Disenchantment
“Goodbye Bean”, Season 5 Episode 10
What do I know about this series going into it?
I feel like I watched a preview for it when it was first launched. All I remember is that it’s a fantasy series drawn in the style of the Simpsons.
Recap
We open on a burning castle in black and white. I recognize the heroine from the preview, but she’s lying dead in a puddle of blood. The blood is red, and I begin to see other colors as well. So this isn’t monochrome – the colors are just muted. The clearly evil wicked witch and her homunculus servant look down at the heroine’s body. They bring up the muted colors: “So what? It’s not the end of the world,” the witch says in what is clearly meant to be irony. They walk off, her planning to turn the homunculus back into her high school boyfriend. Shortly after they turn their back, the heroine glows and comes back alive; she chases after them but they enter the castle and lock the door behind them.
Meanwhile in Heaven, an idiot and an inky-black imp have accidentally killed God, by throwing a brick at the lightbulb that is God’s head. They try to hide the body but a naked cherub discovers them. The imp steals the cherub’s megaphone and announces God’s death to “everyone”. But the only person who hears him is a heckler, whom the imp debates for a bit. Correction: turns out all the cherubs are in fact listening, and the imp orders them to lament God’s death, which they do.
Back on Earth, the heroine sneaks into the castle via the “underground sex tunnel”. She hides from a series of marching Trøgs, but stumbles onto an even larger group who are preparing for some kind of ceremony. They allow her to hide behind a rock and watch, where she finds an elf named Bean; he calls her Elfo. They hide as Elfo’s mother, the evil woman from the opening, arrives.
To prepare for the ceremony, the Trøgs begin spinning around with their mouths on the ends of the cave’s stalactites. The Trøg leader reveals that this is the secret to Trøg magic, which makes “goo” out of “brains”. Apparently eating brains gives you magic powers, and this is the ceremony that Elfo’s mother is here to perform. There’s just one problem:
Ah, but the joke in the picture caption doesn’t work. The Trøg leader orders a Trøg to approach Elfo’s mother (“Dagmar”) and open his head. She is shocked to learn that his head is empty: he has no brains. All of the other Trøgs open their heads to reveal the same, and this is the Trøgs’ secret to immortality.
Meanwhile, in Heaven, Jerry the idiot and Luci(fer?) the imp have decided, on the basis of nothing at all, that God must have a user manual for the universe. They begin searching for it, because Luci has decided he wants to use it to become God himself.
Dagmar catches Elfo and Bean behind the rock and chases them into another cave, which is full of hallucinogenic mushrooms. They inhale the spores and descend into madness, first hugging and then fighting in a world that twists and elongates around them. They zap each other with magic, wrestle each other, turn into constellations, split and reform.
Ah, this is confusing. Turns out I switched Elfo and Bean’s names; Bean is the heroine and Dagmar’s daughter, while Elfo is the elf. I guess that makes more sense.
Eventually the fight leaves the mushroom caves and their perception of the world restabilizes. But Dagmar gains the upper hand, shooting Elfo a few times and knocking Bean to the ground.
Just in time, Bean’s stepmother Oona shows up out of nowhere and slices off the top of Dagmar’s head. But this does nothing; in fact, Dagmar reaches into her skull, pulls out her brains, and throws them on the floor, making her immortal like the Trøgs. She pulls an antlered crown out of nowhere and attaches it to her head using screws.
While Dagmar is thus distracted, Bean decides that the only way to stop her mother is by “destroying all magic forever”. She zaps Dagmar extensively, causing all the crystals in the cave to collapse. One impales Dagmar to the ground, as Oona, Bean, and Elfo flee.
Bean and Elfo find themselves on an underground coast. There are a bunch of other random people there, but Oona is nowhere to be seen. Lying on a rock is a dead mermaid named Mora, whom Bean apparently loved. She tries kissing Mora because in fairy tales this always brings the dead love interest back to life, but this doesn’t work.
Meanwhile, back in Heaven, Jerry and Luci find a secret door under God’s throne, inside which are hundreds of spare light bulbs. Luci wants to smash them all to make sure God stays dead, but Jerry convinces him to install a new bulb in God’s head and bring Him back to life. Once revived, God picks up the brick Jerry used to kill him and drops it out of heaven. He gives Luci a wish in thanks. Luci wishes for Mora to come back to life, because he loves Bean and wants her to be happy with the love of her life.
It’s the next morning. Bean is still sitting on the coast, lamenting that everything sucks, when suddenly Mora wakes up.
Mora tells Bean, “Don’t stab me anymore”. Did Bean kill her?
Later, Bean is making a speech at the town’s celebration of victory. Dagmar is dead! Satan has been emasculated! All our enemies have run away! I’m in love with Mora! She thanks a series of characters, some of whom I know: “Mop Girl”, Elfo, Luci (who is not present), Oona, Oona’s son Derek. She then introduces her father King Zøg, who announces he too is in love with “Ursula the Bear” (a regular human wearing a bear skin), and their son (who is an actual bear). A man watching from a window interrupts the celebration to complain that there are plot holes in the story, but God’s brick hits him in the head and he falls out the window. Everybody cheers.
