Summer Camp Island Review: Where's the Confetti (Yeti Confetti Chapter 5)

"Uh-oh! Y'all ready for snow?"

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Season 3, up to this point, has been an interesting beast, and despite my enjoyment, a little bit hard to peg down. Whereas the show's second season was a vibrant effort to take everything about the show and recalibrate it to perfection, Summer Camp Island's third season buries those leads in favor of more pointed explorations of its characters and lore. That's difficult to complain about, really—SCI is no less of a workhorse, determined to challenge itself whenever it can—but it's also turned SCI into a moderately different show with about as many things to like as things to take quiet umbrage with, having been able to take a step back and assess its accomplishments over the past half-season.

"Where's the Confetti," curiously enough, does a nice job of epitomizing those overall trends, a strong and compelling episode on its own that feels a bit perplexing under the weight of the season's ambitions. There are certain expectations that come with an episode like this that the conflicts of the past chapter get resolved, and while "Where's the Confetti" succeeds at that, it feels equally motivated to exist in its own space while paying limited dues to what came before.

There's a bit of circular weirdness to "Where's the Confetti" in that the things that make it enjoyable are also the things that reinforce the season's struggles to be as cohesive as it might like. On paper, everything about the episode makes sense: we're on the final day of Yeti Confetti, with all of the yetis gathered around the sherbet cloud awaiting the snowfall that concludes the holiday, but issues arise out of its refusal to cooperate that Lucy feels obliged to solve. By the episode's end, too, every question from across the episode is answered. It just feels as if the path that it chose to take is too separated from what brought us to this point. The sort of situations that the episode creates are solved in satisfying ways, but also ways that don't feel like they take strong advantage of the show's circumstances. 

Bringing Skadi back to use her brawn on the uncooperative cloud, for instance, is an inspired way as any to plug the character into the show with a new context, and to her credit, she kills; her alternating between brazen confidence and thoughtful self-diagnosis makes for the episode's funniest character work, and it's always fun to see a more commanding voice mixed into SCI. At the same time, though, it feels negligent of the other possibilities the past chapter has opened up, squandering characters like Saxophone and Fife by instead forcing them into an unwanted hibernation. The introduction of Lithophone, a revered yeti elder who only comes out at snowfall to be the first to step in the fresh snow, also adds a bit of organizational weirdness to the episode. There's nothing wrong with Lithophone existing as he does, supplying "Where's the Confetti" with its necessary dramatic pressure, but it further makes the episode's circumstances feel distant from the episodes that preceded it. 

Fortunately, the way "Where's the Confetti" handles Lucy grants it the level of finality that allows it to succeed. Picking up where "Lucy's Instrument" left off, the episode is dedicated to granting her the sort of closure that she deserves regarding not just what her instrument family is, but the validity of her yetihood in general. Validation seems to be this chapter's defining concept, and it's nice to see that be as fruitfully explored with Lucy as it has. Whereas past episodes like "Don't Tell Lucy" had her doubting her connection to others, and "The Sherbert Scoop" had her thirsty for credibility in an advantageous situation, "Where's the Confetti" forces her to confront being labeled legitimately invalid by Lithophone, attributing the sherbet cloud's shyness to her illegitimacy in his eyes.

It's nice to see Lucy thrust into such a situation that she has to define. While Oscar and Hedgehog do their best in supporting roles to assist her, their actions help enable her rather than co-opt her own narrative as they've been prone to doing in the past. Lucy is the only character who can guide the story, and even though Skadi chimes in with defining assistance, she dictates all of the narrative's efforts and faces the brunt of all of its tribulations. While it could be argued that the episode's resolution serves to underplay that notion by having the revelation that Lucy is Bagpipes stem more from a spontaneous occurrence than a personal discovery, it makes sense in the grander scheme of things that she would discover it in as arbitrary of a manner as every other yeti does. And more importantly, the fact that she's managed to unearth something within herself free of the nuances to her thinking that plagued her last episode is solid character development in its own right. She's triumphed over herself, and she's found her yeti family.

Ultimately, the visual of Lucy, embraced by her new woodwind family composed of the characters we've been with along the past five episodes (Saxophone, Fife, Bassoon, and Miss Clarinet) makes for a poignant image to go out on—cute nighttime ceremony aside—but it also serves as a reminder of how segmented the Yeti Confetti chapter felt. That's sort of the give-and-take with how SCI's third season's been going: cute and ambitious as always, but not equating to the sum of its parts. SCI is determined to maintain its signature tone, but it creates an imbalance as it struggles to equate those laid-back sensibilities to the more compelling subject matter at its feet, and the end result has been a season of solid episodes that nevertheless feel like they didn't quite recognize their full potential. 

It's a tough argument to make because of the sort of debate here in terms of what I, as a critic, should prioritize; every episode has scored pretty well from me, and they average out to the highest rating that a season has ever gotten (stat nerdery be damned). On its own individual merits, too, I think that "Where's the Confetti" is a strong episode! But Season 3 is an odd case of the show being torn between its past and its future, yearning to tell more but struggling to devote itself as fulfillingly to that mission as it could. Instead, it's subscribed to the same mentality despite the show calling for a more sharpened approach, and while it's the mentality that's made the first two seasons so enchanting, they come across in Season 3 as occasional shackles. 

We still have a little ways to go with this season, and while it hasn't been as rewarding as I hoped it would be, my appreciation for everything that Summer Camp Island does right remains unswung. The amount of intrigue that the show has built around itself makes for ample kindling to whatever else it has to offer, and that's something to be excited about, right? Here's hoping that Season 3 can finish off, though, with a little more direction.

FINAL GRADE: A-.

For my last reviews of "Sherbet Scoop" and "Lucy's Instrument," CLICK HERE.

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