Amphibia Review: Contagi-Anne / Family Shrub

"Wow, that's uncharacteristically generous of you."

Amphibia episodes tend to play like extended proverbs and life lessons. No matter how complex the episode, there's a basic sense of lesson-learning crucial to each of them. From the very start with a basic but cleverly-subverted message about not judging books by their cover, to "Breakout Star" teaching you to never forget where you came from, there's a sort of fortune cookie mentality, with each episode dispensing some nugget of uncomplicated wisdom on its way to the finish line. It's never to the expense of the material of the show itself, and it allows for a basic throughline of optimism that connects every episode, but at a certain point, you wonder if there's really any other mode that Amphibia can switch into.

"Contagi-Anne" is, in that respect, as straightforward in its lesson-learning as it can get. Instead of helping out her new family with protecting their crops during the worst rainstorm of the year, Anne decides to fake coming down with a bad case of the Mocha Lattes, but as a result of her refusal to lend a helping hand, all the other Plantars get legitimately sick, and it's her job to take care of them. That's a fine bit of situational irony in and of itself, but there's the extra step taken of having all of them come down with a far worse ailment: a deadly disease called Red Leg, which turns you red from legs up until you croak. (Heh, frog puns.)

Amphibia Review: Dating Season / Anne vs. Wild

"Alright, boy, go get that lucrative business relationship!... I mean... romantic relationship! Saved it."

"Dating Season" and "Anne vs. Wild" are, generally speaking, more traditional episodes of the show, but they're both looking to shake up the status quo in interesting ways, with the former seeking to expand upon the show on a more developmental level with its characters, and the latter taking the show's most explicitly narrative-driven stride yet. They're nothing too grand on their own, but they're the stepping stones to greater things, and suggest that, sooner or later, this season is gonna experience some pretty serious shifts, and the story lurching in the background of the show is preparing to jump out into the forefront.

"Dating Season" is, by far, the more simple of the two. While most previous episodes of the show have put Anne in the spotlight, "Dating Season" decidedly puts Sprig first, and it's an exciting idea for the show to get behind, allowing him to really prove his worth as a character independent of the others. He does a great job, too; the episode cleverly casts almost every other character against him in their encouragement that he pursue his friend, Ivy, but after giving some traditional courtship the good old college try, he decides he's miserable and flees into the forest with her to hang out like a couple of buddies and watch some fireflies.

Final Space Review: The Toro Regatta

"Gary, may I speak in ironics? You're a prisoner, once again." "Wow, freakin... hilarious insight, H.U.E."

It's the dawn of a new season, and Final Space is shaking things up. Gone are the cold opens of Gary floating through space in the last 10 minutes of his life. Gone is the overproduced, CGI opening sequence, replaced with a qu⁠ick, to-the-point logo. Some new, exciting names line Final Space's post-intro crawl credits⁠—among them Ashly Burch, Ron Funches, Jane Lynch, and headline status for perennial bit-player Conan O'Brien—while others have gone away—Coty Galloway, most noticeably, for obvious reasons. Basically, this is a new era for the show, and it's time for it to really prove itself. Luckily, "The Toro Regatta" plays to the show's strengths, even if it's a low-key re-entry to the universe of Final Space.

That's almost surprising considering how intense the last episode was, the dramatic fight between Gary's ragtag crew and the Lord Commander that ended with the team fractured and otherwise presumably left for dead. "The Toro Regatta," though, is quick to fill us in on the questions "Chapter Ten" didn't answer: Gary's limp, near-dead body is sucked into a trash-collector spacecraft, and Lil Cato was similarly picked up, dropped at the feet of Clarence, a seemingly-minor character from Season 1 who now puts them into servitude with a brand-new, 20-year prison sentence. (H.U.E. also returns, now in the form of a bipedal robot, as does K.V.N., much to everyone's immediate dismay.)

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Inquisition

"It's better this way."

You know an episode is a bit of a head-scratcher when you just sit back and don't know how to really comprehend what just happened, so I'll just start with a basic, two-word sentence. Cliffhangers, right?