Meanwhile, underground, the Trøgs are addressed by a mustachioed man identified by captions as Alva (we saw him briefly earlier with the marching Trøgs). He orders them to stuff Bean in a sack and kidnap her so he can take her to the moon using Stience. The Trøgs instead stuff him in the sack.
Meanwhile, back at the celebration, Bean announces that she is abdicating as queen of Dreamland. She says that the elves are the rightful owners of the castle, and she wants to give it back to Rulo, the elf king. But he too wants nothing to do with the kingdom, so he abdicates in favor of Mop Girl.
The denouement is very very long:
Mop Girl is crowned, reveals her name as “Miri”, takes Elfo as her consort, and assigns a pig as prime minister.
Bean and Mora are scheduled to get married too, but they decide not to show up to their own wedding.
The Trøgs load Alva and “the Archdruidess” into a rocket, and they all go to the moon.
Since the intended couple didn’t show up, the wedding is instead held between “Odval” and “Sorcerio”. “Big Jo” who runs a formerly secret society, ministers the wedding.
“Merkimer”, the prime minister pig, begins a relationship with “Miss Moonpence”.
An old and lonely man at a campfire says goodbye to three laughing horses.
Oona meets up with another pirate, who confesses his love for her, but she kills him.
A bunch of lightbulb gods play poker.
Dagmar is still lying in the cave, impaled by a crystal, but can’t die because she has no brains. Satan shows up. She demands he help her get out of there and take her to a place where she will never be bothered by angels, demons, or animals. He snaps his fingers and she is teleported to a cage dangling over a cliff, where she will be trapped with her son Freckles, whom she hates, for all eternity.
The owner of a Freak Show, mentioned by Bean earlier as the place Mora was held captive before Bean rescued her, finds a replacement mermaid nymph to capture. The nymph turns out to be an anglerfish-type lure on the head of a giant sea monster, which eats him. The sea monster goes back underwater, and next to approach the nymph is a hapless peasant who is in love with her (and who I’m guessing is a recurring character that always gets injured or killed).
Yet another wedding, between “Pops” and “Grogowitz” or some such. For God’s sake, how many weddings are there going to be?
The spaceship crashes into the moon, and the Trøgs scatter over its surface, bouncing around happily. Alva rejects the Archdruidess’s advances, so she smashes his space helmet and kills him.
Satan crosses out Bean’s and Mora’s and Luci’s names from his giant book of the dead.
God gives Luci angel wings and a halo and fills heaven with cats.
Queen Mop Girl orders the drawbridge closed and the castle disappears.
Unresolved questions
How is Bean the queen if her father is the king?
Are the crystals in the cave the source of all magic in the world? By zapping them, did Bean actually destroy all magic forever? This seems like it should’ve been a much bigger deal.
Ratings
Story: 3/10. A generic evil queen vs. good daughter plot with nothing to set it apart from every other time this has been done. Even the most unique part of the story – the fight in the hallucinogenic mushroom cave – was squandered, as the fight in that cave was exactly the same as the fight in every other cave only with special effects added. They could have done so much more with that.
Writing: 2/10. Most of the jokes consisted of characters long-windedly explaining why their situation might be amusing if looked at in a certain light. When there were actual punchlines, they were telegraphed long in advance. Case in point: the camera slowly zooms in on Elfo as Rulo describes the qualities of the next elf ruler, and it’s blindingly obvious Rulo is going to name someone else. Then, when Rulo does name someone else, Elfo tediously explains the joke. It was like that throughout.
Production: 2/10. Substandard animation, below the level of its sister shows The Simpsons and Futurama. Substandard voice acting, especially when Luci was supposedly crying but actually just sounded bored. Generic music. Characters appeared and disappeared from scenes without rhyme or-
Characterization: 6/10. In truth this probably deserves a 4. But I’ll give the show the benefit of the doubt, what with the 979 different characters in the denouement who got five seconds of screentime each. Surely there must have been a few who showed depth when they got their focus episodes.
Clarity: 2/10. Even before the flood of people I’d never seen before getting married, I had no idea what was going on in the main plot. What was Dagmar’s motivation? Why did she want to kill Bean? How did Bean come back to life? Where was the king throughout the story? What does eating brains do, what does goo do, and how are those different from each other and from removing your brains to gain immortality? What happens if you remove your own brains and eat them?
Closure: 10/10. Although I can’t pretend to understand anything that happened in the last ten minutes, it was clear the show was taking care to provide closure for every single character, no matter how minor, who had ever appeared on the show.
Do I want to watch the series now?
No way. This episode committed the cardinal sin of comedies: it was actively boring. Not only did I not laugh once, I wasn’t even mildly amused.