The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Pact

"Well if I go down, I'm taking you with me." "Yeah? Well, if you do take me with you, I'm gonna sit in the back and complain the whole way and keep asking you if we're there yet."

Well, those plot synopses are a bit annoying, aren't they?

Before we discuss anything else, I think it's something incredibly important to address how misleading they are, because all they've done is cause mismatched expectations to emerge, and in this instance, they've helped sink this episode's reception to some extent. And I understand why: it advertises Penny playing a larger role on the front box, but her character is only utilized as much as necessary (that is to say for roughly five seconds of screentime). Even if it's difficult, I don't think we can hold this episode's disregard for the character against it: that was never the direction the show was trying to take.

There's a lot to be said about how Penny just isn't on the writers' minds, and that's a problem in and of itself for sure. But we can't chalk this as a failure merely because some idiot watched two minutes of the episode, assumed it was going to do something else, and haphazardly wrote a rough description. Simply put, you can't evaluate an episode on the basis of that which it wasn't trying to do.

With that being said, though, "The Pact" certainly wasn't anything special, and though it was far from an abject failure, it came across as a rather scattershot effort. Let's chalk it under that "pleasant but forgettable" category.

Final Space: Chapter Seven Review

"I never thought I'd be creating a murder squad with a small boy, but here we are."

Following the events of Chapter Six, one thing became incredibly clear: more than ever, our heroes have to see eye-to-eye. However much chemistry they've established, as I said in the last review, they're a group but not truly a team. With the shake-up that is last episode's ending (I'll just phrase it like that up here so nobody spoils themselves by accident), though, there's no better time to snap the gang into place, and it's an interesting challenge that Chapter Seven nimbly and almost effortlessly rises to.

Even if this a reconstruction period for everyone, Final Space doesn't relish the moment too much, and I say that in the best way possible. Don't get me wrong: the events of last episode are crucial to how things unfold here, with Chapter Seven exploring the effects of the tragedy on its characters, but there's very much a mentality of "one step back, two steps forward." That's not even a thing. Final Space is making that a thing.

So yes, we do see Gary sulking and feeling purposeless, and we see Little Cato's distress mounting as he keeps to himself, but there's also interesting advancements, too. Most significantly, Gary's sentence as prisoner aboard the Galaxy One is over, and Nightfall makes her presence known as she tries to rewrite the future. Beyond just adding a newfound dimension to the episode, though, they're the lens through which these feelings from before become properly realized.

Final Space: Chapter Six Review

"HUE won't let me have a guitar. Do you really think I'm going to HANG MYSELF BY GUITAR STRINGS?!" "Yes, dude." "Yeah, well, you're probably right." 

They should've just gone and fixed the breach.

No, I told myself, I'm not letting this show catch me off-guard. And, to some degree, I succeeded. But then that ending comes in and punches, nay, stabs you square in the gut. But before we get to that, let's go over everything else this episode does right. Even without its ending, it would be as tight a narrative as ever.

Chapter Six is the first episode (and last, but we'll get to that) to put everything in order by unifying our leading cast, allowing us to push onwards on the long-delayed quest to save Lil Cato. In other words, there's a lot on this episode's plate: it's legitimately monumental, signifying a shift in the overall narrative even beyond the obvious (Just wait on it), and we're finally moving from the preliminary rounds of setting the narrative up to the meat of the narrative itself.

Final Space: Chapter Five Review

"Like it or not, we're a team. And you can't spell team without M and E. And you know what that spells? Us."

Chapter Five is an interesting sort of buffer episode. Compared to previous chapters, there's very little to what it sets out to do, with the main focus being the building of trust between Quinn and Gary's ragtag group of unconventional galactic heroes, and it does a stellar (space pun? Maybe) job at that.

Whether or not that ultimately benefits us in the long run, though, is up to contention. For the record, I don't think there's anything wrong with episodes like this, and to its credit, it did get things done. But with a focus leaning on the characters and how affected they are by their surroundings, "Chapter Five" feels like a change in pace that, while not detrimental by any means, stands out a little.

That's certainly an odd, and I'm sure picky, argument, but Final Space, by its nature, is a gripping space opera; it plays out with all of its episodes bearing equal weight, with the constantly-evolving status quo being the propeller. "Chapter Five" is a good episode, by all means, but it doesn't quite fit as snugly into the overarching story the show is trying to tell; more than anything else, it fills in blanks instead of introducing us to anything new. And again, it does a knockout job at that, but not better than any of the other episodes. It feels like Final Space Lite.

Final Space: Chapter Four Review

"Commencing rescue. Commencing destiny."

First of all, I'd just like to offer a highly profound thank you to Olan Rogers, who was such a gentleman that he actually gave me access to all of the episodes through to Chapter Six for reviewing purposes! That's such an utterly humbling thing for him to do, and in a strange way, it makes me feel more committed to my self-imposed job than ever. It almost makes it feel like what I do is... credible. Which is an odd sensation that I really dig.

Of course, with that, there's also the consequence of simply becoming a parrot who talks about how amazing Final Space is for the sake of stroking Olan's ego, but that ruins the point of why I'm here in the first place, and that's not what he wants to see. With that being said, though, the argument is a little difficult to defend considering how genuinely solid this episode was regardless.

That's not to say that it didn't yield a few issues, however. Chief among them is that, since this marks the reunion of Gary and Quinn, we get to see more of the side of Gary from the first chapter that didn't work so well, finding him as a klutzy and haphazard womanizer without a lick of poise. Sure, watching Gary's melodramatic notions is fun, especially as he Footloose-dances his way across the ship filled to the brim with woeful angst, but the struggle persists between how much it does for the narrative and how much it detracts from it.

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Anybody

"Tell me again what he looked like?" "He's about yea tall with a hat, a green shirt, and an orange tie." "Okay buddy, I'm gonna give you a ten-second head start."

If there's any character I would've chalked down as "Most Unlikely to Make a Successful Comeback," Clayton would probably be near the top of the list. He's always been a very one-note character by design with one defined quirk: the compulsive need to consistently be lying in an attempt to make his boring life more interesting. As far as hooks go, he's got one of the weakest that the show's got to offer, so going into "The Anybody," I was fairly skeptical.

Then again, Season 6 truly is all about fun surprises, and against all odds, the episode was quite a treat. I suppose it makes sense; even though Clayton's kept a low profile for a while, the show's coming back with one final idea for him, and even if it doesn't have that same sense of closure as a lot of the other character-based episodes this season, it's closer in spirit with a concept to squeeze everything we can out of Clayton once and for all. And squeeze out they most certainly did.

I think what's interesting about "The Anybody" is that it acknowledges the limits of Clayton as a character; the full extent of who he is has already been explored in "The Move," where we, more than less, piece together why he's a pathological liar and bear witness to his internal struggles when that status is challenged, and this episode doesn't try to do anything new so much as hone in on what the show has.

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Candidate (A Second Opinion)

“They say lions throw their cubs off ravines and only raise the ones strong enough to climb back up. Well firstly, that’s not true and it’s also completely irrelevant to the story, but it makes for a cool opening!”

Hey! I'm doing this whole thing a bit late. I was super tired yesterday from the past week, and then my WiFi got torn to shreds by high winds through all of Saturday, so that was a lot of fun. There's not much to this post, though I will inform you that the meat of all of my thoughts is right here: