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.