Archive for February, 2020

By the final few episodes of season three of The Dragon Prince, a number of disparaging, distant characters have gathered together to fight off a giant army of soldiers, all of whom have transformed into raging, hostile creatures. The main characters have been at odds with each other in various degrees, mostly due to confusion over true end goals and disinformation/misinformation generated to manipulate people like chess pieces or prevent hurt feelings, but by the end, they come together in a slightly uneasy alliance to protect the great dragon and its egg/child from this horde–particularly its leader, Viren, who has become grotesquely corrupted by a literal magical monster in his ear. The battle is intense, the kind of close-knit battle that crusts and wanes with intensity and tension, near catastrophic failures opening up amazing moments of tide-turning successes. It’s as complete and rewarding as any endgame battle should be.

It’s also clearly not where The Dragon Prince wanted to go.

It’s unclear if there’s going to be a fourth season of The Dragon Prince. Its third season ends with a mysterious cliffhanger of sorts, but for all intents and purposes, all the major narratives seem to have been closed (not to mention a very contentious and serious issue behind the scenes). But the events of the first two seasons very much purported something grander and more epic in scope, a tale originally gathered to tell a more expansive, Game of Thrones-esque narrative. Animated shows have been trying to “go” Game of Thrones for a while now, with limited success. All Hail King Julian had one season of a Game of Throne parody which was rather restrictive in their fairly loose, family absurd comedy voice. Star Vs. The Forces of Evil didn’t go full Game of Thrones but had lofty ambitions that fell far, far short. Amphibia, which asks for an analysis on its own, couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a tale of misguided warring factions or an episodic comedy of weird yet potent friendships; its second season plans to send its cast on a traveling mission across the land of Wartwood. This, mind you, is what Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventures did in its second season, which was both fine and clunky: fine in the sense it was still fun, entertaining, and intriguing, but clunky in that its cast often felt stuck in one place for too long, and the various encounters and characters they went up against were too fleeting to be particularly memorable (and, perhaps most unfortunately, Rapunzel’s struggle through her trauma took a very definitive backseat). Its current season immediately snapped them back to Corona in the time it took to do a song cure; All Hail made a pointed self-aware joke about the process, immediately opting to go back to its original episodic-is structure.

The Dragon Prince also, very clearly, had lofty goals. Its basic concept was easy enough on the surface: hostilities between humans and elves had reached an uneasy truce, but when the act of one particular human upsets a dragon–the destruction of its egg–all hell starts to break loose. It’s revealed early on that the egg was only taken, not destroyed, but the course of returning it can’t stop the drumbeat of war. Well… that’s what was supposed to happen. Similar to Ned Stark’s attempt to find out what happened to regarding the “death” Jon Arryn, which led to his beheading and the floodgates of absolute war and madness, The Dragon Prince seemed to chart its narrative on how two outsiders of an inevitable clash coped when their goal completely failed to match up against the drive for bloodlust, revenge, and misplaced justice. The driver of this was Viren, a misguided and hostile assistant to the late king whose death has him lashing out and desperate for revenge against the elves who killed him (rich in queer subtext, FYI). In just a few episodes, things escalate, fights are fought, dragons mess about, magic is casted, and so forth. It’s most telling moment was in season two, in which Viren has to convince a roundtable of human leaders to march on the elves, and he almost convinces them – save for one person, a kid. Her refusal to abide to his whims enrages him, doubly so when it convinces everyone else to back down as well. There was a sense that the show was going to really get in-depth here, with conflicting human lands responding to the threat (or non-threat) in different ways. To further that, Viren gets gradually corrupted by some kind of mysterious creature in a magic mirror; Ezran, upon learning his father is dead, departs from his crew to return home to try and rule.

