Ducktales, Season Four, Episode Three: "The Duck Who Knew too Much"

For this one, the seminal wikipedia article "List of Ducktales Episodes" claims that "Fenton uncovers an international conspiracy to steal Scrooge's gold overseas while supposedly on vacation." I defy you to tell me, based on that description. who is overseas, who is on vacation, and whether or not these two things are one and the same.

They ARE, and it's Fenton. He wins a ski vacation to "Swizzleland" on the popular gameshow Let's Make a Mess (I feel like there's some sort of vague reference to Chuck Barris' alleged history as a CIA assassin here, but it never goes anywhere). Scrooge won't give him time off, natch, so he pretends to be sick; this works, but meanwhile Scrooge is also going to Swizzleland to check out potential security issues with his factory there.

So Fenton has to simultaneously avoid being seen by Scrooge, try not to alienate Gandra with his eccentric behavior, and foil the espionage plot he's stumbled onto.

And it is pretty fucking spectacular. It has the manic sort of pace that all the best Ducktales episodes seem to, and there's a lot of very funny business involving Fenton's efforts to hide while also figuring out what's going on ("Are you always this weird on vacations?" Gandra asks him). In the episode's best scene, we see Fenton and Gandra tricking an agent into thinking that she's their contact by means of a really fake Spanish accent ("Funny, you had a French accent on the phone." "She was calling from a phone booth in France!"). "Qu'est que c'est 'remote control?'" she asks, upon being told that she's supposed to be bringing one, which is funny and pretty darn smart--the sort of thing we see too infrequently in this show. Then, she gets a chance to shine, thanks to the course she took in "advanced espionage robotics" ("the advanced nail polishing class was full").

Great stuff--and as a bonus, we get to see Mrs. Crackshell in the gizmosuit. I'm always relieved when a really good episode comes down the lines, because it provides evidence that I'm not just being arbitrarily hard on the show's many substandard ones. The only real weakness is the ending, in which, apparently unable to come up with anything really satisfying in the limited space remaining, Fenton comes down with the illness ("the purple-blotch beak-pox") that he was feigning before.

Stray Observations

-Fenton and Gandra have separate hotel rooms, I note. Yeah, it's a kids' show, I know, but still…

-…could this have some relationship to the fact that he's so intensely--uncharacteristically, I would have thought--lecherous upon meeting the enemy femme fatale?

-"Good day. Please answer the following questions. True or false. Number one: I think spying would be a neat job."