Amphibia Review: Swamp and Sensibility / Wax Museum

"SWEET TADPOLE MARY!"

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I feel like it makes for an interesting sidenote to acknowledge that, if Amphibia was being churned out at the same rate as last season, Season 2 would've already concluded; instead, though, we've only really gotten to one major narrative shift (in last week's "Toad Catcher"), with the show as a whole cruising along at a nice steady rate that I feel has really assisted in my ability to assess the show with contentedness. It's nice to get a better idea of what the show is supposed to feel like, unwinding on its own terms without the contrived urgency that its eight-episodes-per-week release model created, without allowing any episodes so far to really slip through the cracks... not like an episode as notable as "Wax Museum" would really have that concern.

"Swamp and Sensibility" certainly does, not to knock on the episode too much. It's nice but no shake-up, finding our protagonists taking an unexpected pit stop in Ribbitvale, the most expensive town in all of Amphibia, only to unexpectedly spot... One-Eyed Wally? His return is pretty exciting—he's the latest contestant in Season 2's game of recontextualizing the characters we met along the preceding season, and I've always had a soft spot for the guy—and the revelation that he's actually more properly known as Walliam, the progency of the rich Ribbiton family and heir to their family fortune, makes for a nice, unexpected bit of revision.

It threatens to undo some of Wally's charm, but using that bit of personal history to accentuate his love for living like a tramp is as smart of a way to go about things as Amphibia can get. In a lot of ways, it shares DNA with Season 1's fantastic "Wally and Anne," instilling the usually-wacky character with an appreciable level of heart and depth to ensure he's more than just a wild card in the cast. Little touches the episode makes along the way, too, like Wally hiding accordions under the floorboards of every room in the family mansion to keep himself sane, speak to the sweet degree that its conception is realized.

It's all fine character work, even if the episode's plotting feels a bit too standard to really do it much justice. "Swamp and Sensibility," to its credit, frames itself in an interesting way: Anne's obsession with a cheesy movie about a ballerina who reveals her passion for hip-hop dance moves ("From Pointe to Poppin'") convinces her that Wally coming clean about his true self would be met with an equally cloying level of acceptance... and it's not. While the episode finds a fun way to subvert that, with Wally's punishment being that he's effectively locked into the Ribbiton family and forced to live out his rich life, deprived of the estrangement that so often becomes the punishment with these sorts of narratives, "Swamp and Sensibility" doesn't do the acceptance plot one better so much as slightly modify it for its own means.

Instead, the episode unravels into a decisive round of Beast Polo, a nice jolt of fun that simultaneously limits any further exploration of the episode's themes. It's an amusing enough conceit and a fun chance for Anne to redeem herself as Wally's "beast," and perhaps one of its greatest treats is Kermit the Frog doing a delightfully Kermitty voice cameo as the sports announcer, Crumpet, but the spectacle certainly takes away some of the episode's bite by allowing the conflict at the episode's center to be settled in a way that doesn't hinge on Wally's relationship with his father. The conclusion at least makes for a fine capper, with Wally reiterating that he doesn't want to leave so much as be accepted and uncovering his father's love of playing the jug—understated, but sweet. I just wish "Swamp and Sensibility" would've done more to break away from the path well-traveled.

And then there's "Wax Museum," an episode I was as excited about as I was nervous. Crossover episodes, or even just heavily-referential episodes, tend to be a mixed bag because of their crowd-pleasing nature; they satiate fans but risk blind-siding those less acquainted with what's being taken on or otherwise feeling like a forced attempt to bring different universes together. Thankfully, "Wax Museum" settled on a very happy medium, paying dues to Gravity Falls and nodding to its fans while still feeling like an authentic extension of Amphibia's universe that slots perfectly into place.

It certainly helps that Amphibia feels like the most natural successor of Gravity Falls' distinct style amidst its other offspring, with its fascination for fantastical grotesqueries, snappy and sharp dialogue, and the darkness its comedy so easily lends itself to. In that sense, the fact that our thinly-disguised pseudo-Stan and the proprietor of a fancy wax museum, The Curator, slips seamlessly into the fabric of the show should come as no surprise—it feels like a match made in heaven, allowing the show to indulge in its usual charms without ever needing to tweak itself for the sake of accommodation.

"Wax Museum" also manages to find an interesting angle before the festivities can even begin, with Anne being reminded of her status as an oddity and the allure that being a human in a world populated by frogs will innately create. It's something that's been taken for granted quite a bit this season, I feel; barring "Swamp and Sensibility" making jokes about her being some strange, exotic beast, Anne being human has never really popped up as either a complication nor a benefit. That just makes it all the more refreshing, then, for Anne to be fully cognizant of her place in the world to the degree of using it to hustle for money, a slippery slope that leads to her using her potential as a tool in the Curiosity Shack to obtain a Skip Man CD player from her world that she discovers inside.

Perhaps it's a bit regressive for Anne to so easily fall into the Curator's obvious trap, and that's even something "Wax Museum" has the self-awareness to mention in a charmingly Stan-like fashion, but the fact that it's being funneled into such an interesting, conceptual episode (even barring the Gravity Falls aspects of everything) allows it to work for me. One of the most recurrent themes across Amphibia's first season was Anne's status as an outsider and the disenfranchisement that could create, so the sudden breakthrough that she could also be a commodity with such intrinsic value is particularly exciting. In Anne's honeymoon period of understanding the capabilities of that power, too, it's not too surprising she'd be swept into a foolish scheme by her own cockiness.

That scheme turns out to be that the Curator's wax statues are actually real creatures that he captured and encased in a coat of wax to preserve them as part of his collection of oddities... and Anne's his latest victim. With Anne incapacitated, it then becomes the responsibility of the Plantars to rescue her, another cool offering from the episode that we don't get to see too often. Even if the characters don't establish their unique values as individuals too much in the effort, it makes for another nice reaffirmation of Season 2's ongoing quest to demonstrate there's more on the show's mind that just demonstrating Anne's relationship with the world around her. They also allow for a nice, satisfying bit of "what goes around comes around," discovering that melting the encased creatures causes them to return to their original state and, with a freshly-minted vendetta against the man who imprisoned them, drag the Curator off to an uncertain fate.

As much of a minor thing as it is to comment on, too, the doorway of where the Curator gets dragged off to dripping with red ooze, before the Curator corrects that it's merely wax, is as good of a bookend on the crossover event as you could hope for, channeling Gravity Falls' playful "you can't do this in a kid's show" attitude with one final, memorable hurrah. I've seen some people wax (heh) about the shallowness of the episode's referential nature, but it's moments like that which really demonstrate the sort of fun synergy that I think makes the episode a success more then any string of cameos or inside jokes ever could. (With that being said, the brief sighting of a self-aware Frog Soos named... Frog Soos... was much appreciated.)

Even if, for me, there was only one bona fide hit out of this bunch, "Swamp and Sensibiltiy" and "Wax Museum" certainly amounted to another week of good fun, and it's nice that we're given the sort of breathing room to at least find the value in the show's more low-key entries. 

FINAL GRADES:
"Swamp and Sensibility": B.
"Wax Museum": A.

For my review of the last two episodes, "Quarrelers Pass" and "Toad Catcher," CLICK HERE.

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