Tuesday, January 9, 2018

New Ducktales, Season One, Episode Nine: "The Impossible Summit of Mount Neverrest"


Okay okay, I watched it. Leave off, you vultures!

So there are things I liked and things I did not like about this episode. Here's what I liked: the fact that Scrooge has a more-or-less believable motive other than financial to climb the mountain. The trippy-ass portals at the top with no explanation. The fact that Mallardy's corpse is wearing an "I didn't survive Mount Neverrest" t-shirt. Okay, and Huey's motive was fine, and so was Dewey and Webby's.

Right. So all that is reasonable enough. Here's what I didn't like: the fact that Louie is just going to decline to go on this trip. And Launchpad's nonstop excessive stupidity with the "ice fever" thing. Admittedly, those are fewer things than the things I claimed to like, but did I say "didn't like" above? What I actually meant was "found just absolutely fucking intolerable." Especially the Launchpad stuff. Somebody needs to wire the writers' eyes open Ludovico-Technique-style and force them to watch the Launchpad-centric episodes of original-Ducktales' first season to teach them that that's not all there is to the character. Fucking hell, man. Oh, and I also hate Louie's personality. And the fact that only Huey is a Woodchuck. But that's neither here nor there. This could have been a servicable mini-episode shorn of all the stuff down-mountain, but as it is, bah. BAH, I say.

Random Observations

-So Scrooge is apparently in his nineties in this continuity, if we're accepting that he really tried to climb the mountain seventy-five years ago. A bit hard to buy, really. He was seventy-five in that one Barks one-pager where he uses a lightbulb instead of candles on his birthday cake. That seems a lot more reasonable to me.

-"Louie put it on his corporate credit card!" "Louie doesn't have a corporate credit card." "Oh. Louie gave me your credit card."

-It's kind of weird that there were seven episodes in quick succession, then a month-long pause, then one more episode, then...an even longer pause. What's going on here?!?