Requested By
Ultraraptor on our Discord server
What do I know about this series going into it?
Never heard of it.
Recap
“King Andreas and Darcy have been defeated!” announces Olivia1 in triumph. But while she’s talking from the balcony of a medieval castle to a cast of frog creatures, a robot spider hidden in the ceiling flies off into space and plugs itself into an outlet on the moon, which turns into a Sauron eye and begins moving towards the planet (which does not look like Earth).
An explanation follows: the bad guys, known as “The Core”, developed all sorts of projects to kill everyone on the planet so they can “claim the stones”.
While the good guys mull about trying to think of a plan, one of the islands they’re standing on shakes and bursts out of the sea: it’s actually an enormous creature named Mother Olm.
The stones that the Core is looking for contain enormous power, Mother Olm tells them, and you can use them to stop the moon. But it might use up all the power in the stones, which means the main characters won’t have any way to return to our world and will be stuck in Amphibia forever! There’s a moment of false hesitation, but of course they choose to do it.
Mother Olm takes Anne aside, to remind her about “the secret spell” that the stones contain, which she should use in case the stones don’t manage to stop the moon. “What secret spell?” Anne asks. Oops, Olm never actually told her. The secret spell is: Just ask the stones for what you want. It can defeat anybody – but you’d have to sacrifice your life to do it.
Anne and her friends enter some kind of temple to meet “Valeriana”, a lizard creature who activates the stones for them in an enormous burst of energy.
This gives the girls magic powers and new outfits, Magical Girl Anime style. They fly towards the moon, and handily defeat the robot insects that the robot spider releases from a robot hangar. Then they start pushing against the moon.
The Core telepathically calls for help from “Andrias”, who is apparently the Core’s son. Andrias activates the “frobots”2, who fly up to attack the magic girls… no, they don’t attack the magic girls, they help the girls push the moon away. The Core is furious at Andrias’s betrayal: “You could’ve been immortal! What are you doing?” Though the real question is why he didn’t do it earlier.
“You cannot stop a god!” says the Core and pushes even harder, overcoming the combined effort of the frobots and the magic girls. Anne realizes it’s time to fire Chekov’s Gun, so she takes the other two stones from her friends (one of whom I finally learn is named Marcy). This makes them lose their powers.
Anne uses the secret spell and asks the stones to help her save the world she loves. She goes into the Avatar State. Her friend “Sprig”, who can somehow see and understand all this from his vantage point on the surface of the planet, flies up into space to beg her not to die.3 The Core politely pauses the moon’s advance while they talk; she sends him home, and then easily blows up the moon.
Having sacrificed her life to cast the spell, Anne disintegrates into blowing leaves.
Darkness. Echoing shouts of “Anne!”.
Anne wakes up on a floating earth mote with a treehouse. Inside, she finds a CRT computer monitor with an incoming message from “3_stones_deity”, who eventually transforms from a chat into a cat.4 The cat is a clone of her pet cat (presumably the one she left behind on Earth), and it finally gives me her full name: Anne Boonchuy, age 13.
The deity has come to Anne with an offer: I’m tired of being god of the multiverse, you take over.5 Anne turns it down: she’s still just a kid and screws things up, and might destroy the multiverse by accident. When she mentions that she still has a long way to go to improve, the deity is shocked: human beings can grow and change?6 So it resurrects her, telling her to continue improving so that she can become the “guardian” when she dies (78 years later, spoiler alert).
Back on Amphibia, everyone is mourning for Anne. She walks up and they do the classic “Not now Anne, we’re busy mourning for you” joke. Everyone is of course overjoyed to see her, and it turns out that the catgod also provided shards of the three stones in her pocket so that she and her friends can get home. They say their goodbyes to the frog creatures who live in Amphibia. Valeria uses the shards to open a portal, and the girls step through it.
In the denouement, there are a series of vignettes between side characters on Amphibia that I know nothing about. Polly the air-breathing tadpole has become a frog. An old woman gets a potion for her rheumatism. “Toadie” won the town’s election for mayor by bribing the voters. The people unveil a statue of Anne.
And back on Earth, ten years later, which a newscaster states is also ten years after “Frog-vasion” (whatever that is), Sasha and Marcy meet at an airport. Marcy has a psychology degree, while Sasha has a webcomic. They drive over to meet Anne, who is a herpetologist. There is one final voiceover and the series ends.
Unresolved questions
How much, if anything, does Anne remember about what happened after she died?
Will Anne indeed become the guardian of the multiverse when she dies? Will she screw up that job?
Will Polly turn evil?
Can the people of Amphibia handle themselves now or will they need rescuing again?
What does a deity do in retirement?
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 6/10. A pretty classic story for the genre – no more complicated than it needed to be. I’m giving an extra point over the average of 5 because there were a larger number of side characters than I am used to seeing in a preteen show. I could see that these side characters had well-developed plotlines, even though I didn’t know what they were.
