My Favorite Shows of 2023, part 2!

Continued from here.

19. Made in Abyss: So. So! This one was one of the big anime back…wow, six years ago, and I took one look and thought two things:

1. Wow, moe designs. I don’t like the implications of that, looks like child fetishization.

2. This show’s going to be creepy and violent as hell, isn’t it?

So it turned out that a bunch of people were, in fact, surprised when the show turned out to be creepy and violent as hell, even though the screenshots alone radiated that energy. Maybe it’s because the first season theme songs were so cute; don’t worry, season 2’s music was appropriately sinister (I’m haunted by the line “I still love you/Even though I miss you,” and not just because it’s an improper use of “even though”). So, since I had a month of HiDive to finish Lupin Zero and Urusei Yatsura anyway, I figured I’d give it a watch.

Yeah, don’t show this to your kids. Maybe don’t show it to yourself, unless you want to see a cute little blonde girl bleeding from every orifice—and that’s one of the milder bits. Still, despite all the…face melting of it, Abyss somehow manages to be very compelling, through its bizarre aesthetics and haunting musical accompaniment. I can see why it continues to be discussed as one of the best of the past ten years, despite its graphic nature. We, the audience, want to see Riko succeed in her (frankly) mad quest, for the protagonists to find happiness and experience a world their peers are too afraid to find. Also, there’s that mystery of why kids keep dying on their birthday, which they left on a cliffhanger in the first season and never mentioned at all in the second, but they were very busy then.

My main question, rolling out of the first season and through the movies (two compilation films and then an original movie about the powerful “White Whistle” explorer, Bondrewd) was, what’s the POINT? Japanese media in general and anime in particular trends toward a very nihilistic view of human nature, where the masses devolve into screaming mobs at the slightest provocation, and that can be really depressing to watch unfold time and again in cartoons. Abyss in particular trends toward torture porn, with how often we are introduced to lovable, cute characters who get chopped up, stomped on, poisoned, or just melt into a puddle of monster, unable to communicate with the outside world, no longer considered human. My best guess was a criticism of capitalism: the characters are orphans (well, Reg is a robot amnesiac, but he’s basically an orphan) from a one-industry boom town (“Orth”—tell me your show is about the world in microcosm without telling me, you know?). The town sprung up around a giant pit that goes straight down into Hell (not really, but basically), and though it’s very dangerous and even going down a short ways can lead to death by either monster or a strange curse that hangs over the hole, children are trained by the orphanage to descend, without any more protective equipment than a helmet, to bring back artifacts from the Abyss, which the orphanage claims for itself and sells for its upkeep, denying the children the fruits of their labor. Punishment for keeping something for yourself is draconian, and descent into the Abyss is highly controlled, though there are shantytowns of claim jumpers who descend illegally. Add on to that Bondrewd’s strange experiments on orphans he collects from other cities around the world, chopping them up and exposing them to extreme conditions to protect himself (which brought to mind the world of Brazil, where the elderly enrich themselves at the expense of their children, continuing to live an empty parody of the luxurious life they grew up in while denying their children any dreams of their own aside from the vapid pursuit of more money, only Abyss literalizes that theme as opportunistic cannibalism)…yeah, I had the feeling it might be a critique of laissez-faire capitalism, but it didn’t fit quite right.

In the third episode of the second season, a “Hollow” creature—someone that used to be human, but had that stolen from them by the pit (or, in this creature’s case, by something else)—injures the heroes pet, Meinya, a little Patamon-thing. Meinya lives—Nanachi, a mutated Hollow herself, knows a lot about how to heal things from her time in the Abyss, and treats the injury (also, hi Nanachi, I get the joke about you from last year’s season of Pop Team Epic now)—but Riko, distraught, claims her pet is priceless. Tendril-like creatures emerge from the darkness, and turn the Hollow (Maa, it is later named) upside-down, taking from it all its possessions, and when that isn’t enough, they tear its flesh from its bones, selling its very skin, its very suffering, to the people of the town. When that is judged enough, coins appear in midair, coalesce into one large piece of currency. When the hero asks what it is, her guide friend tells her the value has been made equal, and she needed money anyway, so she has some now. When she says she didn’t WANT it THAT way, his reply is that’s how money is made, and she has it now anyway.

So yeah, I was right, critique of capitalism.

Season 2 is just ROUGH to watch, as it tells one contained story instead of the short arcs of season 1, and so has less time with the kids just being friends to cool you down between the awfulness. It’s also the more intriguing story, as it cuts between a flashback to early explorers of the Abyss (apparently before the settlers who founded Orth arrived, possibly several thousand years before the start of the show, although at one point a character says they’ve been in the Abyss for 150 years, time moves differently within the Abyss so it’s possible it was much longer outside, and would have to be to jibe with another scene of people discovering the Abyss 2,000 years before the show) and the present day in a small town of Hollows, protected from the curse by a forcefield. The two plots eventually converge, of course, and that convergence is just super gross and depressing. Like, I watched episodes 7 and 8 back-to-back while making lunch, and my food finished cooking during episode 8, and I couldn’t force myself to eat it. I pride myself on being able to eat despite whatever gross topic of conversation is happening, but man, I had to watch an episode of Urusei Yatsura to get my appetite back. Irumyui and Vueko didn’t deserve any of that.

Which is the point! Of course that’s the point. Prushka, Reg, Nanachi, Mitty, none of them deserved that shit either. But I mention those two in particular because of how the season ended. Irumyui’s daughter, her instrument of revenge, the feral child Faputa…well, she finds herself at a crossroad, not to give anything away. Designed for one purpose, she starts to change her mind, struggles with big ideas of morality, destiny, and finally, what she can do with her life now that it’s her own. The show describes this as a search for a life “free from the shackles of value”—Faputa gained what her mother wasn’t able to, a life that doesn’t need to justify itself based on a person’s use to other people. Irumyui’s tragedy came about because she had internalized a conception of self-worth based on her function, of how others could use her. Riko grew up just doing work for other people, and she longed to chase after her mother as an excuse to free herself from the cycle of the grind. Prushka…poor Prushka got used, lied to, and discarded, but as her last act she was able to wish for something good for a friend.

“Free from the shackles of value.” Like, life goal right there.

18. Villainous: I didn’t think I was going to watch this one this year. Or ever. I’d heard about it! I heard about it years ago, when the shorts first started airing on Cartoon Network Latin America. The Know Your Meme crowd went wild for Villainous, but it was only available in Spanish, and I didn’t want to go looking for fansubs (at the time, I have since done so). Imagine my surprise to see it added to Max this year, especially since they were busy removing many other animated shows. Put it on the list, figured I’d check it out when I had a free moment.

Villainous started as a series of shorts, before graduating to a miniseries of six 12-minute shorts, which are the cartoons on Max. It follows the misadventures of Black Hat, a Pennywise-type character who affects the image of a Snidely Whiplash-style villain, who founded a business dedicated to helping hapless supervillains defeat the superheroes who get in their way. Black Hat has three major subordinates: Dr. Flug, a paper bag-wearing mad scientist who creates all the weapons of the Black Hat Organization and lives in fear of his terrifying boss; 505, a faulty monster Dr. Flug created who is actually a little sweetheart and lives in fear of his terrifying boss; and Dementia, a weird, goofy lizard lady with wall-crawling powers who wants to fuck her terrifying boss. Villainous is really three different expressions of the same basic premise about these characters: it began as a series of one-minute infomercials where they try to sell supervillain technology, then somehow became a series of 10-minute episodes where Black Hat critiques the performance of villains on other Cartoon Network shows (often becoming so enraged at their incompetence that he passes the job onto Flug and Dementia), and then the full series, where Black Hat sends Flug, Dementia, and 505 off to fight superheroes themselves. Every version is sharply funny, with a devious sense of humor fitting for the characters. Black Hat himself is, of course, a horrible murder machine, always on the verge of breaking character and revealing the cosmic horror lurking underneath his three-piece suit, which tends to manifest as jokes about eating puppies or something. Dementia gets a lot of the laughs, though I think she loses something in the English version (something about the way her Spanish VA says “Si, Milord!” in the luchador episode stuck with me, and the unbridled joy in the way she yells “DEMENTIA TIPS!” in the supervillain critique episodes helps set up the repeated joke where she suggests ways to finish off superheroes that inevitably end with her recommending murder) (yes, I watched it in Spanish with subtitles, and yes, Max kept trying to switch it back to English, but we made it work—I wanted the original voice track! Even though some of the episodes were clearly animated to the English voice track! It’s like 50/50 whether the lip flap matches the English or Spanish for some reason), but Dr. Flug unexpectedly became the true main character, including a tragic romance cliffhanger at the end of the miniseries. I’ve seen frequent comparisons between Villainous and the Looney Tunes-revival shows of the 1990’s, with that kind of cruel slapstick element that modern cartoons shy away from, but without the world-weary jaded feel of, say, a Ren & Stimpy (please, no more Ren & Stimpy). My only complaint is that it’s so SHORT; six episodes produced two years ago?!? I know Cartoon Network Latin America doesn’t do many shows, and I know the network is in turmoil right now, but come on guys. You have a cult hit, just give it the push to get more recognition.

Oh, one more thing: because of Villainous’s origins as a Cartoon Network bumper (well, okay, originally it was a bunch of Flash animations on creator Alan Ituriel’s webpage, but those don’t count) and then the critiques of villains, the animators have a lot of fun hiding characters from other CN cartoons all around the episodes. Mostly it’s stuff like Johnny Bravo standing in the background, but there are some great gags in a few episodes that got real laughs from me. I hate to imply they use referential humor to get by, it only happens a few times, but when it does, it’s great. It reminds me of the old Cartoon Network City bumpers, the little cartoons Williams Street would make in the early days of Cartoon Network, building a world where these characters all know each other. It’s a lot of fun.

17. Re: Cutie Honey: Ah, my problematic fave returns…with this cartoon from 2004. It wasn’t available in the US before, so it counts. Couldn’t even find a fansub back in the day…

I spoke last year about the…complicated nature of Cutie Honey’s sexual humor blended with its, frankly, compelling-if-not-deep superhero lead, and how that usually leads to interestingly unfulfilling shows. The series usually has something promising to show, but threading the needle of a strong female lead who also finds herself in sexual situations and also it has to be funny…it can be done. I believe in my heart it can be done. The original show got close, the original manga went way too far…but I figured if anyone could do it, it would be the talent arrayed on Re: Cutie Honey. Hideaki Anno, the creator of Evangelion, which I never got into, but who I’ve come around on since seeing the “Shin” series of movies and loving them, did a Cutie Honey movie in 2004. I had a chance to see that back when Bandai Visual put it out on DVD, but never did—maybe one day. But, the reason I didn’t watch it was because everything I read said that Re: Cutie Honey, a three-episode OVA Anno made right after, was a better, expanded version of the film. Also, Anno hired three of the best episode directors he had: Hiroyuki Imaishi, who would go on to do Gurren Lagann and Kill la Kill; Naoyuki Ito, who would go on to do Digimon Savers and Overlord; and Masayuki, who doesn’t seem to have ever led a show himself but worked on a bunch of things, including being an episode director on Evangelion and working under Anno on the Eva movies. I was excited to see what they did with the concepts.

