Oops, no budget.
Impressions:
Only really posting this because it airs super early (technically very late last night), and the other Sunday things air quite a bit later, but yeah, I’m ready to call it. This episode was pretty terrible on every front. There’s the obvious, how godawful the production was with stills absolutely everywhere for the first 20 minutes. The pacing, where nothing could happen without three to four asides to explain and then re-explain it. Including how the monster was absorbing evil magic, so let’s stand here and yell how somebody should really do something about that. Wait, no. Cut to another two people also saying that. Call the dwarves! The dwarves are assembling! Hold out for the dwarves! The dwarves will be here any minute! Oh no, the dwarves were instantly defeated. In a single still frame. Great use of five minutes here, guys. The writing and dialogue, which featured such gems as “Magic is useless against it! Hit it with more magic! That didn’t work! Wait, let’s try hitting it with not-magic! That worked! Okay, now stop doing that and hit it with magic!” Or Will’s big dramatic moment, where he all of a sudden declared that he’d tried everything and was all out of ideas. My guy. You tried literally nothing. It appeared, you gawked at it. Then you stood there and gawked some more.
All the effort went into the last two minutes. The final monster, no different from any of the others in design, but this one was semi-animated, so that’s how you could tell it was important. Than whose-his-face, absent for the entire episode, pops out of nowhere and sacrifices himself as his first choice of action, immediately poofing into a cloud of ice crystals. Gee, I wonder if that has anything to do with all the various people who are known to create ice clones running around. Well, it sure it tragic how he… did nothing, then died for nothing. Get in the fridge, Rosty. A protagonist needs to be motivated.