Cliffhanger endings are scary, especially when you compound that with them being an unequivocal downer. Everything about "The Inquisition" throws the future of Gumball, not just as a series but as a franchise (if movie rumors turn out to be true), into doubt, and whether or not the finale yields anything else determines how much its ballsiness pays off. Before we really get into the nitty-gritty of all of that, though, and of all the abstract questions raised by the episode, by the show, and by the people behind the show itself, let's just talk about the episode for a minute, because finale or not... this is still a review. "The Inquisition" is fantastic.

Warning: major spoilers. You knew this.

It's hard to know just how much of the past six seasons of Gumball were really building to this exact point, but everything about the premise, and how it becomes increasingly dark and twisted, is perfect. Not only is the show tackling untapped territory which, at this point in the show, is sort of an intrinsically exciting rarity, but it's a master-class in deconstruction, with its humor more meta than ever before. This time, Gumball subverts its own visual identity, with its vibrant cartoon characters existing in a photorealistically-rendered world, by acknowledging that its characters are an anomaly. While their irregularity and individuality makes them charming and who they are, it also means that, as their world comes to a screeching halt, none of them will survive.

Amphibia Review: Anne Theft Auto / Breakout Star

"Thanks for helping me, guys." "That's what we're here for." "Not me. I'm here for the drama."

"Anne Theft Auto" and "Breakout Star" are two incredibly different beasts—even moreso than other episode pairings last week—but in spite of their differences, they form an effective pair, playing to different strengths entirely and ensuring that, when put together as a double-feature, they're all-encompassing of everything great about Amphibia at this point in time.

"Anne Theft Auto" is perhaps the more traditional of the two, focusing on Anne and Sprig on another misadventure, this time taking ol' Bessie (the Plantar family snail) for a ride without reading her instruction manual, which Hop Pop makes a requirement. Anne's reprehensibility is probably her leading trait, and it's a somewhat predictable means of driving some conflict and lesson-learning into an episode, but "Anne Theft Auto" is able to nail it because it doesn't just save those morals for some last-minute resolution out of a botched attempt to solve her mistakes as usual. When she and Sprig take her off-road, leading to Bessie retreating into her shell and effectively leaving the two trapped in the woods, there's no easy escape, and sending out Sprig to get Hop Pop and solve her problems only goes so far. (In a fun twist, one of the townsfolk that he mocked in an act of road rage earlier is his only chance of hitching a ride to Hop Pop, and he gets punished accordingly in the form of the most nightmarishly slow ride of his life.)

Amphibia Review: The Domino Effect / Taking Charge

"Welcome, brother, to the Church of Cute!" "Uhh, this a cult thing?"

For better or worse, Amphibia's very much in its first season, and while it's been advantageous on the character front, working hard to solidify each character and demonstrate their chemistry, the episodes through which they've been demonstrating their worth, for the most part, feel safe. I don't find that lack of ambition surprising, though: Amphibia is accomplishing everything that it has to with aplomb, carving out a distinct universe and tone that makes it stand out from other, like-minded shows, and leaving an impression is the earliest sign that a show's getting somewhere.

Unfortunately, though, episodes like "The Domino Effect" are a reminder that we're still in the show's first phase. As I mentioned last time, there's a formula the show's been using where an object that once seemed insignificant suddenly comes out of nowhere and saves the day, and lo and behold, Anne's toy mouse gets to hold that coveted role for this iteration, though with an unfortunate lack of unpredictability to make it at least an engaging conclusion.

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The BFFS

"What are you doing?" "Oh, just looking for a darn to give."

It's so weird to think that we're one episode away from the end of the series, and that, come the 24th, I'll never write a standalone review of the show ever again. Certainly not helping with that general weirdness is the fact that "The BFFS" doesn't feel like the penultimate episode the show. In fact, it barely feels like anything. At best, it feels like a disappointment. Maybe I just didn't have enough darns in my darn pocket, but this was a strange one, and not necessarily in a great way.

Certainly not helping is the premise of Gumball's first best friend, Fuzzy, knocking on his door one day, with the two reconnecting, much to Darwin's immediate discomfort. There's a lot wrong about the premise itself in that it forces us to pretend that there's a logical reason Gumball would even have a best friend as a toddler that went completely unmentioned over the past 238 episodes, let alone that friends you have as a toddler don't really add up to anything, because we all know that toddlers are stupid. (I said it. We were all thinking it.) Even so, though, beyond having to suspend your disbelief, "The BFFS" just feels rocky on a lot of other fronts.