I hesitate to say they nailed it, both because Cutie Honey is still not perfect and because that’s a sex joke and we don’t need any more of those, but they got damn close. Re: Cutie Honey is a stylish, fast-paced, funny and heartfelt installment in a series that probably didn’t deserve the amount of care and artistry put into it, but I appreciate it nonetheless. Imaishi’s episode is the standout, of course, with the same fast-paced, wild, unhinged style of animation that he would bring to his own shows, but the other directors did a wonderful job too, with Ito’s more realistic (still very anime, but more realistic than Imaishi’s) style bringing the series down to Earth for the tense clash after Panther Claw kidnaps innocent civilians/the budding romance (excuse me, they’re just buddies, Anno said they’re just buddies) between Honey and Natsuko leading to extremely contrived fanfic situations. And Masayuki? Masayuki’s episode is the Serious Finale, but he finds the humor by making everything Evangelion, But Too Much. Those big flashing displays on the good ship USS George W. Bush sure did look familiar…

I’ve spoken before about how Honey should be a strong character, if not a deep one. Her power ideally comes from within herself; she’s not one to experience doubt. This is why (ONE reason why) I have come to hate 1994’s New Cutie Honey, because of scenes like the one where she says she gets her power from the love of Chokkei; no, Cutie Honey is the person who went to an all-boys reform school, took it over and became their gang leader through sheer force of will and power. In some ways, Re:’s Honey falls short of this ideal: she’s new to this, no longer the bad girl breaking out of boarding school but a temp worker who gets walked all over by her boss and coworkers (not literally—literally, the Panther Claw Combatants get walked over by Natsuko and they’re into it). However, this does work to give Honey a character arc, which Anno, in the extras, says was one of the producer’s requirements for the story. By building Honey’s character to the point where she’s strong on her own, it also helps the big addition to the story: Natsuko Aki. Nat-chan is a minor character in most stories, a good friend whose main purpose is to die halfway through to give Honey some pathos. Because an actor wouldn’t go for a role like that, Anno expanded Natsuko’s role in the film so she’s a hard-nosed cop (likewise, Seiji the reporter is revealed to actually be a secret agent so he has something to do). Making Nat a cop is a major improvement; she’s a relentless badass, working by her own rules, telling her asshole bosses to shove it, grabbing guns out of midair, making trick shots, dressing in fatigues and rushing into certain danger. Like, Natusko’s HOT in this movie. Wonderful decision. It works wonderfully as a romance, too, as Natsuko is repressed from a traumatic experience, and Honey is shy and too accommodating from, well, a tragic experience, and they both learn to trust themselves through learning to trust each other. It’s a much more balanced relationship than with Honey and Chokkei and works great as a narrative hook, I really enjoyed it.

Wait, did I say romance and relationship? I meant friendship. It’s a buddy cop movie. They’re buddies.

Ahem.

I didn’t appreciate that Re: is the origin of the trope of Honey’s costume disintegrating when she’s been in superhero form too long. I know this is a T&A show, but that’s too much. It gives the villains too much of a hint that she’s losing energy! I could get if it gets torn, like the suit in Adam Warren’s Empowered that has its strength tied to the heroine’s mental state, and at least Re:’s explanation that Honey’s powers come from nanobots makes more sense than the original explanation of the Atmospheric Energy Converter (the nanobots would eat the clothes as a last-ditch energy source, whereas the original explanation of the Atmospheric Energy Converter was that it rearranged her clothes with the energy she had stored, so if her clothes were disappearing that would use MORE energy that she could use to fight Panther Claw…), but I’d rather they just let Honey be strong without an explicit timer. Well. Can’t win ‘em all.

16. Regular Show: Hm.

Hm hm.

Hm hm hm.

Hm.

For a lot of the Cartoon Network shows I skipped over the last fifteen years, it was either because I missed the schedule, or I didn’t think they would live up to the quality of Adventure Time (a silly reason), or because I thought they’d be around longer and they were gone. Regular Show fell into another category: its commercials made it seem really annoying. They would play little clips of Mordecai and Rigby just being weird little gremlins with no context and then be like “this is when Regular Show airs,” and I thought it just looked like a collection of early-00’s “random humor” that I had long since grown tired of, so I skipped it. But it isn’t! Uncle Grandpa is, but Regular Show isn’t.

The joke of the name is built into the premise: a low-stakes “magical realism” series, the main characters are just two slacker dudes (who happen to look like a blue jay and a raccoon because cartoon) who work at a park in…California? I guess? Their days typically revolve around raking leaves and complaining about raking leaves and slacking off from raking leaves and playing Sega Master System. Their biggest threat is their boss firing them, which he never does. Also somehow they always manage to tear a rift in reality and send themselves and those they love to a liminal space where annihilation of Earth is imminent, but they fix it so it’s fine.

The show Regular Show reminds me the most of is that classic of my youth, Angry Beavers. Like Beavers, Show revolves around two rambunctious knuckleheads getting into trouble, fighting with each other, and creating a strange situation for themselves outside the bounds of their normal, baseline reality. If there’s any real difference, I’d say Show is more concerned with resetting the status quo at the end of the episode (Angry Beavers would often leave the title characters in an inescapable bind and then next episode they’d be fine, whereas Regular Show usually saves that trick for the semi-canonical Halloween episodes) and Regular Show has much more emphasis on romance. I think that’s a point in Regular Show’s favor, but also one of the downsides; it plays around with romantic plots, but never commits in the way that, say, Owl House or even Adventure Time ever did. This is fine of itself; not every children’s comedy needs to be a life-changing experience, but after years of She-Ra, Steven Universe, and I’m just going to say Adventure Time again, Regular Show’s treatment of Mordecai’s romances with Margaret or CJ, or even Benson’s few romances, just fell short. Eileen and Rigby got a lot more time actually; during the CJ plot I kept thinking “Wow, Rigby is acting like a better boyfriend to Eileen than Mordo is to CJ and they aren’t even dating,” only for the reveal at the end that yes, they were dating, it was a secret. (Although, Eileen, girl, you can do better) (Is what I thought every time she expressed interest in Rigby, including once they were dating) (Although it did give us the best punchline of the show, watch “Diary,” tell me I’m wrong) Really, if I’m being honest, I wished the show had broken out of its formula more often. When you know every episode is going to end with some otherworldly menace coming to ruin the guys’ day, some mistake that dominoes into catastrophe only to be put back by some desperate quick thinking/Skips (voiced by Mark Hammill) saving their ass, it stops being funny and starts hampering the lighter, more character-based comedy that comes to long-established series. And Regular Show is LONG, even at 10 minutes an episode 261 is nothing to sneeze at, and they got a TV movie on top of it. It clearly had support from executives right from the start, too; the amount of licensed music in this show is insane, and helps it establish its unique brand of referential comedy that flows a lot better than, say, Family Guy’s. (Or, put another way, “Hey Man Nice Shot” is totally about basketball, right?) They lost some of that music budget in the later seasons, but you could usually place what they were going for with their soundalikes, and they did get to license “Through the Fire and Flames” for that one episode, so it still worked.

I do have to talk about the final season, which did break the mold but not in a way I appreciated. Many children’s cartoons I’ve watched over the years and reviewed on here follow a common thread, where they start with low-stakes adventures and slowly build to a major climax of world-shaking proportions. Most of these series have fantastic elements from the start, and they slowly tease out the truth behind what the child perspective character believes at the beginning of the show until there is an emotional catharsis and character arc resolution at the end. Regular Show very abruptly decides it wants to do this too, without putting as much work in, and so the final season is set in outer space. It’s fine, and hey, Eileen got to tag along so they didn’t lose their most popular non-park employee character, but it put the series in this weird limbo between continuing the same humor they had before and suddenly having a plot and a primary antagonist. They did a whole episode about how there’s no reason Benson would want to stay on the space station instead of going home and continuing the exciting new relationship he'd just started, and then by the end Benson has a hallucination that I have to assume the spaceship captain gave him to get Benson to do what he said, only at no point is it implied that the space people were evil or unethical (other than the uh, kidnapping). I’m going to be honest with you, I would have preferred to see more of Benson’s relationship. I would have liked to see Mordecai find love that he didn’t sabotage with his own indecisiveness, but instead that’s just a clip in a voiceless montage of life events we don’t get to see for ourselves, shoved into the latter half of the final episode. OK KO! Did that too, but they were cancelled after only three seasons; it was an Owl House situation where they had to show you all the stuff they WOULD have done, if they had the time. Regular Show had a decade to resolve its storylines with real heart and depth, and instead they went with more 80’s movies references and boot camp to turn the lollipop man into Goku. That’s their sense of humor, and there was plenty of it in the final season—maybe too much. I just would have liked more of the human element than the over-the-top one.

But maybe that’s just me?

15. Doctor Who (Four Specials): I felt bringing back Russel T. Davies was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, yes, he ran one of the best eras of Doctor Who, full stop. He brought the show back from cancellation and made it a worldwide phenomenon, with sharp, imaginative writing that never lost the human element, but also never felt ashamed of how unabashedly silly it all was. He wasn’t perfect; I’m very glad Christopher Eccleston got help with his depression and eating disorder problems but apparently the backstage on Doctor Who was so toxic he still won’t work with Davies, which is heartbreaking. But I was glad to see Davies back…except that, he was BACK. It’s a RETURN. Someone who had finished his run, done all he could, fourteen years ago, came…back. It didn’t feel like moving forward. Bringing David Tennant back as the Doctor, even for a short time, DEFINITELY didn’t.

The first three of four Doctor Who episodes this year dispelled much of my fear. It feels weird to say that Davies’s return slowed down the pace from the madcap, go-go-go years of Moffat and Chibnall, since Davies’s Doctor Who was already more fast-paced than the original, but there were so many more small, human moments in that first episode (“The Star Beast,” adapted from the classic 1980 Doctor Who comic book story by the British comics greats Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons, finally bringing one of the great non-canon Doctor Who characters to TV: the Meep) than I could summon up from previous seasons. I would have liked more of that feel with the whole ROMANCE PLOT FROM LAST YEAR, but learning how Donna’s life has been since the Doctor left was nice, too. The second episode was the standout for character development; a bottle episode that oddly was on all new sets, with some practical effects you’d think would be CGI, it was a nice breather to get a handle on where Davies wants these characters to be emotionally, right before he went really big with a celebrity guest star doing camp voices and a coordinated dance routine. These episodes were a blast from start to finish, and they did a better job of handling the problem of enticing an actor back with something new than, say, the third season of Picard. Tennant definitely got to do something no other Doctor actor has, that’s for sure (although apparently Douglas Adams tried to get a story about that done with Tom Baker, but it was replaced by “Shada”). (About what? Not telling) It had all the great elements of the first four seasons of New Who; the comedy, the humanity, the adventure, compacted into three episodes with a budget probably higher than all four of those seasons put together. But, despite the unusual, wild (from a continuity standpoint) ending—and despite making very clear that nothing the other writers did was getting retconned—it still didn’t feel NEW. BETTER, yes, but old. What worked before.

