Good episode, nice mix of humor, action, and drama. It’s been too long since I watched Trollhunters from start to finish, so I can’t remember exactly how I felt about its first batch of episodes, but I’m again impressed with how strong and confident 3Below has been from the beginning.
As if the looming threat of bounty hunters doesn’t give the Akiridions enough to worry about, a woman from the school board has shown up asking questions Aja and Krel can’t answer. Birdie wants their papers, and she wants them in the most xenophobic way possible. Aja is freaked by the thought that their lives at Arcadia Oaks High, “the closest thing [they] have to a home” on Earth, could be in jeopardy.
First things first: I didn’t realize it until I looked it up on IMDb just now, but Birdie is voiced by Fiona Shaw! Shaw is a splendid actress anyway, from the Amanda Root/Ciarán Hinds Persuasion to Killing Eve, but of course, thanks to Andor, this episode is also a retroactive reunion for her and Diego Luna. She killed it as Maarva, and here, she’s repellently effective as the quietly menacing, insinuating Birdie.
This isn’t the first time the show has addressed the Akiridions’ immigrant experience—for instance, during an unfriendly encounter between Krel and Steve in an earlier episode, someone calls for Steve to “knock [Krel] back where he came from”—but it’s certainly the most pointed example so far, with a story revolving around how Aja and Krel’s status is perceived by bigoted adults. It’s an ugly thing for them to deal with, although it’s another chance for Señor Uhl to show his character. By his understanding, Aja and Krel are undocumented refugees from a small country that experienced a coup, and he made it clear earlier in the season that he is looking out for them. Here, he says to Birdie, “‘Illegal?’ Such language is not permitted inside my school.”
Given the heavier subject matter, the episode needed some levity, and that comes chiefly from two places. First, Varvatos has been playing chess with some older guys at the park in his human “geezer” form, and he has an entertaining “love at first sight” moment with the nana of one of the Trollhunters characters. When his chess buddies tease him about it, he exclaims, “Of course Varvatos Vex has a crush! Do not doubt Vex’s crushing power!” And naturally, his idea of dealing with Birdie involves forging fewer documents and more “dismembering” and “bludgeoning.”
The other main source of humor comes from our character of the week. Tom Kenny voices Ricky, one of the “Blank” robots Krel programmed near the start of the season to pose as their parents whenever necessary. Because the Blanks’ Earth-specific knowledge all comes from outdated radio transmissions that made it into space, Ricky and the other Blank, Lucy (yes, the names are intentional,) give off mid-century sitcom suburbanite vibes, complete with mid-dialogue advertisements and hokey old-timey slang. The Blanks are amusing anyway, but in this episode, Ricky takes a hit from a bounty hunter that scrambles his circuits, which causes him to veer wildly from his usual peppy aphorisms into monologues of existential crisis.
Once again, Aja gets more heavy lifting in the episode than Krel, even though some major stuff goes down for him here. The bounty hunter who hits Ricky was targeting him, but while that shakes him up, he quickly goes into STEM mode, working on trying to repair Ricky. When Aja asks how he’s doing after the attack, he simply says, “I’m fine, I guess.”
And in talking about incidents of xenophobia on the show, it’s no accident that the example I picked from an earlier episode specifically involved Krel rather than Aja. While Aja’s human form looks like a white girl, Krel’s looks like a brown Latino boy, and in the different ways they’re treated on the show, we see examples of how immigrants are treated differently depending on how they’re racialized. When Birdie comes sniffing around, she sneers, “Mr. Tarron has scored 100% on every single math test, highly unusual for his kind.” To the other kids, Krel’s literally out-of-this-world math and science knowledge makes him weird and geeky, but to racist adults, it's suspicious. This exchange is very gross, even if Señor Uhl immediately steps in to defend Krel.
However, we don’t see much of Krel’s reaction to any of this. Luna doesn’t get as many standout scenes or terrific lines here as he’s had in some episodes. He still does well with his material—Krel always feels so firmly in-character to me—but I’m greedy, so I naturally want more.
.jpeg)