*Spoilers for “The Golden Spear!”, and season 2 arc spoilers.*
One of the many things to love about DuckTales is the fact that it’s given me a genuine appreciation for Donald Duck. Without sacrificing one bit of his ridiculousness, the show makes him a real character within the series, and this episode is a fine showcase for him.
At the end of “The Golden Spear!”, when Della flew her rocket back to Earth, Donald found it and unwittingly launched himself to the moon. Now, the people of the moon are holding him prisoner, spurred on by leader Lunaris’s claims that they were betrayed by Della. Back in Duckburg, Dewey and Webby are jonesing for a new mystery and decide to investigate why Donald hasn’t written to them after going off on a “relaxing cruise.”
In Della’s interactions with the moon folks, she was initially welcomed by Lunaris and regarded suspiciously by Penumbra. Over the course of her time with them, Penumbra was just starting to come around on her, only for it to be revealed that Lunaris was playing a long game, inventing this false “betrayal” to get his people’s backing for a war against Earth. That means that, in Donald’s predicament, Penumbra is his unlikely ally.
It's really fun to have Donald off on his own adventure on the moon. There are the usual jokes at the expense of his speech—as Lunaris is presenting him to the moon people as a dangerous spy, the very confused Donald is just trying to figure out what’s going on. When someone calls out, “What did he say?”, Lunaris answers, “…He said, ‘Death to the moon!’” And there’s some fantastic physical comedy, such as Donald trying to escape his prison cell by literally banging his head against the wall, along with a terrific wordless sequence of him trying to sneak through the soldiers’ barracks without waking any of them. At the same time, though, the episode culminates in a neat climax that gives added context and an in-story purpose behind Donald’s classic tantrums. I like that.
The Earth plot is good, too. Dewey and Webby might be the best one-on-one screen partners among the kids, because both are ridiculously enthusiastic but with completely different sensibilities. It’s a hoot watching them work themselves into a frenzy as they try to invent conspiracies to solve. At one point, Dewey goes on a long ramble that ends with the fact that Mrs. Beakley hasn’t been buying peppers. Webby gasps, “Ghost peppers!”, to which Dewey responds, “It’s all connected!” Once they launch onto their Donald investigation, they both get super into it. Dewey styles himself as a noir detective while Webby wears a deerstalker, and during an interrogation, they explain, “We’re both bad cop.”
It's a great episode, but it’s fairly light on Scrooge. On the Earth side of things, he basically bookends the story, first frustrated by Dewey and Webby’s attempts to manufacture an adventure, then showing up at the end when their sleuthing takes them too far down a rabbit hole. Still, it’s fun, and I get a kick out of him building a money bin in a bottle.
As such, there’s not a ton of David Tennant here, but he gets a few good line readings in. I enjoy his exhausted pragmatism in the face of Dewey and Webby’s hyperactivity. And I especially like the line, “Hang on! An adventure has to call to you. You cannae just go around making up mysteries.”
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