“The Church on Ruby Road,” the first Christmas special since 2017 and the first full episode with Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor, felt new. It perfectly captured the excitement of seeing Christopher Eccleston tell Rose to run for her life, but in a new way. The Doctor dances at a club, in a kilt. The bad guys are…well they’re…I don’t know what the hell they were, aside from what they seemed to be; and the Doctor doesn’t either. Gatwa imbues the Doctor with the requisite sense of wonder, but a more innocent one, devoid of the self-righteousness of Tennant or the self-assuredness of Capaldi or the just downright petty meanness of Smith; but it’s also a loving, slightly sexualized wonder unlike the anxious overcompensating of Whittaker. Even the sonic screwdriver is different, contorted into a non-phallic shape for the first time in 55 years. Gatwa killed it in every scene, and I’m very excited to see where he takes this Doctor. No one has so perfectly inhabited the character, twisted the Doctor into the form the actor’s version will be known for, as quickly as Tom Baker did in “Robot” 49 years ago, but Tennant got close, and Gatwa may be even closer. There are one or two lines with a Tennant delivery, and that may just be from Davies. This Doctor has a whole new way of looking at the world, and I can’t wait to figure out just what it is.

The new companion, Ruby Sunday, is a little different, but I don’t have as great of a grasp on her yet. Part of this is just the problem with Doctor Who companions; she’s our viewpoint character, so she has to spend her first couple of episodes confused and running around. I do like her family situation; left on church steps as a newborn (and you bet that mysterious cloaked woman who left her is coming back later, of course), she still lives with her adopted mother, taking care of both her grandmother and a cavalcade of foster children. The plot of the episode revolves around her and the Doctor protecting the latest foster child, but the real crux comes when the villains travel back in time and remove Ruby from history, and we get to see how sad her adoptive family’s lives would be without her. Seeing what she brings to people through its absence gets a lot of information across quickly, but I want to see more of how she acts under stress, other than just grabbing onto a ladder floating from a cloud—Clara did that already, you know. I look forward to learning more.

I think Doctor Who is about to become something other than what it’s been for decades, again. Thank goodness. I look forward to finding out what that is next year, and with any luck it’ll have a smaller number next to the title on my next list.

14. Final two episodes of the Owl House: I almost skipped listing this like I skipped Distant Lands for Adventure Time (which was very good), but I’ve done a couple three-episode reviews this year and anyway this should have been 10-15 episodes (although these were double-length, so it's like four regular episodes). More than the first episode of “season three” that aired last year, these two episodes felt like they were struggling to get everything in. Moments that should have had room to breathe, maybe over the course of several episodes, or at least a commercial break, come at breakneck pace; you’re not quite over the previous emotion until it’s on to the next one. Again, I don’t blame the crew for this. The fact that they were able to convey any emotions at all when up against a deadline like this speaks to the amazing talent involved in Owl House, and that the ending is this satisfying and complete is almost a miracle. I know stuff was left out—Dana Terrace talked about a Hooty-centric episode that we only get the slightest hint of in the actual finale, and of course the focus on the main cast of Luz, Eda, and King leaves a lot of the compelling supporting characters just thrown off to the side, but those are the main dudes and they needed to use them. I get it.

I want to speak specifically to one scene, with the Collector and Belos, because the moment I saw it I immediately interpreted this season, and possibly the Owl House as a whole, as a reaction—not a refutation, just a reaction—to the end/moral of Steven Universe (setting aside the fact that Steven Universe Future was also a reaction to the end of Steven Universe; Future focused on a different issue). You see, Steven Universe was an argument in favor of radical kindness; Steven was an innocent child who just wanted everyone to get along, and he was thrust into solving his mother’s problems. Faced with a threat he couldn’t beat with physical force, he resorted to dialogue, and through logic and emotional connection was able to turn his enemy to, if not agreement, then at least acceptance of him. It’s a touching finale, although it always bothered me that, due to plot reasons, Steven could only have accomplished this through being who he was, and the conflict with the Diamonds being built on grief and maladaptive coping mechanisms for the same. If anyone else had tried, if the Diamonds had any other reasons for their fight, Steven’s plan wouldn’t have worked. The finale of SU is kind of wishful thinking that you could still connect with the worst member of your family, find a way to still have a relationship with someone who doesn’t understand you. And the Owl House is not against that. The Collector is your typical all-powerful child character, like Trelane or Bat-Mite. He befriended King in the previous episodes because he also had a childlike way of looking at the world, and felt bad for the Collector—Luz and King are able to connect with the Collector because they share his feelings of abandonment and desire for friendship, but they have to teach him normal childhood lessons in compassion in a very short time, and do manage to succeed. Collector reveals his origin, where he was used as a tool of conquest and genocide by his elders, a dupe of more powerful entities who suffered the consequences of their actions. It’s a tragic tale of a cycle of innocent mistakes leading to violence, and it’s not dissimilar to Rose Quartz’s origin in SU. However, after this, Belos, always the real villain lurking in the background, puts his big bad guy plan into motion and fucks everything up. Collector smiles—oh! Luz just got through to him! He can get through to Belos with compassion too!

It doesn’t work. Sometimes, compassion just won’t work. Belos is so consumed with his own ego, he can’t understand compassion or forgiveness; hell, the man is still nursing a 500-year-old slight, and he killed the guy who did that and then cloned him to…make the dead guy see Belos was right? Manipulate him into an apology? Basically he just killed the dude a lot. For the raging egotist, compassion is weakness; more, it’s artificial, a tool of manipulation, only to be employed against others, never to feel yourself. Luz reassures the Collector he did nothing wrong, he made the right choice in showing compassion to Belos, and that’s true. Luz also made the right choice in not listening to Belos’s feeble lies, where he tried to pass off his own horrible actions on someone else, as if he could talk himself into living just a little bit longer, trying just a little bit harder to commit genocide on everyone she loved. As the acid rain melted the flesh off his bones, Belos crawled forward, begging for help and spewing a vitriolic, racist rant against the very people who took Luz in while she was hurting and Belos had tried to kill for centuries. When all that remained was a skull, he still screamed bile until Eda, King, and Raine curb stomped him into a fine powder. It was very satisfying.

This aired on the Disney Channel!

13. Transformers: EarthSpark (episodes 11-26): Well alright.

Last year I expressed hope that EarthSpark could improve, based on the few glimpses of narrative I saw in the chill, home-based, kids-learn-a-moral episodes that dropped late last year. I’m a little surprised I rated it so low, but I watched a ton of great shows last year so it’s not that weird. Anyway. Uh. Yeah, I think they pushed the series where it needed to go this year.

Although the series primarily focuses on a nuclear family adopting a bunch of Transformers children—up to five from the two in the first ten episodes—I was, of course, more drawn to the events going on behind the scenes. The setup early in the show, where Optimus and Megatron have put aside their differences to work with humans, start to strain in unusual ways. Megatron looks out and sees his former allies, his Decepticons, all forced into prison by the humans, with no chance of rehabilitation, no path to a life afterward. Optimus knows his human allies in GHOST don’t have a plan for what to do with the Transformers afterward, and suspects that if they did have a plan he wouldn’t like it, but feels trapped by his moral code to acquiesce to their expertise, since he brought his war to them—it’s either some Transformers are in jail, or all of them. Of course, we and Megatron both know that Optimus is pushing at the imposed boundaries of his alliance with humanity by sending Bumblebee on spy missions and hiding the Terrans with other nonaligned human allies, but Megatron is right to worry that’s a bandage on a bleeding wound. Plus, they’re both right to suspect their human allies aren’t quite on the same page that they all deserve human rights, with the head of GHOST, Agent Croft, teaming up with early-season villain Mandroid on a…let’s use the word xenophobic quest toward robot genocide.

This plot starts to bleed into the episodic stories of the young Transformers finding their way and discovering their identities as individuals, in interesting ways. A standout episode was “Missed Connections,” where the nonbinary Transformer Nightshade befriends Tarantulas, traditionally portrayed as a real sadistic torturer, but here with some of the tragic humanity character designer Nick Roche gave him in the Sins of the Wreckers miniseries. Nightshade keeps their friendship with Tarantulas a secret, and sees past the creature he had to become during the war. Tarantulas learns to trust Nightshade, but can’t extend that to humans, assuming the worst and attempting to force Nightshade to do what he wants through coercion or trickery. It has a nice fight scene and an unexpected face turn for one of the real bad dudes from Beast Wars.

Or how about the two-part “Home,” where the kids sneak out to Philadelphia at night, only for Robbie to run into his old friends who not only is angry at Robbie for leaving, but has developed an anti-Transformer prejudice that puts up a barrier between Robbie’s old friends and new and taints his memory of the place he considers home. Plus, it turns out that anti-Transformers prejudice is being purposely stoked by Mandroid and Agent Croft, to drive interest in their underground Transformers fighting ring they’re using to test mind-control devices—and the crowd goes nuts for it, basically a barely-legal bloodsport (hey, it’s Philly). This leads directly into the next episode (the silly-named “A Stygi Situation”) which deals both with Jawbreaker discovering who he wants to be/transform into, but also Grimlock’s post-traumatic stress disorder from being mind controlled, afraid to turn into a t-rex again and haunted by dreams of Mandroid…touching him, holding him, towering over him, and laughing. The fear of losing control, manifesting through his alt-mode.

“What Dwells Within” also has great Starscream content, and the return of the classic enemy the Dweller in the Depths, but I don’t have much to say about it other than don’t trust Megatron but also don’t trust Starscream telling you not to trust Megatron.

It all culminates in what’s really a four-part episode, but as is usual for shows like this, is broken up like it’s two single episodes and then a two-parter: “Stowed Away, Stowaways,” (they’re not even stowaways, either, they just break in separately from Bumblebee), “The Battle of Witwicky,” and “The Last Hope.” Most of that is just a good action show, “But you betrayed me!” plot, but the Mandroid gets an upgrade that veers into body horror territory I haven’t seen in a kid’s show since the 1990’s (when anything was game). It literalizes the fight between the new characters to establish themselves and the old ones everyone expects and wants to see; or if you prefer, the younger heroes trying to do things their way against the overwhelming experience of their mentors. Twitch especially came into her own as a powerful leader figure, despite her small stature; the shot of her barely perceptible under Megatron’s fusion cannon was a standout in a fantastically storyboarded episode. And man, they pushed some boundaries; there’s one scene that was so gruesome I had to check the episode rating. Fantasy Violence doesn’t usually mean someone writhing in agony while being electrocuted to death, but it did here. Like, that’s not the appeal of the story, but I do have to mention it.

So yeah, more of that please. More high-stakes fights and interior conflict over morality and the tragedy of What Had to Be Done. This team has the chops for it, I just hope the show doesn’t get suddenly shitcanned like Star Trek Prodigy before they have the time to do it.

