"I was born with the confidence of a thousand bears, but the
wherewithal of a thousand blueberries."
--
Welcome back, everybody! Today, I commence my coverage of
Summer Camp Island's fifth season, starting with Barb's three-episode
arc! As a bit of minor preamble, when the fifth season was announced, I was a
bit shocked not just to see the show returning to its arc formatting from
Season 3, but to feature Barb as the protagonist in its inaugural arc. It's
true that she's a well-established member of the show's cast and one whose
past hasn't been etched out prior, and if there's one thing I can say about
SCI, it's that it'll never back down from the search for new and
unexpected horizons... and yet, I was a bit skeptical of how it would shake
out. Let's see how I ultimately felt about the way this season kicks off!
"A Barb is Born": And so, on the third day of life on planet Earth,
Barb comes into existence. It's always a bit difficult for me to talk about
these arc-starting episodes; they're an exercise in setting the stakes, as much
about establishing their focal character as they are establishing the
environment we'll explore. In this case,
SCI cranks the clock back the
furthest its ever been, exploring the island before it became a summer camp, or
a witch destination, or even somewhere with the threat of inhabitation—it is
merely a primordial landscape, bursting with talking ferns and miscellaneous
vegetation, and on the second day, bears intent to eat them.
Naturally, in the most on-brand way possible, Barb bursts into the
scene already at the ripe age of 60, fully-formed in every way but knowing her
purpose. The revelation of her lifelong duties are the ultimate end goal of
this episode, and the narrative is all about the misdirection she
endures—touted as a savior to the ferns—as she hones in on that conclusion.
Curiously, she's born with a quiver of arrows, which seems to point her in the
direction of being a hunter, but Barb is a penchant nonconformist. She thinks
outside of the box; she's unorthodox. Her pointy feathers are less an
instrument of torture than one of endless possibility, or as she says herself:
"Rather than arm, I repurposed [them] to disarm!"
Unfortunately, while she works out the kinks on her purpose, she fails at the
task she is given by the ferns and wounds up being ostracized by the island to
the top of the mountain. As she converses with Olf, though, an
equally-alienated fern at the mountain's peak, she realizes that she doesn't
have to exist to fulfill others' expectations—she's an unexpected creature,
the likes of which the planet has never known before. She thus deems it her
purpose to come up with other things that have never existed before, either.
She's a "newer," and we'll see her take her first steps down this path in the
episodes that follow. As it stands, "A Barb is Born" is enjoyable and
thoughtful set-up, if not earth-shattering.
"Hot Milk and Careless Whispers": If "A Barb is Born" is
preamble, then "Hot Milk and Careless Whispers" is a hearty serving of meat
and potatoes. This is Barb's baptism by fire: she knows what her life
mission is, and now it's a matter of acting upon it with the situation
at-hand. While the way the ferns attempted to use her to fight the bears
failed, this is a look at how Barb can tackle a situation by playing on her
own terms. In other words, contrasted against the first episode, it's a
demonstration of what makes Barb's worldview so unique and essential.
You can't fight the bears, as the ferns coaxed Barb to do; you have to
accommodate for them and acknowledge their needs. Fortunately, she seems to
know the exact solution, too. The bears know they're clumsy, or sad, or are
eating ferns to fill the empty hours, but what they don't know is that they
are tired, and their exhaustion is a catalyst for their behavior. With that,
Barb invents the concept of sleep, and spends the episode cracking down on all
of the grumpy bears' differing sleep needs. (Inevitably, too, when it's too
much for her lone self to manage, she consults the mysterious jelly pool and
pulls three new helper elves out of it—a clever way to expand our slim current
cast.)
