with the silence. No, the episode decided that it would extend those themes through to our monsters of the week, Lysil and Angwin, a pair of conjoined olm siblings intent on luring and eating Polly and Sprig... but just as prone to squabbling. It's always nice when Amphibia actually makes its monsters play into the themes of their episodes, enabling everything to go nicely and charmingly full-circle while finding a more interesting well of jokes it can play off of. Perhaps it's my lack of perceptiveness, too, but the twist that Sprig and Polly's newly-revealed knack for doing impressions would end up saving their butts in the climax—mimicking the voice of the olms to make them get into a violent fight with one another—made for a pleasant and pretty awesome surprise.

"Quarrelers Pass" doesn't necessarily offer anything too new in the grand scheme of things; the most important revelation being that it marks that Anne and the Plantars have reached the midpoint of their journey to Newtopia. It's just another nice chance to be able to comment upon how our cast is faring over their adventure, and it does so with some nice surprises. While it feeds into my opinion that Season 2 is less concerned with reinvention than perfection of its formula, it at least ensures Amphibia will always be satisfying, if not game-changing.

We're all here for "Toad Catcher," though. Everything on the Sasha front has been pretty quiet this season—the opening credits have been adjusted to feature Sasha and Anne's duel, and a flashback to "Reunion" in the season premiere ensures that their climactic fight still weighs on her mind—but this is the first concentrated effort of (I'm assuming) a handful of episodes over the next season that'll document her return to prominence and eventual confrontation with Anne. So yeah, there's a lot going on here. I think the easiest way to discuss it, at least for my purposes, is a three-pronged approach: each of the three characters it's centered upon are in their own world and fulfilling their own purpose to some extent, and I think it's best to address those individually.

Let's start with Grime, the once-feared, ruthless leader of Toad Tower and the entire valley... and now, having lost his power and become a fugitive, a miserable neckbeard obsessed with Suspicion Island. While I could see an argument made that the reveal effectively cheapens his character, I see it more as a fun way to ease us back into the swing of things; "Toad Catcher," after all, is all about starting from the ground up. The meat of the episode is all about rekindling his desire to restore what once was, even if what he ultimately does for Sasha is perhaps more profound than his own narrative here.

Beleaguered by Sasha's constant efforts to revitalize him, he tells her, point blank, to stop hiding from her problems. She's not upset that she lost the duel to Anne. She's upset by the long-standing effects of the confrontation and the friend that she lost in the process, and getting knee-deep into training and trying to revitalize Grime is just her way of shoving those frustrations down. I think now's probably as good of a time as ever to address Amphibia's occasional explication problems: the show often leans on having some of its characters unravel the complications of others to instill them with some sort of newfound confidence or moment of emotional vulnerability. I think that can play well into comedic moments, but not every character has to be a trained psychoanalyst keen on dissecting our main characters. Amphibia is certainly capable of showing over telling, but its need to hammer certain points home can sometimes feel like a quick means of resolving the issues at-hand or short-cutting into a deeper moment of introspection. It works well enough here, a combination of Sasha's issues being fairly easy to read into and Grime's proven intelligence, but be confident, show: we're not in the training wheels phase anymore.

On the other hand, Amphibia feels very self-assured in the introduction of its latest new player and predestined Internet newt waifu (waifewt?), General Yunnan, a badass newt warrior out to claim the bounty on Grime's head. For however much loopiness she might have, obsessively repeating her titles ad nauseam to make her credibility known and providing a lot of "Toad Catcher's" comedy, there's a lot more to how she ticks that ensures she won't just be some wacky bounty hunter. It's not just that she's a legitimately formidable opponent who's only weakness is her hubris; it's that she's a bundle of psychotic energy thirsty for advancing her sense of prestige at no cost. (She, notably, has no hesitation in taking Sasha out alongside Grime as long as she gets what she wants.)

Yunnan stresses that having an army slowed her down, and it's clear from that alone that she's not a virtuous figure merely fighting the good fight; she's a highly-technical killing machine, and I think that's a fantastic decision to make that pushes her even beyond what Grime ever was. Sure, she might've been hoisted by her own petard in a fairly anticlimactic defeat at the end of the episode, but she'll return, I can only hope, to continue to muddy the waters of "good" and "bad."

That also feeds into the belief I hold that Sasha isn't being primed to become the series' villain; more than anything else, she's Amphibia's tragic casualty. It's smart that whatever potential Sasha had to recognize that she was an inconsolable jerk that Anne would be better off without after "Reunion" has only grown rotten and given rise for more hatred to fester, but that makes Sasha more of a Sisyphean figure than anything else. She's cursed to operate on her understanding of how the world works even if Anne has inadvertently invalidated it.

In the wake of the broken pieces of her life, Grime is the only one she knows that she can count on, and she feels an obligation to protect him within an inch of her life and enable him to live out his fullest potential. By the end of the episode, too, she succeeds: Grime will raise an army and storm the capital, fating a future reunion with her once-best friend. She's clearly struggling and very much hurting, hesitating to annihilate an Anne dummy in her training with as much ease as her Plantar stand-ins and looking at a Polaroid of her, Anne, and Marcy with a complicated sense of longing, but it's yet to be seen if her emotional wounds could ever be reconciled, or if they'll merely scar. (Well, barring the scar she already has... which somewhat invalidates whatever poetic musing I'm striving for.)

All things considered, Season 2 certainly has a sense of direction, but it's hard to say if it'll inch above the quality of the preceding season or merely match it. At the very least, with its stakes higher and its characters more determined than ever, whatever we'll building towards will, no doubt, be bombastic.

FINAL GRADES:
"Quarrelers Pass": B+.
"Toad Catcher": A.

For my review of the last two episodes, "Truck Stop Polly" and "A Caravan Named Desire," CLICK HERE.

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