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.

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Agent

"Your name?" "Watterson. Gumball Watterson." "Is that all one word or with a hyphen?" "What?" "Like 'Watterson Gumball Watterson' or 'Watterson Gumball hyphen Watterson.'"

Nothing goes together like Gumball and Gumball pretending to be something else entirely. That's not even a joke: some of the series' greatest entries are its genre-swapping episodes, turning a run-of-the-mill day in Elmore into anything from a horror movie to detective noir, fully committing to stylistic mimicry while retaining the heart of the show's comedy. "The Agent" is the latest entry to follow suit (spy pun unintended but welcome), and while it's not one for the books, it's undoubtedly a strong outing.

This time, Gumball and Darwin get to play dress-up in a send-up of James Bond movies from the moment the episode starts, with Gumball's entry framed through the barrel of a toilet paper roll. Admittedly, I'm not the biggest expert on the franchise, with my knowledge pretty much limited to a handful of Mitchell and Webb sketches and old GoldenEye 007 cartridge-tilting videos that I thought were hilarious when I was 14, but it's clear to see that "The Agent" was as much a labor of love as its colleagues: the winning writer threesome of Richard Overall, Mic Graves, and Tony Hull (credit where credit's due) finds a great middle ground between what they're spoofing and the sensibilities of a more traditional episode. The best genre parody episodes, after all, are the ones that can be unequivocally appreciated regardless of your familiarity with the subject matter, and if I'm any indication, "The Agent" really gets the job done, featuring an awesome Thunderball-inspired title sequence and handfuls of excessively circumstantial, Bond-esque witticisms.

Star vs. the Forces of Evil Review: Cleaved (and Season 4)

"The thing about good ideas is they tend to kinda hang around like a bad fart."

I feel as if that quote from the final episode, delivered by Mina Loveberry on her untriumphant departure into the wilderness, summarizes Season 4 of Star vs. the Forces of Evil as a whole. There's sincerity, for the most part, in what Star vs. wants to do, but it can never manage to equal the sum of its parts because, even to the very end, there's a sense that it knows what it wants to be, but was never able to really accomplish that. 

(WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AND UNPOPULAR OPINIONS)

Case in point: "Cleaved," as a series finale, does exactly what it wants. It's clear that the past season worked unrelentingly to telegraph everything possible to make the finale work, and it does, filled with emotional crescendos and masterfully-crafted revelations. The first half gives rise to tension and, more than less, makes up the climax by tackling the broader issues in the series' final arc—most importantly, Star and the queens must destroy magic to stop Mina Loveberry in her pro-Mewman,  monster-killing conquest—while the second half is almost a sort of epilogue. 

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Factory

"If you're not back in two minutes, we'll move your desk to a bathroom stall." "I know you mean that as a threat, but as we're not allowed to take bathroom breaks, it would technically be an improvement."

An episode centered around the Rainbow Factory has been teased for quite a while, so expectations of "The Factory" were fairly high. This was our chance to find out about one of Elmore's few locations that has never been properly explored, after all, and it's a factory that makes rainbows! Obviously, knowing Gumball, there's something a lot more shady afoot, but it was all a matter of trying to figure out what. The answer: it's pretty much like anywhere else, if not painfully sugar-coated.

Thankfully, though, "The Factory," even if a fairly traditional episode, was able to key into the funner aspects of a change in location. Everything, plot-wise, is fairly straightforward: Nicole has to negotiate with the CEOs of the Rainbow Factory to make sure it doesn't get shut down, and Gumball and Darwin do their silly little Gumball and Darwin thing of tagging along without being asked. They're definitely made more naive here than usual, acting more like kids without the faintest bit of cynicism, but focusing on the more juvenile aspects of their personality works well enough here, especially in the episode's musical number.

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Wish

"I can't believe I've been guilt-tripped by a neck pillow. I mean, who am I? Mr... actually no, that's never happened to anyone before."

So... this was an interesting one, wasn't it? Usually, when an episode struggles, it's because it feels unrealized, but it's not that "The Wish" didn't put in the most sincere effort it could into everything it was trying to do. It's just that, well, having Principal Brown struggle to profess his love to a neck pillow is a step too far, and the episode feels all the more bizarre because of it in generally unproductive ways.

I mean, I'm always down for Gumball going balls-to-the-wall with the most insane idea it can think of; that's one of the show's greatest qualities, and it's helped create some of the greatest entries into the show's massive, diverse catalog of knock-out episodes. What "The Wish" does, though, is confound the logic that the show tries to use by churning out an adventure where every character just feels miles off from how they should be as some strange compromise for the narrative to work. And here's the thing: "The Wish" does sort of work in its own absurd way, but at what cost?

The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Future

"Mom, I missed you." "And I miss hardcore hip-hop."

There's a lot to take in with "The Future." For one thing, it was intended to be Season 6's season opener, though that's panned out to arguably one of the worst outcomes to befall a premiere—being so ambitious that its production cycle pulls it all the way to the final quarter of said season (let alone the final season). Luckily enough, though, the events of "The Future" have, realistically, no impacts on the show's timeline, at least not any super obvious ones at this point. (The existence of "The Spinoffs" as an episode that was intended to follow "The Future," for instance, seems explicitly contradictory.)

For the sake of this write-up, though, let's just say that "The Future" exists at a deliberate point in the season's runtime: this is a packed episode, injecting so many interesting concepts into Gumball's quietly unceasing narrative, some more spelled out than others... but I'll get to all of that in a second. Honestly, trying to figure out how to unpack everything is gonna take a second.