Amphibia Review: Hop Luck / Stakeout

"SON OF A SLUG!"

There's a formula key to what feels like every other Amphibia episode so far: something that once seemed insignificant at the start proves to be crucial to the resolution of each narrative. In "Cane Crazy," Anne's hypnotic pen becomes a commodity to pay for reparations to Loggle's damaged shop; in "Flood, Sweat, and Tears," Anne and Sprig's pillow-fighting becomes an invaluable asset in the climactic fight sequence; and now, with "Hop Luck," Hop Pop's old-fashioned book of advice goes from a relic of the past to a vital source of life-saving advice.

Some adherence to that formula is expected, and I know why the writers are using it for now: it works. It's pacing by-the-books, ensuring that episodes make sense and have a satisfying conclusion. The issue is just that, as someone who gets really into the mechanics of plot devices and how narratives get assembled (I'm a massive writing nerd and I apologize profusely), that means that episodes like "Hop Luck" feel transparent in their lack of adventurousness. Luckily, Amphibia is such a charming and charismatic show that it never impedes on the show's ability to be fun, and Anne and the Plantars' quest to gather pizza ingredients in hopes of winning the town's annual cook-off for the first time is an enjoyable enough ride.

Amphibia Review: Cane Crazy / Flood, Sweat, and Tears

"Oh. Oh, I like this."

While the first episodes of Amphibia more firmly established the show's overarching narrative, "Cane Crazy" and "Flood, Sweat, and Tears" reel it back a little. Anne's got two months before she can embark on her journey to the mountainous edges of Amphibia, so the pair making up today's batch is more of a look into what we'll be getting in the meantime, turning out two serviceable episodes more focused on lighthearted adventures with faint beats of character development along the way. They don't aim high, but they make for satisfying entries more focused on getting us comfortable with the characters and their dynamics than adding anything more pressing into the formula, and that's alright with me.

The first of the two, "Cane Crazy," is by far the least eventful, though that's not an inherently bad thing. Both episodes suggest that Amphibia is subscribing to the "monster of the week" episode formula, but it manages to do so in a fun enough way with plenty of creativity, with Anne accidentally breaking Hop Pop's prized, family heirloom cane. Obviously, Hop Pop would be mad at discovering what she did, and she fears that he'll live up to his threats of kicking her out of his house for misbehaving, so Anne, Sprig, and Polly meet up with the local wood expert, Leopold Loggle, a fun character with some fun eccentricities in his devotion to woodworking and unfortunate speech patterns. He ends up pointing them in the direction of the Doom Tree (which turns out to be a strange tree-insect beast) where the original cane's wood comes from, and they set out to fetch a new branch to replace it.

Amphibia Review: Anne or Beast? / Best Fronds

"Guys! I just had the craziest dream where I was trapped in a world of frog pe— Oh. Right."

Amphibia is a show that I've been patiently awaiting for the past year, which is something of a rarity for me. Although I'm someone who generally likes to think that he keeps his tabs on animation, there's not a lot of projects that have filled me with as much excitement as this one.

We're in what I feel like is a very transitional era in cartoons. This is a point where it's becoming clear which shows in the past few years were the true trend-setters, and a point where animation is becoming increasingly serialized, more intent on telling a longer narrative with dramatic twists and turns that allows for deeper character investment as opposed to the zanier, episodic antics of cartoon's past. There's also been more pushes for diversity in the voices of those creating animated programming, and Amphibia is no exception. It's culled from the mind of Matt Braly, a half-Thai former storyboard artist for Gravity Falls and Steven Universe, basing the show off of his childhood experiences of visiting Bangkok.

Although the influence of the show off of his childhood is currently more subdued (it'll play more of a hand in the show as the season progresses), that sense of being a fish out of a water in a strange world is retained, and the creation of animation's first Thai-American protagonist, Anne Boonchuy (voiced by Brenda Song), is an exciting development: as a person of half-Asian descent myself, let alone also being named Matt, Amphibia had me sold from the start. It helps, too, that if the first two episodes are any indication, we're in for the start of a wonderful new show.