12. Unicorn: Warriors Eternal: Taking a year off from Primal, Genndy Tartakovsky also made this new show, announced a few years back and once again barely squeaking through all the bullshit going on at WB to make it to air. Unicorn aired on Adult Swim, but was made for Cartoon Network proper, and so doesn’t have anything objectionable to a younger audience, though its themes and setting show it was meant for early-teens viewers. Apparently based on an idea Tartakovsky had after seeing Howl’s Moving Castle, Unicorn is a unique blend of high fantasy and steampunk themes into a superhero-like show, more of a D&D adventure than the Conan-derived Primal, with elements that remind me of the classic DC Comic Camelot 3000, especially the wedding scene. Tartakovsky has also consciously deviated from his usual style, as everyone looks more rounded and cartoony than his other recent work; the shape of their arms and faces are clearly inspired by Osamu Tezuka (one character in particular, a stage magician, looks straight out of Astro Boy). Leave it to me to say something is unique and then rattle off a list of inspirations, right? Well, you can’t avoid inspiration, but more important are all the ways you differ from your inspirations. In ten episodes, Unicorn somehow managed to build an exciting, strange new universe, establish several well-rounded characters (especially its main character, the confused Emma/Melinda, and her two suitors, Edred and Winston), set the stakes for a climactic showdown, and then blow everything up to end on a cliffhanger. Tartakovsky knows when to take the time to let us sit with the character’s emotions, and when to speed things up for cartoony action. Each episode is its own self-contained story, with its own genre beats from across fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, but they all work into the ongoing narrative as well. It’s a wonderful balance between the joys of animation and storytelling that doesn’t look down on its audience and hold their hands, but trusts them to figure things out.

Which I am too good at because dang it, I do NOT trust this show’s version of Merlin. From early on I felt like he was keeping secrets about the nature of the “evil” the heroes fight across time, and the flashback to Melinda’s origin burrowed that idea into my mind and never let go. And yet, the show asks us to take him at face value every time. When he quickly calmed Melinda with some platitudes about understanding her pain, only after being prodded by the spirit of Emma within Melinda (or…is it vice-versa?)? I thought, “Dude, she’s carried that for two thousand years, and you’re just giving her some kind words now so she’ll do what you want!” When the evil possessed Merlin during the battle with Otto…well sure, I guess it could have possessed Otto after Edred “defeated” it, but it just felt right for Merlin to turn on the heroes. I had assumed the evil was Morgan le Fay, still trying to take her daughter’s powers, but in the final episode she wasn’t in control…there’s something about the evil the heroes fight that we don’t know yet. Their quest is too straightforward, they’re too gung-ho to be heroes, I think they’re being played somehow. I hope we’re allowed to find out how.

Or maybe I’m wrong! But I hope not…that would be so much more interesting.

11. Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury Season 2: It’s been a day and I miss these girls already.

I spoke before about how the first half of Witch from Mercury was pretty chill for a Gundam show, but the second season covered a lot of ground as situations escalated quickly and the world turned upside-down almost immediately. Of course, that includes the finale of season 1 that aired on January 8, which famously had everyone, Miorine included, looking at Suletta like, “That girl ain’t right” and also “I’m scared.” The season starts with Miorine, understandably, avoiding Suletta (and as a result, putting off dealing with her complicated feelings) and Suletta starting to doubt the moral code she was raised under, trying to handle big emotions she’s never had before but not being able to put her depression into words or really understand what she did wrong. From there, Miorine is pushed and pulled by circumstances outside her control, including by Prospera Mercury, Suletta’s suspicious mother who’s been lurking in the background the whole time. Oh also Guel gets kidnapped by pro-Earth terrorists and learns empathy, it’s a whole thing that ends with everyone just deciding that the best thing for Suletta is if they just cut her out of their lives completely because she’s too pure and innocent for this world.

Which might be right.

But, as I’ve said before: MIORINE.

IF YOU’RE SCARED THAT YOUR GIRLFRIEND DOESN’T HAVE AGENCY, DON’T MAKE DECISIONS FOR HER WITHOUT CONSULTING HER, AND CERTAINLY DON’T LIE ABOUT YOUR REASONS AFTERWORD!

ahem

It all works out though.

Yeah, that is the thing: Witch from Mercury ends with a nice little bow wrapped around it, with everyone happy and working for a better tomorrow. I suppose Iron-Blooded Orphans had a similar ending six years ago, but there were a lot more corpses at the end of that one; it was a story about pressing on for change despite all the obstacles put in front of you. Witch is about that too, but it’s less important than its story about finding change within yourself. Suletta and Miorine start the story as just pawns of other powerful people, bystanders in their own lives, and they learn to stand up and be themselves, each aching step along the way—as do Guel, Chuchu, Nika, etc. etc., on and on. It is nice to have a Gundam end and not feel sad for once.

Except

EXCEPT

That’s all the time we GET? I wanted more! I wanted more drama, more reunions, honestly more for Chuchu to do! Come on, give us a movie, an OVA, something! I miss them!

10. My Adventures with Superman: There’s a point in the seventh episode of My Adventures with Superman where the characters, through means I won’t explain, become aware of themselves as merely one iteration of the larger Superman mythos—as, if you’ll excuse the concept that’s been beaten to death by corporate-synergistic overuse, part of a multiverse. Lois Lane looks down a hall full of representations of herself, including, of course, some familiar to us viewers. Another doppelganger of herself tells her most Loises are contacted by their alt-universe others sometime after they earn their first Pulitzer, around 21.

“I…I’m 23,” stammers our Lois. She’s still an intern.

Adapting Superman today means standing on the shoulders of giants. Back even as late as the 1980s, you could just make a Superman show, churn out some exciting adventures, and hope it catches on. Sure, everyone knew the George Reeves show, the Fleischer Studios shorts, and of course the movies, but people would love more adventures, right? Sure they would. But as fantasy media has become more entrenched, as it’s become easier for people to see past episodes, as people have more options of what to watch, whenever they want, instead of just tuning in to what one of four channels is showing, serialized entertainment has become more important, both to keep people tuning in, and because, frankly, people like it. We like to feel invested in a character, like they’re going to change and grow and learn from their experiences, instead of just staying a static piece in a storytelling formula. An 85 (85!!)-year-old franchise like Superman can struggle under the weight of its history. You can’t just say, “Let’s do Superman,” the producer wants to know your SPIN on it, what’s going to set this take apart. Because if someone wants to watch Superman, they can go watch the Bruce Timm cartoon, they can watch Smallville. If you’re going to keep them there, you need to be different. Also, keep the characters young, kids like when there are other kids on the screen, and if a rich adult is telling you that, it must be true!

My Adventures with Superman literalizes this meta-conflict (and fulfills the wishes of the producers) by following a young Superman, Lois, and Jimmy Olsen, just starting out at the Planet. They’re scrappy underdogs, with Lois pushing them to do more dangerous things in pursuit of a story than either of the boys wants. Olsen is a complete conspiracy-theory mess, Clark is a nervous wreck worried about breaking something accidentally, and I think I’ve made clear Lois has big “I’ll show them, I’LL SHOW THEM ALL!” energy. You can say, “Eric, isn’t that just Spider-Verse?” and sure, there’s a bit of Miles Morales (and Spider-Man in general) in this iteration, although I should say the multiverse stuff is just one episode. But where Spider-Verse is about Miles as an aberration amongst Spider-Men, and the alt-universe forces are actively arrayed against him, the My Adventures-verse is presented as an average Superman universe. The multiversal entities don’t particularly care about it, as long as it doesn’t affect them. It’s only as special as the inhabitants make it.

So let’s talk character work: this is the best portrayal of the Clark/Lois romance I’ve ever seen. Traditionally, their relationship is kind of taken for granted, and even the best portrayals (in my mind) have it grow out of a kind of competition between them, a game of one-upmanship that becomes respect that becomes something more. And I’m not talking about the relationship between Lois and Superman; that’s different. Lois is infatuated based on Superman’s strength, his rescues, but they don’t have a deep connection personally. Clark realizes this even in the early stories, where he says he wants her to love Clark Kent instead of just being impressed by his physical capabilities, although Superman does allow him to be suave in a way he doesn’t feel comfortable with in an interpersonal setting. My Adventures builds on the strengths of their traditional relationship while throwing out the competitive aspect; right from jump Clark is Lois’s direct subordinate, and often expresses how he wants her to succeed because he thinks she deserves it, and will work to make that happen. There’s a particularly charming scene in a stairwell everyone should see. It tears him up that he’s afraid to tell her he’s Superman, it tears her up that Clark keeps things from her, and then Lois goes and learns some things she’s afraid to tell him about…it’s adorable, is what it is. They’re crazy kids who are nervous and make bad decisions and Jimmy Olsen has to be the voice of reason. Jimmy Olsen and Monsieur Mallah. But that’s getting ahead of myself.

In the early episodes I was worried they’re reworked Superman’s powers; they borrowed a bit from shonen anime and had Supes glow blue and get powered up at dramatically important moments in the plot, but by the end of the season it was clear that was just more of his powers awakening and not a permanent powerup thing, by episode 8 his powers are on all the time and Clark just needs to control them. What they have reworked is the nature of Krypton’s destruction, although we don’t know the full details yet. Superman just sees short snippets of a battle and his parents sending him to Earth, but he doesn’t speak Kryptonian so he doesn’t understand what happened. I welcome their decision to keep Superman’s origins a bit of a mystery. In the comics, Superman didn’t know where he came from until the late 1950’s, and every iteration since the movie that just had a recording of Jor-El tell Superman, “Oh by the way our planet blew up and your name is Kal-El,” is such a cop-out. This creates a sense of anticipation, since we, the audience, know more about Superman than he does, and can see where he gets things wrong. There are also other characters who know more about Superman than he does, and we know what they get wrong, too. One of those wonderful villains who are so sure they’re right, they won’t see evidence that they’re wrong. It’s frustrating, but in a cathartic way. Plus, Superman’s going to punch them later, so it’s cool.

I hope this show gets the room it needs to grow. It looks like it will; one of the first things I noticed when they dropped preview images was how much their Lois Lane design looked like Luz Noceda from Owl House, and since My Adventures dropped right after Owl House ended, all the Owl House fans noticed too and started watching. Also, people went nuts for Lois’s design in this show, I didn’t even go looking for fanart but I’ve seen a good amount. I appreciate their decision to go with some less prominent Superman (and DC in general) enemies out of the gate instead of jumping straight to Lex Luthor, Zod, and Brainiac, although you will find those three if you’re paying attention. I thought DC’s days of cartoon dominance were over, but I’m very happy to be proven wrong. A fun, action-packed, comedic, romantic Superman show…for teenagers. Suck on that, Smallville, you overhyped piece of garbage.

Chris Parnell plays Deathstroke that’s SO WEIRD.

9. Star Trek: Lower Decks: Boy, I did not know what to expect when they announced this. A Star Trek parody…set in the Star Trek universe…from the makers of Star Trek. Sure, cash in a bit on the attention the Orville or, uh, Final Space are getting? Oh, let’s not beat around the bush: they wanted a bit of that Rick and Morty money. I don’t know that the makers of a show are really the best people to parody it (see: the GinRei spinoffs of Giant Robo) and anyway, it could just be an excuse to go “Hey, remember this?” instead of a joke, like the worst crutch of a Family Guy episode. Could be funny, could be cringey, I didn’t expect much.

Uh, holy shit, this show rules.

