Another relatively Scrooge-lite episode. Not as much so as last week, but still, Scrooge takes a backseat to another adventure featuring two of the kids. It’s pretty fun, even if the main joke starts to wear after a while.
Flintheart Glomgold has been missing since the events of the season 1 finale, and a new acting CEO (who’s far less focus on vengeance) has taken over his company. When Louie and Webby stumble across Duke Baloney, a fisherman sporting a South African accent and a taste for the simple things in life, they realize they’ve found the missing Duckburg billionaire. Webby assumes he has amnesia and needs their help, while Louie is convinced Glomgold is working an angle.
The tropes are very recognizable here and, for the most part, they’re fun. Glomgold isn’t a favorite character of mine—too one-note—but it’s amusing to see him in a starkly-different persona. While it’s of course only a matter of time before the “real” Glomgold asserts himself, it’s funny to see him as a “humble fisherman” who’s a team player bringing “his determination and a freakishly high tolerance for pain” to the table.
I do enjoy the artificial “drama” injected into the story with an entertaining origin story for Glomgold, and I get a kick out of a dream he has as his mind tries to sort through his jumbled memories. In the latter, the on-the-nose symbolism is a hoot, such as an actual duck in a top hat, sitting in a chest of gold, serving as an obvious stand-in for Scrooge.
Louie-Webby is a pairing that doesn’t get a ton of play, but they’re fun whenever they quasi-team up together. Webby is a guileless go-getter and Louie is a lazy cynic, so they rarely see eye to eye, but that means they both push each other until they ultimately come up with the right answer somewhere in the middle. Here, I love Louie cautioning Webby about playing into Glomgold’s game: “That’s exactly what he wants us to do. And then, surprise! We’re trapped inside a volcano full of shark bombs.” And I’m always here for Webby’s over-the-top enthusiasm about building an investigation board.
As I said, not a whole lot of Scrooge. The idea of Scrooge is more of a focus, since Webby and Louie both figure that bringing up his rivalry with Scrooge is the best way to draw Glomgold out, but the miser himself doesn’t appear all that much.
As usual, though, David Tennant still entertains within his brief appearance. Just the way he says “Duke Baloney” cracks me up, and I like Scrooge’s blasé attitude toward Glomgold possibly having amnesia: “Flintheart Glomgold blows himself up on a daily basis. A simple brain injury is actually a step up.” We also get a bit of Scrooge penny-pinching over charity, which is a good reminder that, even with a “likable billionaire,” the 1% is still gonna 1%.
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