Credited as episode 3 on IMDb. This one rounds off our introductions to the triplets, with a more thorough look at Louie. It also furthers an ongoing mystery arc, which I wasn’t expecting when I started this series.
Scrooge, concerned that living in his mansion is making Louie lazy and unappreciative, decides to take him to the office to teach him the value of a hard day’s work, but Louie’s penchant for taking the easy way out threatens to get him in trouble. Dewey and Webby tag along as well, but their interest is in the McDuck family archive, where Dewey hopes to learn about his mom.
A familiar voice shows up here: Jim Rash, playing Gyro, a moderately-unstable inventor who works for Scrooge. Apparently he has a habit of building robots that inevitably turn on their masters (“Only half of my inventions turn evil,” he points out. “The other half are just wildly misunderstood!”) Rash’s agitated energy lends well to this sort of character, and it’s fun to listen to him variously give his adorable new robot a firm talking-to about not going evil and monologue while teetering on the edge of megalomania.
Like I said, I didn’t start this show expecting any type of serialized arc, but here we are. A previous episode dropped hints about a mystery surrounding the triplets’ mom, and that thread is picked up and made explicit here. While Webby is gung ho for the intentionally-mysterious archive and her pontificating about having to pass a series of trials before finding the information they seek, Dewey is too anxious to uncover something – anything – about his mom. “It is not for us to understand the ways of the archive,” the archivist intones dramatically, and Dewey snaps in reply, “That is literally your job!!”
Much like Huey and his scouting ways in the last episode, I couldn’t have pinned down a precise characterization for Louie before this, but what’s established here does ring true with what we’ve seen of him in previous episodes. At the arcade, he scams to get free stuff, and at the base of Mt. Neverrest, he decides it’s going to be too much work and hangs back with some hot cocoa while the others attempt the climb. So, it makes sense here that he’s not a super motivated person and would generally rather get something for nothing.
This puts him at odds with Scrooge, naturally. As a billionaire explorer/adventurer, Scrooge is certainly a go-getter, so it makes him squirrelly to see a kid who’s content to just laze around on the couch watching TV. And he’s also a miser, so it burns him up to see Louie taking his wealth for granted, like when Louie realizes his phone is dead and, rather than charge it, reasons he might as well just buy a new one. Louie waves off Scrooge’s concerns, pointing out that they’re rich, and Scrooge bellows back, “No, I’m rich!”
Once they get to the office, Louie gets himself into a major scrape that he has to try to desperately hide from Scrooge, so the two characters don’t interact as much together after that. It’s more about Louie sneaking around trying to rectify his mistake. But we still get a little fun from Scrooge, who’s stuck in a meeting listening to his board members complain about his own “wasteful” spending, like the amount of money he spends on magical defenses. “Do you have any idea how many vengeance curses I have on my head?!” he exclaims. David Tennant plays Scrooge’s indignant exasperation well, but it would’ve been nice to get more between him and Louie, like we got to see Scrooge with Dewey in the pilot and Huey in the Mt. Neverrest episode.
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