*Episode premise spoilers.*
Delightful, stupendously Scottish episode! We return to Scrooge’s ancestral home and meet a never-before-seen member, all the characters have something fun to do, and we weave in a bit of the season arc too.
Scrooge brings the kids along to Castle McDuck while he investigates a problem with its magical enchantments, but he’s soon more preoccupied by the presence of his sister Matilda. Webby frets over the siblings bickering while Huey and Louie search the castle for a lost artifact: the Blessed Bagpipe of Clan McDuck!
First things first. Not only are Graham McTavish and Ashley Jensen back as Scrooge’s parents, we also get the one and only Michelle Gomez as Matilda! She’s a lot of fun as Scrooge’s sister, a woman with a fondness for get-rich-quick schemes who has yet to, well, get rich quick.
Webby, who idolizes all things Scrooge and grew up without any siblings, is dismayed when the deep familial love she envisions between Scrooge and Matilda turns to petty arguments. “What is happening?” she asks when they start giving each other backhanded compliments, both concerned and perplexed. “Why are they saying mean things in a nice way?” Dewey puts himself forward as an expert in all things sibling rivalry and advises that Webby shouldn’t get involved. (Reader, you’ll never guess what Webby does!) These two always play well off each other in plots, and this storyline gives us sage wisdom from Dewey like, “This is not a fight, it’s a squabble. No punches, no tears, and no parents stepping in. It’s fine.”
The Huey-Louie plot is one I feel we’ve seen multiple times from them, especially this season: Huey wants to search for the bagpipe meticulously and by-the-book (literally,) while Louie gets bored by his “nerd talk” and wants to skip the hard work to get straight to the prize. Both are definitely very in character, but we don’t break any new ground for either character here.
The episode offers up a return appearance from Giancarlo Esposito’s Phantom Blot. The headline here is his sidekick Pepper—in the Phantom Blot’s debut episode, I speculated that we’d be seeing more of both of them in the future, since Pepper was played by Amy Sedaris but had hardly any lines. That’s rectified handily in this episode. Pepper is in fact a cheerful motormouth who drives the moody, mysterious Phantom Blot up the wall; it’s fun.
The sibling rivalry stuff between Scrooge and Matilda is really good. I like that we see that they do love each other—despite Webby’s worries, they don’t spend the whole episode at each other’s throats, and Scrooge is initially thrilled to see her. I also like that we see how their parents exacerbate the problem by picking favorites/sides, which just feeds into the more quarrelsome parts of their dynamic.
And yes, having David Tennant and Michelle Gomez in scenes together absolutely make me wonder what a meeting between Ten (or Fourteen!) and Missy would be like. Love it!
A few highlights from Tennant’s line deliveries in this episode:
· When they tour the castle’s collection of statues memorializing notable McDucks, Webby automatically since Scrooge will be the next family member to be etched in stone – I just love Scrooge’s over-the-top false modesty in response, saying, “Oh Webby, really, it would be a nice token, but statues aren’t really….”
· When the bickering between him and Matilda reaches a critical breaking point, Scrooge lets out a simply pitch-perfect wail of, “Maaaaaaa!!!”
· I’ll never turn down a bit of the ol’ Scrooge alliteration! – “Let’s send this ignominious ink stain packing!”
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