Main cast: Malcolm Barrett (Derrick), Felicia Day (Molly), Lyndie Greenwood (Susan), Jonah Ray (Matt), Gavin Stenhouse (Bennie), Amir Talai (Amir), Laurel Toupal (Becky), Ben Weinswig (Andy), Motoki Maxted (Jax), Wil Wheaton (David), and Rachel Bloom (Ellie Burges)
Director: Alejandro Brugués

Derrick wrote a book that was apparently so, so bad that he is still the target of online and real life harassment when this episode begins, led by the YouTube video creator Jax that constantly calls his fans to go after our poor protagonist. Never mind, his childhood friends and now married couple Molly and Matt invite him to stay over at their place, in Derrick’s hometown Spring Valley, until things get better for him. Oh, and they aren’t even charging him rent—why can’t we all have friends like that? There, Derrick is also reunited with his other buddies, like Bennie now the sheriff’s deputy on top of being the token gay friend among this cast, ex Susan who is also now his colleague at his new job at Pooka, and… oh yes, this episode is Pooka Lives! and that thing is coming back in multitudes.

Aside from the cute-creepy doll being the same as the one in Pooka!, this episode is very different in tone and style. While that one is more of a psychological horror fare, this one is a more straightforward slasher and creepy doll affair. Here, Derrick learns of how the creator of the Pooka toy lost her job when she objected vehemently to her employers tweaking the appearance of her creation, went home, and eventually killed her husband and set herself and the house (full of Pooka toys, naturally) on fire.

You know, it’s odd to see Felicia Day star in and executive-produce a show driving home the toxic nature of cancel culture when she has… oh right, she means the other side is the bad people. Got it.

One evening, when the old friends are catching up and high on weed brownies, the door is pelted with eggs by Jax’s fans that have found out where Derrick is staying. They are talking about Ellie Burges, the creator of Pooka and one of their classmates, and her bizarre suicide-murder, and Bennie, who was called to the scene that evening, still has a picture of Ellie’s charred corpse with the Pooka mask she was wearing melded to her skull due to the fire. They then talk about the creepypasta Momo and decide, you know, maybe they can make their own Momo to scare off Derrick’s tormentors. So, Derrick decides to create some “Pooka ritual” to summon Ellie’s spirit, and make the ritual so dumb and stupid that the people doing it online, like ahem Jax, will look like total fools.

The whole thing is fake, of course. Right? Well, the challenge goes super viral and even gets TV coverage. Everyone wants to do it, and sure enough, a spree of killing begins. Soon, these people realize that maybe the whole killer Pooka entities may be disturbingly real thing after all…

Pooka Lives! is an unexpectedly enjoyable episode, mostly because it actually succeeds pretty well in showing how one can come up with a concept, but the people on the Internet will embellish and twist the concept into something entirely different, unpredictable, even ghastly-beautiful. Here, the killer Pooka thing’s appearance changes as the online folks begin to draw and embellish their own versions of the thing, such as Pooka gaining claws to do its thing and wearing some incongruously hilarious clothes because many artists draw it that way. His incarnations become increasingly monstrous, thanks to the online rendering of it, until it barely resembles Pooka anymore.

Anyway, the social commentary works for once because this episode doesn’t try too hard to take sides or make a stance, so it ends up being on point.

However, the main characters are on the bland side. It’s like they had this concept, a script that makes the concept work, and then they ran out of juice to make the main characters interesting. Derrick is probably the most well-drawn character of the lot, but even then, he feels only tad half-drawn and not very complete. This is fine if the episode had piled on the kills and gore, but much of the episode is also spent on drawing out the relationships of these people, and that doesn’t work when despite all the efforts, the characters mostly all still feel one note. Maybe it’s because there are too many characters here. I feel that this episode would still be fine if Susan and Matt had been taken out, as the former is mostly there as love interest while the latter just takes up space with lame one-liners. Bennie isn’t very necessary either, but he’s here to be hot and fabulous, so it’s okay, he can stay.

I really want to like Pooka Lives! more, I do, but in the end, it’s an episode where the gimmick works far more than the actual execution of the rest of the episode. A part of me also gives this one the side eye because it is a sequel in name only, and the people behind this show just wants to use the Pooka name to ride on the goodwill generated by the original show.

All things considered, though, this is definitely one of the few Into the Dark episodes worth a second look.