But inside all those developments, there were some, what you may call, red flags. For one, Viren’s gradual corruption by that mysterious figure, whose name is Aaravos, took way too many episodes to get to its point. We also never learn much about that figure, other than he’s angry and is “in some kind of captivity” but with no context on what this even means (again, this seems like a development that was intended to reveal itself over time, but it never reveals enough for audiences to be curious or care). The corruption arc also brings up another issue: the show’s portrayal and execution of its magicks have been somewhat baffling, consisting of profound and wonderous special effects, but a severe lack of weight, or purpose, or logic, or consistency. I know that magic isn’t supposed to “make sense,” but also, did we need to see a mysterious bug sew creepy and grotesque webs inside Viren’s eye in order to see the projection of Aaravos? Callum’s magic cube possesses access to six Primal Sources of Magic, but we only see Callum’s execution of the Sky magic. The other five never pop up, or more specifically, they never pop up to the point that they should matter. I’m not even sure they even exist.

The Dragon Prince struck me as a show whose ambitions were larger than its narrative acumen, and perhaps its ratings limitations, could take it. It’s characters, marred within the dark, far-reaching depths of plans, ideologies, and temperaments that needed time to grow and function, had been hindered by many things, but in particular, its struggle to find its comic voice. The use of comedy in The Dragon Prince often felt like a desperate stretch to make its characters come off likable and appealing, but the kind of jokes told through its characters often hurt their characterization more than helped. Nothing exemplified this more than Rayla. Introduced as a fledgling assassin who grew doubts when confronted with her first kill, Rayla’s character shifted from a dark, conflicted character to a talented, plucky teenager, and the transformation created some real whiplash. It became impossible to square the intro of Rayla with the later iteration of her, one where she nearly came close to killing the king, to the one who skipped around town pretending to be a human, sprouting the kind of “haha humans amirite” jokes that could only be written by a writer.

It’s clumsy and awkward, but most of the jokes are. Some work by sheer design, mostly through Soren, who’s meathead goofiness is inherent in his character, which lets his clumsiness and/or idiocy comes across cutely amusing, but essentially part of his nature. (I especially love when his lack of intelligence stun characters into stuttering repose, struggling to explain themselves to him.) Other time they feel stilted, awkward, and kind of tasteless. One character remains weirdly blithe to his captor after being held in captivity for weeks, even months, as indicated by the growth of stubble on his face overtime. A mystical elf woman who teaches/guides Callum, Rayla, and Ezran also bursts out moments of silliness. Late in season three, there is not one but two “Sailor Moon transformation” visual jokes, but they’re so incongruent to the show’s overall vibe that they come off garish more than comical.

When The Dragon Prince works, it does work, mostly with its backstories and tales of the events of how its characters got to the tense and harrowing point of where they are today (a narrative tact taken with the humans, but curiously not with the elves). Yet it’s current story feels hamstrung, a bit meandering, and uncomfortable with how best to tell its story, both long-term and episodically. A good example is in the third season premiere, “Sol Regem.” Callum and Rayla have to sneak past a massive yet blind dragon, but the logistics of the story’s beats are clumsy. Callum supposedly has a wicked body odor that the dragon can sense (revealed in a pretty forced gag), but his odor doesn’t become a significant part of the story until late in the episode. Presumably the dragon would have been able to smell him earlier in the episode, but for some reason he doesn’t. It’s just wonky and sloppy, and really makes the tension of the moment confusing and less exciting. I also felt as if Ezran’s return to run Katolis, only for the plot machinations that allowed him to return to Callum and Ezran four episodes later (two of which have him sitting alone in prison), felt rushed and narratively shaky at best.

But it’s also a pretty representative beat of the show at large, a kind of broadly-scoped adventure that struggles in the smaller details, which wouldn’t be a problem if that broad scope was more tightly plotted, if the comic moments were stronger, if the characters were more consistent, and/or if the episodic stories were more significant. The Dragon Prince has all the potential in the world to a driven, harrowing, intriguing, and entertaining show, but it feels too beholden by a broader, 2000s-era kids-cable-network sensibility that no longer seems to apply, especially on Netflix. It doesn’t need to be darker or more violent. It ought to be bolder with its choices in how its characters and its world are warped and shaped by the confusion dangers around them, in the shifting loyalties and morally ambiguous decisions that need to be made. The third season suggests the show may be better off just telling a straight-forward adventure, with one main villain and one set of heroic characters out to stop them. We’ll see if that questionable fourth season makes the change.