The plot of "Hot Milk" also becomes an excellent showcase for a sneaky,
specific little thing that I've always loved within SCI: how it finds a way
to put probing, silly spins on the banal with carefully-crafted turns of
phrase. With sleep being a new concept in the universe of the show, we're
treated to it being described in ways ranging from "worrying in the dark" to
"like being lowered into a bottomless well." ("Geez, Barb!") The
introductions of all the elves Barb pulls out of the jelly pool offer a
similar charm in their specificity ("I got this giant hammer, and I think
brushing teeth is a scam."). This is ultimately a very small
part of the overall episode to highlight, but it's something I've always
found immensely gratifying about the show's writing style that deserves to
be highlighted as just one of the many components that make it feel so
idiosyncratic.
It's also one of the little things that makes "Hot Milk" feel like a step-up
from "A Barb is Born," helping to orient the arc into a better overall
direction. Something worth noting about the way each of these episodes bleeds
into the next, though—"Hot Milk" ends with the ominous, no-context arrival of
a sheep and zebra—is that it makes every episode of this arc feel less like an
explicit gain so much as a piece in the overall puzzle. Each episode exists to
build off of the last, keeping the narrative in a state of ongoing progression
whereas I think it could afford to take a bit of solace to make the victories
feel that much more victorious. It's a minor complaint, though, and
considering
SCI is still a greatly episodic show, perhaps it's a clever
way to make things feel a bit more overarching.
"Nightcap": We don't know a lot about the jelly pool at the top
of the mountain. Last episode, we saw Barb use it to create other elves to
assist in her mission, and now, in "Nightcap," we get the sense that it
contains something truly powerful... but that sense of power doesn't really
get further defined. It's an interesting strategy within "Nightcap's"
narrative which I struggle to perceive as a clear-cut strength or
weakness—things just arbitrarily as they are, without clear justification. I
think the potency of that gray area ultimately yields both some good and
some bad.
Perhaps most confoundingly with the narrative, we're further acquainted with
the mysterious sheep and zebra who appeared at the end of last episode. Sheep
and Zebra (as I will now refer to them as, for hopefully self-evident reasons)
are clearly bad characters, but they're also characters with limited
definition. We know that they want access to the jelly pool's riches to
harness evil powers—thus kickstarting the fun narrative of Barb arranging
decoy pools with the other elves—but we don't really know who they are and
what their deal is. The potential they have as a threat, too, feels hurt by
how much they're rendered as buffoons, bumbling and bickering from decoy pool
to decoy pool.
I can't help but feel like that's an iffy choice. They're clearly supposed to
be interpreted as an antagonistic force, and indeed, when we get to their
climactic altercation with Barb, there is finally a sense of them having
legitimate powers: they rip what Barb doth desire most clean out of her body
and absorb it into theirs. It just feels like it plays to their detriment that
it's so tough to see them as anything more than morons with the way "Nightcap"
primes us to understand them. At the very least, this enables the shine to
remain fixated on Barb; her cleverly cursing them with debilitating
sleepiness, albeit while depriving her of being able to sleep ever again, is a
wonderfully clever moment.
The question of what the jelly pool really does, though, remains nebulous to
the very end, when it suddenly solidifies into a giant, magical gemstone
(seemingly by the Moon); with that, these episodes spontaneously become as
much an origin story for Barb as for one of the island's most iconic features.
But we're still only left to really hypothesize about its significance, let
alone Barb's significance in protecting it. (She seems to have guarded it just
long enough for the Moon to crystallize it, an action that feels detached in
all ways but chronologically.) Nevertheless... it kind of works. There are
some secrets to the Island which deserve to retain that air of mystery. Even
if the point of these arcs is to, in theory, paint the elaborate past of these
characters and their histories,
SCI makes a deliberate effort to leave
some things open to interpretation. While there are sometimes things I wish
the show spent more time specifically examining, it's difficult to truly
complain about the show's passion for the unobserved. This is an odd arc, in
the end, but a pleasing one.
FINAL GRADES:
"A Barb is Born": B.
"Hot Milk and Careless
Whispers": B+.
"Nightcap": B.
For my last reviews of "Hark the Gerald Sings," "Hall of Mooms," and
"Pepper and the Fog,"
CLICK HERE.
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