"DuckTales" Reboot, Year Three

Minor spoilers ahead.

This is the last season of Disney's "DuckTales" reboot, and while I love the show, I think it ended exactly when it should have.  This is a prime example of a show trying to do way too much at once.  There are so many, many characters now, so many more introduced, and the show is starting to get tripped up by its own mythology.  The biggest difference with this season is that there's no big, emotional, high stakes character arc to build momentum behind.  You can see the bits and piece of it - Huey is the most prominent triplet this year, and Mrs. Beakley is keeping a big secret about Webby that gets revealed in the finale - but the season is kept very episodic with few connecting storylines.  

The evil organization F.O.W.L., lead by the Phantom Blot (Giancarlo Esposito), is on the loose, and competing with the McDucks to find a group of special relics.  This means more globetrotting to places like the hidden mermaid commune of Mervana and the Library of Alexandria, and facing F.O.W.L. villains like Steelbeak (Jason Mantzoukas), Black Heron (April Winchell), and John D. Rockerduck (John Hodgman).  And it also means having encounters with other McDuck relatives and Disney Afternoon characters like Gosalyn Waddlemeyer (Stephanie Beatriz) and Kit Cloudkicker (Adam Pally).  And the show also takes pains to check in with every McDuck ally we've already met like Lena, Goldie, Penumbra, Storkules, and Scrooge's parents.  As a result, the most significant new character, Daisy Duck (Tress MacNeill), didn't get nearly as much time or attention as she should have.  

There's nothing wrong with episodic stories, of course, and the show's level of quality remains very high.  I'm constantly marvelling at the amount of work that goes into the designs and animation.  A high point is the episode where the gang travels to Japan, which incorporates a lot of little homages to various classic anime, including specific bits of character and effects animation that only hardened otaku would probably catch.  There are spy, caper, and holiday episodes, plus a bizarre meta episode that sees the family trapped in a '90s sitcom called "Quack Pack."  There's also a double episode that is essentially a backdoor pilot for a new reboot of "Darkwing Duck."  And good grief, the talent that shows up here to voice a couple of lines for a minor character is just ridiculous.  To preserve the surprises, I'm just going to express my appreciation of Hugh Bonneville, Martin Freeman, Michelle Gomez, Amy Sedaris, Keith David, Nestor Carbonell, Jaleel White, and Marc Evan Jackson.  

I appreciate that the show is run by committed nerds, who will not hesitate to create an entire episode around a shameless "Die Hard" joke, but we've probably hit the point of diminishing returns.  There's still plenty of material left for future seasons, but the show doesn't seem interested in getting into the big, emotional stories that made the first two seasons so unusual, and the individual ones are getting more and more obscure.  I'm not sure what a kid who wasn't familiar with "Tale Spin" would get out of the "Tale Spin" episode, and the "Quack Pack" episode's parade of references were already probably pushing it.  Meanwhile, Donald and Daisy only had about two good episodes to establish their relationship, Huey didn't get an arc remotely as well fleshed out as his brothers, and parts of the finale could have been set up much better.    

Speaking of the finale, not many shows get a feature-length adventure to wrap everything up the way this one does, and it's a good one.  In fact, if the third season were just this ninety minute special, it would have solved most of my issues with it.  Older duck fans might have some issues with what the creators do with some of the characters, but within the continuity of the show itself, this is such a treat.  It's especially wonderful to the original "DuckTales" creations like Webby and Launchpad, and if this is the last we ever see of the characters, I'll be satisfied.

Watch this space for my Top Ten episodes of the "DuckTales" reboot, because this show has earned it.  

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