*Episode premise spoilers.*
And here we are at the season 1 finale! A lot goes down here, in terms of action, plot, and emotion. I’ll avoid major spoilers, but I have to spoil a little in order to talk about the episode at all.
While Jim and the Trollhunter crew do battle around town, Aja and Krel have their own crisis to deal with: General Morando, having learned their location, has sent a suped-up robot called Omen after them. Omen has taken control of the Mother Ship and is planning to hijack it, along with their parents’ life cores. Our heroes fight tooth and nail to confront Omen, retake Mother, and protect the king and queen.
Very quickly, our character of the week is Queen Coranda, Aja and Krel’s mother. Like Aja, she’s voiced by Tatiana Maslany, and although the premise of the show demands that she’s extremely sidelined throughout much of the series, the moments when we do see her shows us a fair queen and a kind mother. Here, we get a brief flashback of the kids on Akiridion-5, failing to appreciate a lesson their parents are trying to teach them. Coranda is understanding, patient, and maybe a little indulgent, but she consistently believes in her children’s capacity to do good.
Onto the rest of the episode, which is a banger. Because Omen’s first attempt to abscond with the Mother Ship fails, much of the action is set in the freshly crashed ship, which fluctuates between its actual appearance and its retro house camouflage. This leads to cool scenes of Aja, Krel, and co. dodging blows in a sharply tilted kitchen or climbing down interior ship corridors that are at a 90° angle. Omen can take over other machines, so not only has it subsumed Mother, it’s taken control of Lucy and Ricky, coopting them into murder bots who still have their corny Lucy and Ricky personalities. That means we get scenes of Lucy grinning madly as she chucks dinner plates at the Akiridions, or Ricky calling things “swell” as he tries to bash someone’s head in.
Unsurprisingly, all the alien adults in Aja and Krel’s life want to do everything possible to defend them, but of course they can’t fight the Tarrons’ ultimate battle for them. Different forces conspire to keep the adults occupied with various threats, leaving Aja and Krel to press onward into the bowels on the ship and take on Omen on their own. As they generally do when they’re at their best, they work together, with Aja handling the derring-do to give Krel time to come up with a tech solution to some of their most pressing problems.
Another great showing for Krel here. I like that, even though Omen has taken over Mother, Ricky, and Lucy, he recognizes that they’re being controlled and wants to make sure they’re detained/thwarted but not harmed. Similarly, there’s a moment where he’s working on his tech stuff and the controlled Mother is mocking his attempts. Exasperated, he snaps, “Don’t mother me, Mother!” I love that, that he still treats her like her even when she’s being controlled by an evil robot and is being used to try and kill them all.
Krel wouldn’t be Krel if he wasn’t a bit cranky and cynical, so we get some fun lines from him even in the midst of all the drama. When Aja presses him over their comms, asking, “Are you making any progress?” as she fights the aforementioned evil robot, he shoots back, “No, I was just thinking of taking a nap!” And he later takes the air out of a tender moment by pointing out that he saw “Home is Where the Heart Is” written on a doormat: “Humans wipe their shoes on this saying.” Oh Krel, never change.
But at the same time, he also dramatically quotes Winston Churchill? Basically, it’s awesome. Krel is great, and Diego Luna does a bang-up job playing him. I love it all. Bring on season 2!
No comments:
Post a Comment