Main cast: Jude Law (Jod Na Nawood), Ryan Kiera Armstrong (Fern), Kyriana Kratter (KB), Robert Timothy Smith (Neel), Ravi Cabot-Conyers (Wim), Nick Frost (SM 33), and Tunde Adebimpe (Wendle)
Director: David Lowery
Now that we are in episode two, I have a better idea of what I like and what I don’t about this show. So yay, here’s to a more substantial review of… uh, what is this episode called again?
That’s right, let me press the Control and V buttons simultaneously and… Way, Way Out Past the Barrier. That’s it, that’s the name of the episode!
So, the brats have activated the Onyx Cinder, and it sends them into hyperspace. Actually, Wim sort of activates it without know what he has done, so now he runs off feeling wounded that his buddies are now using a certain tone of voice at him.
They then end up at some seedy port when they do dumb kid stuff and end up in jail. There, they meet Jod Na Nawood, who offers to help them find their way home.
It’s an okay episode, and the pacing is better than in the previous episode. It’s also nice to see actual non-human species running around, unlike in previous Lucasfilm slops where it’s almost always humans cosplaying badly as aliens.
However, the kids are starting to grate on my nerves, which isn’t a good sign considering that the kids are going to be front and center of this show.
More specifically, Fern is getting on my nerves. Her character is judgmental and annoying, but the actor playing her makes it more annoying by overenunciating every word she says. It’s like she’s trying to ace some kind of oral exam, and she wants to make sure that everyone can hear her pronouncing everything correctly. Her delivery of each line feels very stilted and unnatural, forcibly distracting me from fully immersing myself in the show.
Also, there is something about the kids’ interpersonal dynamic that feels artificial. I can’t put a finger directly on the exact issue, but I think it has something to do with how everyone nicely waits until everyone else has finished talking before opening their gobs, and how there seem to be a uniform amount of pause between one character speaking and another chiming in. There is a “My First Grade School Play” feel to the whole thing that again distracts me from enjoying the show more.
Oh, and it’s hard to enjoy this show unreservedly when at the back of my mind, I can’t help thinking that some 30-something and 40-something adults with colored hair, long pronoun list, and shrill voices are out there at this very moment drawing X-rated fan art of that elephant-head kid while touching themselves inappropriately at the same time. Has the fandom degenerated so much that all sane people have mostly left and the lunatics of the asylum have taken over?
Anyway, I hope the kinks with the kids—no, not the kind that those people would like to get into—would get sorted out over the next few episodes, or this show is going to start doing a cheese grater on my nerves. I don’t want that, and neither do we, right?