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Decisions

"There! I made a decision to do... exactly what that guy told me... ugh."

Self-awareness in late seasons of a TV show is something of a double-edged sword. In some cases, it comes across as smarmy, making fun of your show's own failings without making any proper amendments to fix them, but in other cases, it's a step towards fixing some deeper-set issues. Whether or not "The Decisions" was able to symbolically fix up Darwin's spotty history as a character over the past few seasons of sidelining, it's far more in the latter lane than the former.

Darwin's always been something of a difficult character for the show to grapple with. While there are some pretty solid spotlights here and there, most recently with "The Sucker," he's relegated to a supporting role without even the faintest bit of influence over what's going on too many times to count, and while he once had a fun level of tact in that role (like in "The Hug," by calling out Gumball's idiocy), the past two seasons have eroded most of that away, making him a pleasant but biteless partner-in-crime. That's what makes "The Decisions" so exciting in its self-awareness: Darwin finally realizes that all he does is whatever Gumball tells him, and he needs to learn how to forge his own path in life.

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.

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Heart

"What seemed sweet has turned out to be lethally toxic, like feeding a chocolate cake to a puppy, next to the tailpipe of a 4x4, in the middle of an oil spill, while reading it Elmore Stream comments."

It's surprising how many recent episodes have made efforts to be legitimately sweet or optimistic in one way or another. "The Heart" is the latest installment to take that direction, serving to bury the hatchet between Mr. Robinson and his toxic relationship with Gumball and Darwin by reaching into the emotional core, or rather the lack thereof, of his character.

It's an exciting development considering how repetitive and nonsensical the Watterson brothers' infatuation with him is. It feels like one of the few major elements from the show's first season that's really survived this far into the program, with episodes centered around him often going in the same direction: Gumball and Darwin give him nothing but love, but he isn't having any of it. "The Heart" reaches an interesting fork in the road, though, by forcing them to realize that Mr. Robinson has never loved them, and it crushes their souls. Not only does that freeze up the normal route these sorts of episodes like to take, but it pushes Mr. Robinson into the spotlight as an unlikely protagonist, and the new angle does wonders.

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Mess

"Ask me for anything you like and I'll buy it for you!" "I would like the golden twinkle in an old man's eye as he holds his infant granddaughter." "What?" 

For whatever reason, Gumball's writers really like making Gumball sleep-deprived for quick jokes. The good news, though, is that they do it incredibly well, and evolving his sleep-deprivation into a full-fledged, conceptual episode alongside Darwin was a smart way to elevate the gag with some new wrinkles added to the formula. Fueled—or, I guess, the opposite of that, really—by a night of video-watching, Gumball and Darwin are tasked with watching Penny's sister, Polly (making her first major appearance in an episode) though they fade in and out of consciousness repeatedly, losing Polly along the way and awakening every minute somewhere else, in the middle of a new scenario with an inexplicable lack of context.

That's the game of "The Mess," and it's a ton of stupid fun. Watching Gumball and Darwin run around at only half of their mental power is already fun enough, allowing for more interesting dialogue and an all-around weirder narrative, but centering it around them attempting (and failing) to babysit Polly adds a nice sense of urgency to everything. It's just a terrible day, but amplified up a thousand times, and that kind of idea is right up the show's alley.

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Web

"Feel the doom impending / 'Cuz stupidity is #trending."

There's a lot of problems with "The Web" in a lot of different directions. This is the series' long-overdue (though not at all necessary) satirical take on the boomer-millennial/gen-Z gap in understanding technology, and while that does allow the episode to find some interesting beats along the way, there's too many compromises being made for certain jokes to land or have any merit.

Not that, realistically, that's anything new for the past season. As much as I will defend a lot of the show's stranger episodes, there's been a concurrent trend of changing core qualities in its characters, most often their intelligence, to make odder premises work. (Think back to "The Wish" just a few weeks ago.) This time, though, Nicole is the unfortunate victim, getting spun into an archetypal boomer parent with a complete misunderstanding of tech terms, and it's a bad look on her and the show.