Writing: 4/10. There was a certain amount of pure silliness, attenuated by a certain amount of maturity.
The reverse tug-of-war over the moon was the most cliched part. Twice – once for each side – those pushing discovered they were losing and decided to “push harder”. Why weren’t they pushing as hard as they could in the first place?7
In addition, the main characters suffered a lot from “this is how the youths talk nowadays” syndrome; they just didn’t sound believable.
But on the other hand, the rest of the writing was decent I can’t pretend I know anything about Andrias’s history or just how meaningful his change of heart was, but (other than the cheap fakeout over which side he was joining) it was handled pretty well.
I also liked that the writers didn’t feel it necessary to tediously explain, after Anne said, “These stones are not Amphibia’s greatest treasure!”, that said treasure was the friends she made along the way (more on this under the Production heading).
Production: 3/10. The animation was annoyingly sloppy. The moon stood still in the background every time the good guys stopped pushing to talk to each other; when Anne read out what she was typing it didn’t match what appeared on the screen; and at one point when Anne did air quotes her fingers curled during the wrong part of the sentence!
There were also bad directorial decisions, like pausing Anne’s conversation with the c(h)atbot to give you time to read what she wrote on the screen, even though you just heard her say it out loud. And though the writers had enough self-control to not insert the sentence “Amphibia’s greatest treasure was the friends we made along the way”, the animators immediately betrayed them by showing said friends in case we didn’t get the point. I know it’s a kids’ show, but give your audience some credit.
The music was generic and the voice acting was decent; neither were good enough to make up for the above. The animation really annoyed me.
Characterization: 4/10. Anne is a generic teen hero archetype; I didn’t see anything in her that I haven’t seen a dozen times before. I got very little sense of the personalities of any of the other characters save for the scarred Commander-frog.
Accessibility: 9/10. The good guys are good. The evil guys are evil. Some minor characters might have formerly been on one side or the other, but at no point was I confused about what was going on.
Closure: 10/10. The kids have finished saving the world and gone home. I’m mildly curious as to how they know that Amphibia no longer needs saving – surely there have been multiple crises over the course of three seasons, not just a continuous battle against the Core – but the show has reached the standard and natural conclusion that always concludes a “kid transported into a magical world” story.
Do I want to watch the series now?
No, nor will I recommend it to the kids. The storyline had potential but the writing and especially the animation really let it down.
Name given in captions
I’m embarrassed to say that only while editing my notes did I realize this must be short for “frog robots”. While watching all I could think of was frogurt.
If frogs can breathe in air and water, I guess they can breathe in space too.
If you’re French you must be very confused right now.
What?!
This deity seems a bit thick if you ask me.
Also, what was either side trying to accomplish here?
Say the Core rams the moon into the surface. Why are they so sure they will survive the impact that kills everyone else?
Say the good guys push the moon back to where it was. The Core still controls it. Were they planning on staying there and continuing to push it forever?
Hey, writing this as a massive Amphibia fan that sorta just happened across this review.
I definitely understand most of your conclusions about it based on what you watched, since you only watched half of the finale. Amphibias series finale was split into two episodes, “All In” which is the heart of the finale and “The Hardest Thing” which serves as more of a victory lap and tying up loose ends.
Since I’ve never read your blog before, I don’t know what your stance on this is, but I do know that most of the intended depth of the finale was put into part one while all the goofy bits they wanted to throw in for fun were reserved for part two.
I definitely encourage giving it another shot, at least with the full finale instead of just the second half. Amphibia is easily one of my favorite tv series of all time, but the second half of its series finale certainly doesn’t paint it in a good light on its own.
it's always nice to read your blog, but unfortunately this is yust a finale that makes no real sense or carries any waight if you didn't watch the series, kinda like I feel about the Star Wars rebels finale, but ^2. Setting aside animation (that I liked in the show) and the music (that I really liked in the show) your conclusions are perfectly understandable, coming from your point of view, but a lot of what happens really relies on everything that came before to gain meaning and cap off an amazing series with an amazing finale. I will not go into boring and usless detail about it, but the finale getting 9/10 on accessibility shows how little it gave away about the characters. "The good guys are good. The evil guys are evil. Some minor characters might have formerly been on one side or the other", for exemple, the main character's (human) friends have spent most of the series being the villains, and yes, stopping the core was indeed the only time they saved Amphibia, which never needed saving before that conflict emerged, all of this, togeder with a surprising layer of themes, is, of course, completely unfathomable from the final episode alone, that consists of nothing but payoffs and a denouement. The series is mostely a commedy, and a good one at that, so I think that you should give it a try with your kids anyway, but that's just my opinion.
It's always nice to read you, and I wish you a good day.