Set shortly after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis (So, after the 90’s-era shows, before Prodigy and Picard—look, Wikipedia has a timeline breakdown, but if you want a simpler one I can draw you a chart, it’s really not that hard), Lower Decks follows the worst crewmembers of the worst ship in the fleet, the USS Cerritos, a ship tasked with “Second Contact,” filing the forms for official diplomatic business after Starfleet has contacted a planet, although as usual for Star Trek, they also do whatever Starfleet needs them to do at any given time. Instead of focusing on the bridge crew, as usual, Lower Decks follows a group of ensigns doing the grunt work of a starship, like the TNG episode of the same names. Problem is, the four ensigns the show focuses on, are led by the brash, loud Beckett Mariner, who also definitely COULD hold a higher rank in Starfleet but had some sort of breakdown they haven’t fully explained yet and is purposely sabotaging her career, and her relationship with her Captain, who is also her mother. That’s supposed to be a secret that the viewer catches onto before the characters, but that was weird, the first season’s a little weak. The show improves in the second season when it starts to equally focus on the other main cast members: Bradward Boimler, over-excitable and geeky son of raisin farmers who dreams of being as cool as Kirk someday; Samanthan Rutherford, engineering whiz with a faulty cybernetic implant that DEFINITELY isn’t concealing a dark secret or anything; and D’Vana Tendi, an Orion nurse who’s just happy to be here and have so many cool friends who definitely don’t have any horrible preconceived notions about Orions all being sexy pirates, not that she’s ever been one of those sexy pirates, ha ha ha. That’s not even mentioning the bridge crew, who are all cool characters in their own right: Chief Engineer Andy Billups is an ace icon, Chief Medical Officer T’Ana is a grumpy, irritable Caitian, Security Chief Shaxs is a shellshocked former Bajoran resistance fighter, and First Officer Jack Ransom is a dick. Plus, there are a few minor characters I’d like to know more about, like Bates, Jet, and Jennifer, but there’s only ten episodes a season, I get it.

The main draw of Lower Decks, beside the general promise of zaniness, is that each 25-minute episode still has an A-Plot and a B-Plot—sometimes even a C-plot!—but they’re all TNG-era B-plot stories. They’re all character moments. You know, exactly what every other Star Trek series (except SNW) is missing due to their serialized nature? Here you go, this is the show with that. It’s so refreshing!

Coming back to this after season 4…that’s it? That’s all I said? I guess I don’t have anything else to ADD, really, because I only did a general overview, but I can do a little better. The characters all have well-defined arcs, but they all play out over single-episode stories, in a classic Trek mold. Season 4 was their first REAL experiment with a full-season storyline (you might say season 2 did a season-long storyline, but that was more of a recurring antagonist situation; Season 4 has several linked scenes that don’t pay off until the end) and I thought I had it all figured out, only for them to swerve me TWICE at the end for a wonderful twist where the hero admits something about herself and gets to stand up for what she believes in/fight some fairly topical villainy, disguised as a sci-fi premise (so, Star Trek). Season 4 also pays off Tendi’s story in a way I thought would completely resolve it, only to throw in a twist at the end to promise more for the future, which is nice because we’re reaching that point where everyone’s character flaws start to look resolved, and I kind of want this show to keep going until it reaches around the same number of episodes as TNG/DS9/VOY did (hey, Archer made it to 142 episodes, why can’t Lower Decks make it to 170?). They’ve only found ways to improve integrating their guest stars into the stories of their main characters (some WILD guest stars in this series, just saying) in a way that never feels cluttered like, say, Picard sometimes did, although the thirty-minute runtime means some of the done-in-one episodes have to run a little fast to fit everything in, that’s pretty normal for 30-minute sci-fi/fantasy shows. I do want to loop back to my comment about some of the supporting cast needing more time; I worry that they’re stretching their voice acting budget to thin to spend the time fleshing out some of the background characters, but with only a ten-episode season instead of the classic 22-26, that can’t be helped. Still makes me a little mad when a character I like just hovers in the background with no lines, but Lower Decks is hardly the only example of that happening. The show’s good, is what I’m saying.

8. King of Braves GaoGaiGar FINAL: WOOOhoohoohahahaHA, oh boy!

GaoGaiGar is one of the greats of the Super Robot genre; back when I was a wee lad convincing my mom to send off checks to some dude in New Jersey so I could get subtitled VHS tapes of Transformers cartoons that weren’t available in America, the website I purchased from used GaoGaiGar as its header image, to show where their loyalties lie (and in the years since I have heard some stories about that dude and drama surrounding him, but at the time I knew no other way to see Car Robots, until Saban got the rights the next year, but I digress). GaoGaiGar is the final installment of the Brave (Yuusha, which could also be translated as Hero) series of toy tie-in anime that Takara developed with Sunrise after Transformers petered out at the end of the 80’s. A lot of the toys used old Transformers designs with only slight changes, but the anime were more like a classic Japanese robot show than the unique midway point between Japanese and American sensibilities Transformers (and, yes, Go-Bots) was, with exaggerated designs and usually at least one robot that was piloted by a human or humanoid instead of being a character itself. Near the end of the 90s, Brave itself was starting to peter out in sales, and with Hasbro making new Transformers cartoons again, AND with Sunrise being purchased by their main competitor, Bandai, Takara started looking to move on. But, they gave it one more go—and just by coincidence, Sunrise was looking to experiment with new computer animation technology, not full CGI (anime production schedules and budgets wouldn’t make a full CGI show feasible for over a decade, and even what they did looked much worse than Beast Wars for years after) but using morphing and digital backgrounds to enhance traditional animation. Sunrise didn’t want to take a risk using this technology on their big, important adult shows (although they did experiment with CGI on Cowboy Bebop the next year, too) but they also didn’t want to give it to their lesser studios, which is how one of the top studios in one of the top companies in Japan ended up making a kids show. GaoGaiGar, as a result, is the show the animators wish they saw when they were kids, the show that makes adults feel like they did watching Mazinger Z as a kid—children’s cartoons as you remember them, not as they were. It’s the Platonic ideal of the classic robot show; everything played straight, just cranked up to 11, with a beautiful orchestral score and some of the best animation you’ll ever see on TV anime. It’s a wild, wild ride, and I’m glad to finally have it on Blu-Ray.

But I first watched it on Daisuki back in 2015, so it doesn’t count for this list.

BUUUUUUT

Two years after GaoGaiGar ended, it remained so popular they got to work on a sequel. GaoGaiGar FINAL is just that: the final adventure of the cast of GaoGaiGar (well, okay, there’s one more that was going to be a miniseries but that fell apart and it was released as a novel, but there’s no translation so it doesn’t count for me). You’d think, being an OVA targeted toward the adult market, that FINAL might be a refutation of the themes of GGG, explore the dark sides of the super-agency behind the giant robots, slowly peel back the world to show everything was a lie, like an Alan Moore comic. Nope! It’s still GaoGaiGar, just more. Yes, “more” means “more things you wouldn’t show kids”—one character’s traumatic origin is shown in short clips that you definitely shouldn’t let a kid watch—and also sometimes people are naked for no reason—but the emotional core of the series remains the same. These are all the same people you knew before, and they’re back. It’s very reassuring, and certainly helps since they only have eight episodes to move the plot along. That plot itself is great, a perfectly logical continuation of the villains of the original show, both building on what came before, but twisting things around enough that it stays interesting.

Interesting, but not…deep. As I mentioned above, GaoGaiGar is good, but very straightforward. There’s not a lot I can say other than “The robots fought the aliens and it was boss as hell.” The new character (the one with the tragic origin), Renais Cardiff Shishioh, the cousin of series star Guy Shishioh, is a pretty cool addition, and though the short runtime doesn’t give her THAT much time to make an impression, there’s enough to give you the shape of an interesting character who I want to hear more about (I understand they released a manga and a novel about her before FINAL came out—come on, manga companies, give me something). All the little additions to the show were just as fun as the main cast, and at the end it left me wanting more, even though I knew there couldn’t be anything else.

There’s just…one thing. I maybe wouldn’t even mention it, but it worried me when I watched the show. It’s a bit of a cultural thing, something a Japanese writer might not think about, or if they did might not realize the severity of the cultural faux pas they were committing, so I’m willing to cut them a bit of slack for it, but…

Early on, two characters arrive acting strangely. It’s not immediately clear, but if you’re paying attention you can notice their colors aren’t quite right: they look washed out, like they got bleached. This is your hint that something’s wrong, these are flawed duplicates sent to hurt the heroes, and they’re destroyed. In the process, though, the duplicates kill a new character, Papillon Noir. Papillon Noir is the only black person in the show—not unusual for an anime, but still not a great look. And Papillon Noir gets cloned, by the same machine that drained the colors on the other clones.

Which means the only black character dies and comes back white.

…yeah! I this was made between 1999-2003 and the Japanese sometimes aren’t as sensitive to racial issues as America, but uh, that’s a real bad idea and you shouldn’t have done it! That’s my only complaint but I understand it’s a dealbreaker for some people. I wasn’t happy about it either.

Happy about the rest, though. Great show.

7. Lupin Zero (episodes 4-6): What a way to end a show! Lupin Zero is better than Part 6, which is wild to say because it’s ¼ the length. Although only episode 3 directly adapted a chapter of the manga, the take on Lupin II was great and set up the status quo as it stood early in the manga, with Lupin II operating a vast “Lupin Empire” organized crime syndicate that his son is only tangentially connected with. Most people (Monkey Punch included) forget about that! The first of the final episodes was a fun story about Lupin and Jigen’s friendship that also used the vaguely postwar setting well: a story that starts out being a goofy tale of friendship between the problem students ends with the kids butting heads with corruption in the occupying United States Army. The heist is very Lupin—which is to say, kind of nonsense but kind of cool—but while adult Lupin would plan the whole thing out in the minutest detail, kid Lupin is in way over his head, which adds tension when the audience (and Jigen) know what’s going to happen before Lupin does, which is rare (unless Fujiko is betraying him, but he kind of knows that’s going to happen, too). The final two episodes, though, do a lot to set up Lupin as he was early in part 1, the Masaaki Ōsumi episodes, with a tragic story of naïve young love, revolution in the backdrop of the Cold War, devotion, ego, and corruption. It’s good shit, and is a satisfying payoff to “Why is Lupin like this?”, much more than, say, the end of A Woman Called Fujiko Mine, which tried to have its “origin story” and disclaim it, too. I don’t want to give anything away, but there was a part that made me yell out loud, “Lupin STEALS HEARTS!” I do regret that it leaves us with a Lupin close to how he was as an adult, which sort of undermines Miyazaki’s assertion in Cagliostro that Lupin had a wild period before he mellowed out after Clarisse saved him, but hey, most media also assumes Lupin and Jigen didn’t meet until they were adults. It’s not like this series has continuity or anything!

But speaking of continuity, look at “Al” sneering when Lupin declares himself the Third. Which I never really got, apparently the Japanese conceive of generational iteration differently than we do, that you don’t just get to be “Lupin III” by being born and being the third person named that. Well, we all know how Lupin and Al turned out, don’t we? No? You’re not watching modern Lupin III? What’s wrong with you?

