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Just finished this season, and very much feeling the same sense of why I felt when I finished Season 2. I get the feeling I'm going to end up watching Season 4, just in the hopes we'll get some answers on this, but with the last two seasons basically confirming that Disenchanted is just gonna keep being Disenchanted, I really can't expect a fourth season's gonna be different. It feels like the show's writing was bizarrely rushed, where they basically had the start to a bunch of plots and twists, but didn't have the time to think them through and start consolidating them into a few clear lines. Like, there's just so much stuff thrown at the wall that suddenly stops and then comes back that it's hard to tell if any of it matters. Odval's conspiracy involves Big Joe and maybe Steamland via the Arch Druidess? The Troggs have something probably, and the Elves are tied to Dreamland's magic, a plot point suddenly brought up in Season 3 that feels really out of left field. Dagmar's in league with, what, hell now? Elfo's half-ogre and the ogres want him for some reason? Also, Oona's there until she leaves... I'm not sure if I got all of them or if I'm still missing some other conspiracies! Disenchantment is a bunch of Simpsons/Futurama writers trying to prove that they can do the big, intricate plots you get in modern animated comedies like Adventure Time and Gravity Falls. But these writers hate writing like that and clearly don't want to, so they introduce things that just... linger. It's like if the human-hating Robot Planet in Season 1 of Futurama kept showing up in later seasons, with some ~mysterious~ connection to Santa, even though their whole story was pretty much wrapped up in one episode. Who cares about the Troggs?
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Jan 21, 2021 20:19
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 13:12 |
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I think one of the reasons the recap feels so bewildering is that most of the recap's about the first three episodes of Season 2, while the next 5 episodes of that season really just had their own adventures, until it was time to ramp up a plot and slam a cliffhanger ending in the last two. So the show itself kind of pushes aside the big plot moments for half the season, encouraging you to forget all about it until the next point where it gets plot and crams it all in too fast. Season 3 does break with that, with each episode pretty much leading into the other (the Merkimer episode probably being the one exception, though even that's nominally to raise funds for an army), it's just that it's constantly shifting who the antagonist is, and it's exhausting. In ten episodes, it starts with Dagmar and the Troggs, shifting into the conspiracy against Zogg, which leads to Steamland and Alva, Mermaid intermission as they return to Dreamland, back to the conspiracy, until the Green Smoke shows up, there's a ventriloquist dummy that matters for an episode, Green Smoke's just Big Joe (who's in the conspiracy), but surprise! Ogres! are here to besiege the castle and oh, hey, Dagmar's back. A Futurama season would have a similar number of villains (one episode, it's the DonBot menacing the crew, the next, Mom, and after that, Lrr), but they'd be understood as a self-contained episode. I didn't have to care about Lrr until the next time the show needed alien invaders, but with Dagmar, I still don't know what exactly she's supposed to be or what she wants three seasons in.
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Jan 24, 2021 18:54
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Eighties ZomCom posted:I assume it was Dagmar who sold the puppet since she was the one who released Zogg from his cell in the first place. But was the puppet cursed or magical to begin with? It was implied when it talked while Zogg was asleep but that whole thing just didn't go anywhere like a lot of other threads. And somehow I don't think it will be covered in part 4. My favorite joke this season was Bean taking one look at the puppet and immediately seeing it was obviously haunted, but... she's got other things to deal with right now, so just... have fun with the haunted doll, Dad! And then the show immediately has Bean make the doll her top priority because of something about proving she's an actual leader. So... eh.
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Jan 26, 2021 17:44
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This is the most inexplicable show I've ever seen. The art and animation are great. The voice acting is solid. The scripts... don't even feel like first drafts. They feel like first first drafts, the vomit drafts where you're just getting words on the page so you can edit them later into a good story. Sometimes it feels like the writers brainstormed three ideas, like, Bean would learn to master her magic in Maru, or she'd learn to master it in a duel with herself where she uses stience, or maybe she'd master her magic dueling her mother with a speech on love. They wrote out scenes, thought through ideas... and then went straight to print with all three. So the show constantly feels like it's making no progress when we have to do the same basic scene over and over again without any attempt to knit them together and make them feel like a clear sequence. But the show clearly had some heft to it, the animation did not look cheap or rushed, so... how did the writing only get a weekend to bang out 10 episodes? Even new Simpsons and Futurama, shows very much past their prime, are capable of basic "thirty minute animated episodes" logic. Basic writers room management. Things Disenchantment just... isn't able to do. It fails at writing goals in a way I don't think I've ever seen another show botch. The one thing I half-liked, though, was the bit where Bean's in the asylum and realizes that she's in a place with considerable matricide experience while she's struggling with the thought of killing her mother. But they don't do anything funny or interesting with it and also, Chazz is there, being a terrible character.
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Sep 9, 2023 15:01
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