6. Revolutionary Girl Utena: All I knew about Utena was that it’s an important magical girl show, it’s a little gay, and a few months before I started watching it some friends told me G-Witch had the same basic premise. That’s it. It was on my watch list because I was running out of free anime and it was on YouTube legally. Even after I started, I was impressed by the designs and the surreal, fairy tale-like story, but the exaggerated artificiality of the characters, like in a lot of classic shojo, made me think there was no way I’d like it more than this year’s Gundam.

Created in 1997 by Kunihiko Ikuhara, who had just left Toei where he was showrunner for the middle three seasons of Sailor Moon, Revolutionary Girl Utena was designed as his own, personal answer to Sailor Moon, an original creation that Toei wouldn’t allow him the freedom to make. However, once the team put it all together, stepped back, and looked at what they’d made, what they had was…weird. Unique, in a very anime way, but also not like many other anime I can think of, certainly not within the genre/in something meant to appeal to the audience of children Sailor Moon pulled in. As the show goes on, it doubles-down on the surreal, with physical objects manifesting in space to represent emotional states of the characters, purposely constructed sequences that make no sense within a “rational” world of cause-and-effect, but are artistically justified as a way to convey meaning to the viewer. Honestly, half the time I think the animators just want to make the audience laugh by deflating the egos of their characters. Comparing a surreal TV show to David Lynch feels hackneyed, like I’m showing the shallowness of my media consumption, but Twin Peaks is the only other show I can think of that bounces back from extradimensional cosmic horror, slapstick comedy, and sexual tension/threat as effortlessly as Utena without it feeling forced or discordant. Or, I should say, without it feeling unintentionally discordant.

Utena is a student at a prestigious boarding school, an outspoken tomboy who wears men’s clothes (her outfit is constantly described as the boy’s uniform, even though it doesn’t resemble anything the other characters wear) and is very popular with the students. When she was a child, she fell into a deep depression when her parents died in a car accident, and a prince appeared to console her; she wears a special ring he gave her. Turns out, the student council also has those rings, and they’re engaged in a secret series of duels that take place in a liminal space accessed through a locked garden on the school grounds, the winner of which becomes engaged to the Rose Bride, Anthy Himemiya, who basically has to become their slave. You can see where this is going.

The artificiality that originally made me feel disconnected from the characters instead allowed the creators to build a consistent, original aesthetic throughout the series, which only intensifies as it goes along. As in Sailor Moon, each episode has stock footage they use to kill time/set up the conflict, each stock setting growing more absurd as it goes along. They play the whole damn transformation sequence every time, with three different variations on the song played during it, one for each plot arc. As Utena is challenged to a duel, each episode has a bizarre, largely disconnected shadow play of two or three girls (who never appear outside these segments, with one exception) act out small scenes that grow increasingly disconnected from the plot. The villains have a stock formula for corrupting supporting cast members into fighting against Utena; in the second arc, they’re lured into a job interview in an elevator, in the third, the main villain lures them into his car and (taking a page from Mistah Fab’s book) ends up jumping out onto the hood while the car is still moving. These sequences are absurd, but evocative; they play out the same each time, until finally they shift, drawing your attention back to the break in sequence. One particularly hilarious segment in the second arc flashes back to the villain’s origin, his room in the past filled with items we associate with his evil lair in the future. Not content to merely place these around, the show has flashing, beeping hands point each one out…itself a reference to the direction signs for the interview in his evil lair.

Like, I don’t know how to put into words how FUNNY this show is. Utena got more laughs out of me than actual comedies I watched this year, or even at the same time. The four episodes focusing on school bully/incest weirdo Nanami are laugh-out-loud zany while also being weird as hell. The two episodes that turn Nanami from a bully into an antagonist are heartbreakingly tragic and also unforgivably evil. Yes, it’s funny, but it’s also very sad. The sexual tension, as well, gets ramped through the roof at the end of the series; some really scandalous stuff is going down at this school. Everyone has that little turn where they do something terrible they should know better than to do. Even Utena. Utena’s lowest moment, one of the most tense, tragic moments of the show, that you see coming from the very first scene but it still hurts once it happens…is in a CLIP SHOW. Nothing but clips from prior episodes and a few new scenes in a car and a hotel, and it’s an essential episode. Amazing work, astounding. A timeless pillar of art.

I understand the movie is even wilder but I don’t want to pay the money to watch it right now. YouTube keeps trying to spoil it for me. UPDATE: Have seen the movie, hell yeah, what a great capstone to the series. Part remake, part sequel, it’s like replaying a videogame to get the true ending. Utena and Anthy are free now.

5. Monster: What happens when the best decision you ever made turns out to be the worst thing you ever did?

Or, put another way, how much do you let the actions of others affect how you see yourself?

How far will you go to stop them?

Based on the manga by the great Naoki Urasawa, who I definitely need to read more of, Monster is a thriller consciously inspired by the Fugitive. It follows Dr. Tenma, who at the beginning of the series is a medical student on his residency in West Germany, where he’s become engaged to the daughter of his hospital head—but he’s unsatisfied, basically being pushed around by his boss and his fiancée, conned into doing his boss’s work and getting none of the credit. The hospital chases rich clients and breaks its own rules to prioritize them and politicians, leaving the poor to either die waiting for an operation or giving them to less skilled doctors. One day, two defectors from East Germany are killed, and their son is dying from a bullet wound to the head—but at the same time, the Mayor has a major coronary. Tenma disobeys orders and operates on the boy instead, and the mayor dies. Tenma is demoted, his fiancée leaves him, and everything falls apart for him. Until his boss turns up dead. Suddenly, the new hospital head wants to promote Tenma, he’s head of the department now. Everything’s looking up. Except that little boy and his sister (who wasn’t injured, but suffered from major symptoms of psychological trauma) have disappeared.

Nine years later and things are much the same. Tenma puts too much of himself into his work and is caring for a patient who seems to be involved in some sort of crime. One day Tenma goes back to the hospital unexpectedly and finds a dead guard, his patient fleeing his room. Tenma follows to a parking deck. The man is frightened, talking about a Monster who tells him to do things. And then, from nowhere, a frighteningly familiar man appears, thanks Tenma for saving him nine years ago, and kills the patient.

No one believes the story. The cops were already suspicious, since Tenma had everything to gain from the death of his boss in the 80’s. And after something else I won’t spoil, Tenma goes on the run throughout post-reunification Germany, digging up buried secrets of experiments behind the iron curtain as he looks for clues to the truth behind the mysterious Johan…

If that was all, Urasawa would have a cool thriller on his hands, albeit one that has the Legends of the Galactic Heroes problem where no one can secure their fucking prisoners. What sets Monster apart from others in its genre is how it examines the central premise of the cynical, conspiracy-theory story, especially as relates to the necessity of gun violence. Tenma throws himself into a dense underworld of Neo-Nazis, COMINTERN wannabes, and thugs and gangsters of a more bizarre sort, taking direct orders from Johan; he trains for months to teach himself how to fire a weapon for the sole purpose of using his own hands to end the life he never should have saved. Yet, each time it comes down to a fight, the question lingers over him: can I pull the trigger? Several times when it would have served his goals to let someone die, Tenma puts his own freedom and his quest in jeopardy just to save someone. His philosophy is demonstrated in an early episode, where a lead on Johan’s origin turns out to be actively abusing young boys in his care, and Tenma goes to confront the man at a burned-out building (with, uh, plot significance) only to find him threatening his adopted son, Dieter. Tenma wants to save Dieter, but refuses to make the decision for him. Dieter has to choose life himself, of Tenma would just be forcing his ideals on the child just like the adoptive father. Tenma’s tendency for self-destructive kindness is echoed in another character, but I’ll leave off talking about her so you can watch the show. Needless to say, they both feel they have a duty to kill Johan, at the very least so the OTHER one doesn’t have to.

Monster also excels at building its supporting cast, so much that sometimes several episodes will pass without Tenma or Johan ever showing up as we meet a new character. Dieter is an early one, and Tenma’s fiancée Eva comes back and becomes one of the most complex and layered characters of the show, despite her best efforts to be a raging bitch. Inspector Runge, the police officer pursuing Tenma, is a perfect foil: where Tenma is giving and self-effacing, Runge is blinded by his own high opinion of himself, constantly telling himself he’s an objective observer who can get into the heads of criminals without considering his biases; Runge soaks up the praise of his coworkers while he sets himself apart from them socially. His chilling mania to be right that he covers by feigning interest in objective truth regardless of how it affects his career leads to a number of tense showdowns and near-misses. Runge showing up to catch Tenma is horrifying, but Runge showing up to call someone out on their bullshit is a lot of fun. And there’s the horrible Roberto, a chameleon man, large and nominally handsome, but a huge sleazebag and true believer in Johan. He sees Johan as a messianic figure, and is willing to follow any order of Johan’s in the hopes of one day being worthy of seeing the full picture of Johan’s plan, his final goal; of being worthy of being INCLUDED. Unable to see how small Johan actually is, and how his own actions push Roberto further from grace, he just keeps killing in the blind faith that it will work out for him somehow. And then there’s the orphan Klaus, and Dr. Reichwein, and the Baby, and Jan Suk, and Klaus Poppe, and the mysterious Mr. Grimmer…

If I had to tell you about all the great characters in Monster, it would take all day. A beautiful, enthralling series that rewards close attention and takes the time to draw you into a story before linking it back to the main narrative. Make sure to watch with autoplay off if you’re on Netflix; the closing credits are clues (and yes, they get explained halfway through anyway, but don’t you want to figure it out?). This became a “wait until Hank’s around, he’ll want to see this” show. It’s damn good.

And for all it answers…it still leaves you with questions at the end. After all, there are some things in life you just can’t know for sure.

4. Urusei Yatsura (1981) (up through episode 149): One day in college I was walking home past a dumpster and noticed a box of videotapes sitting on top. I looked in and it was mostly anime; I took a few, leaving the ones that had gum stuck to them. One was a tape of four episodes of Urusei Yatsura. I don’t remember if this was before or after I checked the first volume of the manga out of Swem Library, but some serendipity was pushing me toward this series, and it quickly became my favorite of the many manga by Rumiko Takahashi. However, it was hard to get a hold of for a decade after that; the manga was out of print and never fully translated into English, and the small company that licensed the anime still only sold one DVD of four episodes at a time, and they all looked like they were recorded directly from old tapes. And then that company lost the rights, and no one had it. Sure, I could have watched illegal YouTube uploads, but like the UY character Ten, I’m a good boy. So, I waited.

Thanks, Discotek!

Well, not just Discotek; they got the anime right when Viz was finishing up releasing all the manga. I considered passing on the anime since I’d just bought all the manga, but I didn’t, mostly on the quality of the second UY film, Beautiful Dreamer, which is a triumph that can stand on its own. The first two years of the original Urusei Yatsura anime were directed by Mamoru Oshii, who would later become famous for a number of other things, including my beloved Patlabor, the famous Ghost in the Shell, and the Kerberos Saga. Oshii can get a little pretentious for my tastes, but Urusei Yatsura is early enough in both his and manga creator Rumiko Takahashi’s career that neither of them had formalized their style when it began. Indeed, the early episodes of the show exist in a vague, undefined reality; characters in the manga like the teachers and principal of Tomobiki High are replaced by generic characters, off-brand versions, who disappear without notice, replaced by manga characters about half a year in, never mentioned again. Oshii even makes some recurring characters of his own, appearing in original episodes or new scenes set between the pages of the manga; “Ataru Retires”, one of my favorite chapters of the manga, is stretched out to a half-hour by creating an entirely new first half of the episode that introduces several women from other neighboring schools, one of whom comes back and is the focus of episode 99, “Deadly! Fast-Food Wars,” an original story for the TV show which Oshii adapted into a stand-alone movie in 2006, with all Takahashi’s characters removed (that’s coming out on Blu-Ray in the US in February if anyone wants to…randomly buy me something in February). It’s odd to think that the show is improved after they start stretching the short manga stories into a full half hour, after beginning the series with two 11-minute stories per episode; the reviled stench of anime filler has doomed many an adaptation to large swathes of formulaic episodes that must revert back to status quo lest they disrupt the manga storyline once they get back to it, and you’d better hope you didn’t write in some information the manga author will contradict later on. In Urusei Yatsura, however, what would be “filler” in another anime becomes important context, adding depth to Takahashi’s comedic situations; the show finds itself with episode 10, “Pitter Patter Christmas Eve,” an adaptation of the manga chapter “How I’ve Waited For You…” Already one of the best stories in the manga—and it’s a romantic one between Lum and Ataru, and I usually despise any suggestion that they’re destined for each other, so I don’t say that lightly—Oshii’s adaptation fleshes out the plot, focusing on Megane’s irrational jealousy and entitlement to Lum’s affections (The Stormtroopers are a very useful outlet for depictions of toxic fandom) and really driving home both Lum’s confused emotions, and why she actually does like this stupid doofus, Ataru Moroboshi. Oshii and Takahashi, despite being almost complete opposites in taste and motifs, were somehow the perfect combination for adapting each other’s work, or at least, this work. Takahashi’s manga is a laugh riot, but the characters have very little room to develop, their emotions pushed to the background except for the rare chapter she could devote to them (Takahashi’s other series are all about romance, so I think the lack of it in UY in favor of screwball comedy is one reason why she left the series to do Maison Ikkoku and Ranma ½ in 1987, but that’s another story). Oshii and his team never lose sight of the comedy, but they also understand the heart of Takahashi’s characters; no one ever feels like they’re a different person than their manga counterpart, but they have more time to develop, more room to explore and express their feelings. Where the manga is full of madcap energy, the anime drifts into melancholy; moments of deep longing and nostalgia punctuate the absurd situations that vex our motley crew of high school students and space aliens. It’s oddly touching, and, while some episodes are better in the manga or the new anime, I have no hesitation saying that Urusei Yatsura under Mamoru Oshii is the best version of the series yet created, which means it’s probably the best there will ever be.

However, while it’s viewed as a classic today, the initial fan reaction to Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer was…divisive. The production company, Kitty Films, switched from subcontracting to Oshii and Studio Pierrot to Kazuo Yamazaki with Studio Deen. I expected the show to fall more in line with Takahashi’s manga at that point, and it did to an extent, but it still has its own feel. The designs look a little different, everyone moves differently, but the writing kept some of the Oshii feel, the depth of character, the calmness. They even kept up the original episodes, bringing back popular characters Takahashi had long since abandoned in the manga, like Kaede the ninja girl; although none of their original episodes match the surreal excellence of Oshii and Nishimura’s “Pitiful! Mother of Love and Banishment!?” (which…technically shouldn’t factor into this review since I saw it in college, but it’s very good) Yamazaki’s tenure may get more laughs, which puts it more in line with the manga, at least. However, I didn’t like the two films Yamazaki directed; apparently trying to ape Oshii’s style, they’re overlong and boring, with extended montage sequences of no action. Both the third and fourth Urusei Yatsura films follow the basic premise of, “What if Lum disappeared, wouldn’t that be sad?” Like, I was born the year after the manga ended, no more Lum is my standard state of being. Yamazaki also favors showing Lum and Ataru as some great love, some predestined couple, and I’m sorry, that’s just wrong: they’re two dumb kids who just happened to find each other in the most contrived of circumstances, and their wild personalities…well, Lum likes it. Ataru doesn’t know what he wants. Fortunately, the faults of the films don’t poison the show too much, although Megane strangely switches from being one of those guys who “Just likes Nazi memorabilia for the aesthetic” to someone who quotes Marx constantly, but Megane was always a pretty messed up dude. I did really appreciate the episode “Benten & Ryūnosuke - Run Toward Tomorrow!”, a completely different take on the meeting between those two characters than the manga offered. The show lost SOMEthing when it lost Oshii, sure, but it’s still the benchmark for that kind of eighties anime with the most bubblegum pop, catchy, lovey-dovey theme song and then the wildest, most out-there nonsense for twenty-five minutes straight. There’s one more volume coming next year to finish off the show (and they’ll probably release the special episodes/direct-to-video episodes after that), and I can’t wait. This is what a classic that DESERVES its reputation looks like.

3. Scavengers Reign: A couple weeks before Scavengers Reign aired, I saw an ad for it. It mostly comprised people freaking out in bad situations, with enough context to surmise the general plot that everyone was marooned on a planet and having a bad time. The ad didn’t make it seem appealing; I was mostly surprised that a sci-fi cartoon had snuck up on me out of seemingly nowhere, although I later found out it was based on a short that aired on Cartoon Network six years ago. Still, I figured, adult sci-fi animation, you don’t see many of those. I’d give it a try, at least to help encourage similar shows in the same vein.

For the past few years, I’ve said Primal probably deserves to be, objectively, the best show on the list, but I’m something of a mark for certain fandoms, or shows take the time to crawl under my skin. Well, there was no Primal this year, so that award now goes to Scavengers Reign. Uh, wow. This show is beautiful, thrilling, deep; its evocative and inventive imagery stays with you long after episodes end; each shot looks like a panel out of the best Image comic no one’s reading. I don’t want to compare it to Mœbius because I already did that for another show, so let’s say Brandon Graham and Simon Roy’s Prophet, especially from the fluidity between manmade technology and improvised tools made of living creatures. The setting is so rich and vibrant, and each character reacts in different ways; it follows three groups of survivors, each trying to get back to the ship—to survive and escape, yes, but with slightly different motivations for why. Ursula and Sam take the time to work together and set their escape into motion, but never fully connect due to Ursula’s scientist’s curiosity about their surroundings, and Sam’s pragmatic, goal-focused tunnel vision and distrust for the unknown. Azi is a loner, doing what she can to survive, but she lucked out and landed near a Levi robot…when Levi starts showing signs of independence, how will Azi react to suddenly having a friend instead of a tool? And Kamen. Kamen’s an asshole with a lot of baggage. He pushes everyone away, wallows in self-pity, and just makes everyone whose life he touches worse. The flashbacks to his life are as heartbreaking as they are inevitable. His decisions on the planet have far-reaching consequences, and all he can do is turn off his mind to them.

But perhaps I’ve said too much.

Like, look. I came into this year already caring about Simon Petrikov and Lum and Lupin III and Clark Kent and Megatron. I was predisposed to enjoy their adventures. Within a WEEK of watching Scavengers Reign, I was already SCREAMING when the characters were put in danger. Sure, that’s because they dropped three episodes a week, but still. That’s six episodes and I was in anguish. Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner are master storytellers just for pulling that off, without even mentioning the gorgeous design sense, the integration of each alien creature or plant into its world, the thought put into how they work and move. The animation is impeccable; they clearly use rotoscoping for a lot of the more difficult shots, and some of the long shots skimp on the in-betweens, but I didn’t notice the slight stretching of digitally-created in-betweens like on Primal (not that I’m faulting Primal for using technology to help the difficult animation process; I’m just saying, they did that animation, as far as I can tell). If you want good sci-fi television, you owe it to yourself to watch Scavengers Reign; not just because its success may lead to more shows like it, but because this is it. This is the show you wanted. Real emotional depth, complicated characters, a rich story and setting, and just wild, out-there visuals you won’t get from other shows. And it’s ANIMATED. For ADULTS. ACTUALLY FOR ADULTS, NOT JUST COMEDY WHERE THEY SAY CUSS WORDS AND TALK ABOUT SEX. That’s a miracle. If this is the end? Well, I’ll enjoy a complete, satisfying miniseries.

And if there’s more? Bring it on. I’ll be here.

2. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Last year, I expressed excitement with Strange New Worlds and anticipation with what it would do in its second season. I wanted more of what it delivered in season one, but worried it would fall into bad habits by focusing too much on the war with the Gorn hinted at in a few episodes, including the ninth episode, which I considered the weakest of season one.

Nothing to worry about. Strange New Worlds continues to keep the traditions of Star Trek going without becoming mired in nostalgia or retelling the same stale stories over and over for a new audience.

Honestly, I think the weakest episode of the season was the first one (although the ninth episode wasn’t my favorite either, I think that may be a personal issue). It was a fun jaunt where Spock had to learn to bend his morality for the sake of diplomacy, brought back an important character who had left in a huff last season, and had some nice Klingon content, but was a bit too straightforward—even as it was about a false flag operation by pirates (and a bit similar to some of the themes in my book, ngl). The second episode, however, should rank among the best Treks of all time, as it explored complex issues about identity, morality, and nature vs. nurture in that classic Trek military court style. The stakes were high, and egos were bruised. The scene where Captain Pike KNOWS he’s about to get yelled at and just grits his teeth and goes off to try to soften the blow hits hard.

I do have to praise Anson Mount specifically for all the character he brings to Captain Pike. Pike, in previous incarnations, was special only because he was clearly important to one of the main characters. In the original series, it was Spock; Spock was willing to put his career in danger to help Pike after his scarring, so obviously they were very close, but viewers saw little of that since Spock’s role in the original pilot (“The Cage”) was small, and cut down in the clips shown as part of the two-part episode “The Menagerie” (I don’t have to explain all that, do I?). Pike as portrayed by Jeffrey Hunter was a dour, humorless figure; part of that was on purpose, as “Cage” is set during a crisis on confidence for Pike, but also because he served less as a character and more as the vehicle to convey the moral to the audience. Hunter’s Pike is either fighting, or arguing for his freedom, he didn’t get more than one scene where he talks with an old man to express a character, and so he feels harsher and less fully human than the whimsical, impish charm William Shatner would bring to Captain Kirk. Sean Kenney just sat in a chair and beeped, so he’s barely worth mentioning, and Bruce Greenwood was just a prop in Kirk’s story, a wise mentor figure who we could feel sad about being kidnapped/dying while the important characters did all the work. Finally, Mount brings some humanity to Christopher Pike, fleshing him out as more than just a prop for the story. Mount’s Pike is positioned as a midway point between Kirk and Picard; he has all of Jean-Luc’s flair for diplomacy, preferring to handle conflicts over the negotiating table than in battle (excellently portrayed at the end of the first season, which I believe I alluded to before), but without Picard’s stuffy, reserved nature. Where Picard wants to be an ALLY, Pike wants to be a FRIEND. Where Kirk has a tight-knit group he loves to roll around space helping people and then leaving, Pike wants to invite people over for dinner and get to know them better. Indeed, the frequent scenes of Pike discussing important issues with his officers while chopping vegetables in his kitchen, or lovely scenes of him proudly presenting a new dish he’s been perfecting over the past few weeks, do more to convey the character with actions than his words ever do—especially in that one scene in episode 5 of season 2, where a character asks for snacks and Mount says nothing, just snaps his fingers into a point and twirls off his stool into the kitchen. It’s masterful work, and my hat is off to whatever casting director made the choice (and a special anti-prize to the moron who wasted all this amazing talent by giving Mount nothing to do in the execrable Inhumans TV show a few years back).

Heck, I could just write paragraph after paragraph about all the great acting and casting choices in this show—Jess Bush finally fleshing out Nurse Chapel (and completely recontextualizing all the character’s scenes in the first show in the process), Celia Rose Gooding playing a young Uhura trying to grow into the character Nichelle Nichols made an icon (and fitting the role a lot better than anything from those movies), Rebecca Romjin humanizing the mysterious Number One, Babs Olusanmokun developing the minor character of M’Benga into a complex, layered individual, or even the new characters like La’an played by Christina Chong or Erica Ortegas played by Melissa Navia. Or the Kirk brothers, yes both of them. Or Carol Kane’s Pelia. However, that would be very long and probably give some stuff away. So let’s just go where the money is: Spock.

Played by Ethan Peck, an actor I had never heard of before this show, Spock is…Spock. I’ve heard some complaints here and there that they’re undermining what Nimoy did with the character, and I don’t think that’s true. I do think they’re kind of…skipping to the end of Spock’s arc. I had a discussion with my friend Katy recently, at least in passing, about what I shall derisively call “data bros,” the kind of dude who thinks of himself as rational and unemotional; you know, a Vulcan. This is a completely delusional self-image. Instead of acknowledging their own biases, these people will declare their position rational, and ignore any complaints as the emotional bleating of aggrieved irrationals. This is, in itself, an emotional response; the human precondition to protect the ego. Star Trek has gotten a lot of mileage out of using Vulcans as slight antagonists by playing on this very human trend, but Spock was largely immune, as he is one of the heroes. Nimoy did play with this idea in the movies, and by the TNG era Spock was open about his Vulcan/human nature, comfortable with expressing his emotions, and rejected Hard Logic as an impossible, self-defeating goal: an unnecessarily repressive system. That Strange New Worlds explores this too may seem like a continuity error to some, and in a way it is; SNW has not shied away from portraying certain bits of continuity that were treated as secrets in the original series as open information just because, well, the original series was developed before the Star Trek timeline was set in stone and a lot of the ideas about Vulcan culture and biology that were presented as new discoveries in that show (as if the viewers found out about them at the same time as the characters) didn’t make sense with later revelations about the nature and term of human/Vulcan relations. However, it’s also a good example of the ways SNW modernizes the concepts of the original series without being overly-beholden to its eccentricities (like a certain other Star Trek prequel I will gladly name, it’s Enterprise, I’m talking about Enterprise, God what a bad show that was). Playing around with Vulcans not lying was a fun bit in the first episode of the season (and set up a fun recurring joke of Klingons getting Spock drunk) but I am specifically thinking of the fifth episode of the season. It seems like they’ve established a trend of Spock-focused episodes coming right in the middle, I’ll have to see if that continues into the third season, and at first I was disappointed that “Charades” was a bit of a carbon copy of last season’s “Spock Amok,” as both feature shenanigans disrupting Spock and T’Pring’s courtship (which we know will end disastrously at the next Pon Farr, per the original series). “Charades” sets itself apart with its final scene, however: Spock, having been forced against his will to live as a baseline human, while also disguising his transformation to please T’Pring’s racist mother, suddenly realizes how he had internalized Vulcan society’s prejudices against their human allies and how it had affected his relationship with his mother, Amanda. In a moment of realization, he launches into a full-throated defense of his mother, followed by an apology for his treatment of her in his childhood. It’s a great message, and an important one; and it wouldn’t have been possible to tell if they’d valued continuity minutia over the story. The broad strokes are still there (the excellent third episode of the season spends some time on that very thing, in fact, although I’m not going to waste time explaining how or why—oh, and the ninth episode drops a bombshell that I feel like the character SHOULDN’T KNOW based on later events, so yes, there are changes that bother me, even as I’m trying to be a recovering continuity pedant) if you want them, but the HEART of Trek is more important, and there’s plenty of that.

I should probably stop there or I’ll be here all day; I want to shout out episode 4, “Among the Lotus Eaters,” as a wonderful sci-fi short story, and episode 8, “Under the Cloak of War,” as an amazing character portrait of M’Benga and Chapel. Episode 7, “Those Old Scientists,” was of course a lot of fun, though maybe not the laugh riot Lower Decks is. I’ve already said all I wanted to say about “Subspace Rhapsody;” I think others will enjoy it more than me, I just think I would have liked to see those relationships play out over the course of more episodes than all at once, but maybe that wasn’t an option. And the season left off on a big cliffhanger, with high personal and political stakes. Here’s hoping we get to see a satisfying conclusion next year.

1. Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake: When Adventure Time: Distant Lands was announced for HBO Max (back when it was still HBO Max), I felt conflicted. More of one of my favorite shows, yes, but the Adventure Time Finale, “Come Along With Me,” was so beautiful and perfect, I couldn’t imagine anything continuing from that adding anything to the series. I needn’t have worried. Not only did Distant Lands continue the level of quality I’d come to expect from Adam Muto and the gang, it provided two of the best episodes of Adventure Time ever, developing characters beyond the limitations the episodic nature of the series trapped them in, continuing plot threads I’d forgotten about, and exploring real human pathos and questions about love, death, and rebirth. When they announced another sequel would follow up on the unanswered plot threads about Simon Petrikov and recurring alternate universe-counterparts Fionna and Cake, I was ready for whatever they had for me.

As you might imagine from the ranking here, it did not disappoint.

A word on the plot involving a multiverse: obviously it had to, since, as anyone who watched the show knows, Simon comes from the main universe of Ooo and Fionna and Cake come from the genderswapped world of…well, early sources call it Aaa, but the show only calls it Fionnaverse. When they announced the series, I was near the end of Steven Universe, and expressed hope that other Cartoon Network series might be incorporated into the universe-travelling. Once the miniseries released, however, I was so spent by Warner and Disney beating the concept of the multiverse to death in an attempt to drain as much money from the populace as possible, I was very pleased to see they did not give in to any such fanboyish impulses, with the exception of one great gag. The multiversal aspect doesn’t show up until halfway through the series; the early episodes take place in established locations like Fionnaverse (albeit altered from how it appeared in the original series), Ooo, and the Cosmic Realms. When they finally do start travelling to other worlds, the ones the heroes visit reflect their own inner conflicts, offering glimpses into worlds where Simon made different choices; worlds that reflect the inner conflict of our heroes (and give us fans some closure on leftover questions…or leave more questions, just in case).

That Fionna and Cake deals with depression should be obvious from the trailer. That depression manifests in different ways, with three different threads running throughout the work: nostalgia for a lost past, disconnection from the present, and blaming outside forces for this feeling. I feel a lot of these threads have been examined to death by more prominent fans; Prismo is overcome with grief for Jake (and as an aside, I’m so upset about how Prismo was recast because Kumail Nanjiani’s agent turned down his returning to the role without consulting him, even though he wanted to do it, that’s a heartbreaker), Fionna is depressed because her job sucks and she dreams of more, Simon is depressed because his one true love fused with an ancient chaos god, the Lich is depressed because he got what he always wanted…each one has to relearn how to find happiness in the world, to make something new of their life, and they struggle to do so. Simon sees a parade of worlds that would be worse off without him, and all he can’t escape the idea that the world would be better without him, wasting Betty’s sacrifice while also centering himself in Fionna and Cake’s story. Simon centering himself in someone else’s story also comes up, giving us more information about the Simon/Betty love story, that is too spoilery and also I’m angry at Hank for…not even for seeing what was coming before I could, but for being able to admit it. Grief pervades the series. I feel like I have so much to say about each thread, but I can’t find all the words—except for one aspect.

I picked up on what I interpret as a metafictional narrative within the show, a sort of commentary by the creators on what Adventure Time means to them. At the start of the series, everyone seems to want to get back to the early days of Adventure Time: Fionna dreams of magical, consequence-free adventures and Simon is living as a human zoo exhibit, writing new books on archaeology, but all anyone wants to talk to him about are the old Fionna and Cake novels. A young girl plies him with requests for an autograph, but he pushes her away, disavowing his older work. It struck me as terribly on-the-nose for creators who have been called back to a cancelled TV show they did thirteen years ago—TWICE—to show a fan begging for new content and ignore the new works…but also, Simon is not sympathetic in those scenes, his new work is boring, his tone condescending. Later, Gary Prince pitches a concept to investors, a cartoon world based on Adventure Time, where the characters grow and change with the audience. The investors like the pitch, but they aren’t interested in an ongoing story, they don’t want change. I was curious where the writers were going with this thread; Simon was clearly in the wrong to push away the little girl, but Gary would be terribly unfulfilled by bowing to the rich executives just to get part of what he wanted, sublimating his passion to the whims of the powerful people who control the money. In the end, Simon goes to the future and finds a book, Casper and Nova. It appears to be about the magic crown, so Simon assumes he wrote it. Not to spoil anything, but the book teaches Simon an important lesson, one that might have changed his life had he learned it long ago. After going through several worlds where Simon made the wrong choice, where his actions led to further pain and suffering for those he loved, Simon receives the briefest glimpse of a place where he made someone’s life better…but he can never visit there. Instead, he makes amends, spends time with his fan, becomes a better person, gets a damn therapist. We see—Simon doesn’t, at least not in the episode, but WE see—the little girl who loves Fionna and Cake designing characters of her own. The characters are Casper and Nova.

THAT is the moral. Or, that is the best ending. Or, that is the best ending the characters have for themselves, so why not take it? Repeatedly going back to the well of Adventure Time is fine, but over time it will just become unfulfilling. At least, they can’t go back to it as it was; we will probably never see Ooo again as in those early episodes. Fine. Adventure Time grew into something greater long ago, anyway. But the true joy, the true purpose of art, is not to continue forever, but to see what new creations that art will inspire in the next generation, and the one after that. That’s what I want for this team. Animation is undervalued right now. So many shows that sprung up in the wake of Adventure Time, an outpouring of creativity not seen in the industry since the deluge that followed the launch of Nicktoons back in the 90’s and lasted until…probably the launch of Avatar and Codename: Kids Next Door at the latest, has not only died out but been silently deleted from view. So many shows I watched that I can’t see anymore; I’ve already failed the Adventure Time team, as most of them went to work on Summer Camp Island, which I didn’t even know about until it was airing, didn’t watch, and now it's been removed from streaming. I want the next generation to have the opportunity to make whatever shows they want, and I want this crew to be able to continue to build the kind of worlds they want, either in Adventure Time’s playbox, or without. I hope for a time where Adventure Time is allowed to happen again, without all the pushback and drama that went on behind the scenes.

Well? What time is it?

(Update: It got a second season, and as much as I can’t wait to see what happens, I can’t think of any dangling threads, what are they gonna’ do?)