Ducktales (2017)

“The Last Adventure! Part 3: Tale's End...”, Season 3 Episode 25

Requested By

.· Ben ⬩ Salvidrim! ·. on our Discord server. Thank you for supporting the Substack!

What do I know about this series going into it?

As a child, I was only vaguely familiar with the original Ducktales. The existence of Scrooge and of Huey, Dewey, and Louie were part of the cultural zeitgeist, and I knew Launchpad McQuack from Darkwing Duck (one of my favorite shows). But, perhaps surprisingly, I never watched the series itself until I introduced it to my kids a few years ago¹; until then, the most information I had about the setting was from playing Ducktales: The Quest for Gold on PC.

I have never watched the revival series.

Recap

There is a crashed plane. Scrooge’s nephews² and (I assume) nieces climb out of the rubble. Dewey brags about having successfully crashed the plane.

As the saying goes: A good landing is one you can walk away from. A great landing is one where they can reuse the plane.

One of the ducks is, for some reason, a cyborg. “Let’s go save our family!” they announce and head off.

Elsewhere, a vulture tells a young duck named April - who insists her name is Webby - that he is about to introduce her and her two sisters to the reason he created them. The three, who are a gender-swapped version of Huey, Dewey, and Louie³, are told to go into another room, where there is a magic box. As soon as Webby touches it, a parchment floats up from inside. But as soon as she grabs it, the words on the parchment start to evaporate.

“Who am I? Why was I made?” Webby cries out desperately, trying to grab at the vanishing letters. But the vulture grabs the parchment itself and gloats: this is why you were made. To retrieve this magic parchment for me.

Elsewhere elsewhere, a green monster is trying to kill “the headless man-horse of the apocalypse”, which is a horse that has Scrooge McDuck’s head attached⁴. The horse removes the Scrooge head, claps its hooves, and a horse head grows in its place. It also sprouts enormous bat-like wings. “I live again! …Again!” shouts the horse, referencing Gargoyles.

Elsewhere^3, a chicken with a metal beak⁵ is beating up Launchpad while Darkwing Duck (Darkwing Duck!) and somebody else watch from inside a transparent cell. Launchpad is on his last legs, but just then Fenton (the cyborg) and Gozalyn come to his rescue, with the famous rallying cry of “Let’s get dangerous!”

We’re shifting from scene to scene so quickly I can’t keep up with the watching, much less with the typing. I’m about 70% lost and I’m sure I’ve dropped something.

Blue-nephew and Green-nephew arrive in the villain’s complex where all these scenes are taking place. They find and rescue Red-nephew.

The vulture tells a captive Scrooge his backstory: his grandmother, Isabella Finch, took him on dozens of stupid adventures as a child and this made him miserable.

How does a finch lay vulture eggs? Is he adopted?

And when he grew up he saw how chaotic these adventures made the world. He lists all the craziness that has happened over the course of the series and laments (as Scrooge’s former CEO) the financial instability that these events caused. And who is at the center of these crises? You, Scrooge McDuck. You and your adventuring family. Children belong in school halls and shopping malls, not gallivanting all over the world!

While the vulture is distracted giving this monologue, Scrooge escapes from his ropes. He leaps at the vulture, trying to hit him with his cane - but the vulture grows a set of armor and a sword out of nowhere and blocks it.

Meanwhile, the two evil nieces have captured and tied up the nephews and Webby.

With Gozalyn and Fenton now fighting Robochicken, Darkwing reassures his ‘meek’ cellmate that everything will be all right. His cellmate is secretly the superhero Gizmoduck, but no matter how much he tries to confess this, Darkwing can’t fit it inside his head.

But then the tide turns: Robochicken opens doors to reveal Flintheart Glomgold and the Beagle Boys and even the sorceress⁶, all of whom he has made his mindless slaves with his intelligence-removing ray gun. The collected bad guys defeat Gozalyn and the Fenton, tossing them into a cell like Darkwing’s.

The vulture’s battle with Scrooge takes them outside, to a winding staircase around the Vortex of Something. When he finally defeats Scrooge, he reveals his plan: I will throw your entire family into the Vortex, which will “erase them from existence”. But you can save them if you sign a contract agreeing to never adventure again. The last page of the contract, where Scrooge needs to sign, is written on the Papyrus of Binding, the parchment that Webby retrieved for him earlier. This will magically ensure Scrooge can never break its terms.

Scrooge points out that all of the vulture’s minions and allies are equally chaotic as his family. Which the vulture already knew: he wants all chaos to end, not just good-guy chaos. And with that, he tosses the allies he has with him (none of whom I have seen yet) into the Vortex. One of them, as she falls, praises “Bradford” for this excellent betrayal, so at least I now have the vulture’s name.

The nieces and nephews are watching this on a screen, and from their reactions I learn some more context. The “nieces” are actually clones, and consider Bradford and Heron (the woman who gave me Bradford’s name) to be their parents. Webby/April is a gender-swapped clone of Scrooge himself, and the other two - May and June - are clones of Webby.

Back in the fight with Robochicken, Launchpad has collapsed on the ground. He’s the only one still free, but he’s in despair, saying he’s not a hero like Darkwing. But Darkwing points out that Launchpad inspired him to be the hero he is - and all of the other heroes in the cells (most of whom I have never seen before) say the same. This gives him the strength to put on the discarded Gizmo-Suit, which gives him powerful armor. He swiftly defeats Robochicken and all the bad guys.

Scrooge tries to stall, reading all the fine print and pretending he needs to go home and get his glasses, but finally Bradford gets fed up. He holds a hostage Donald Duck out over the Vortex, and Scrooge gives in and signs.

But of course Bradford throws Donald in anyway⁷.

Luckily, just before Donald is erased from existence, the science duck (not Gizmoduck - the other one whose name I’ve forgotten) and the nephews disable the vortex, having been released by May and June. They fight Bradford, but it might all be for nought: Scrooge is now bound to never go adventuring again and must stay home with his family.

Obviously the solution is going to be to reactivate the vortex. The writers clearly came up with the vortex because in a Disney kids’ show even the villains aren’t allowed to say the word “kill”, although “erase from existence” is apparently fine⁸. But if they erase the contract from existence, it will no longer bind Scrooge. A very clever move, using the restrictions placed on them in reality as the resolution to the plot!

“The only way to defeat the papyrus is to find a contradiction in the contract,” say the nephews. “And family is the greatest adventure of all!”

…Never mind.

The power of the contract vanishes in a puff of logic, and for some unfathomable reason this also turns night into day and removes all of Bradford’s powers. The other bad guys, disappointed in him, fly away, pausing only to cast a spell on him that turns him into a non-talking, normal vulture.

Denouement. The good guys have boarded the badly-patched-up plane and are flying home. Darkwing expresses disbelief that Launchpad was Gizmoduck the whole time; Gozalyn facepalms. Then Launchpad accidentally presses a button that opens the loading bay door, and everyone falls out of the plane.

Over the credits, we see the characters who can fly (robots and cyborgs and winged horses and magicians) rescuing the characters who can’t.

Lingering questions

• Who rescues Huey, Dewey, Louie, Webby, and Scrooge from the fall? At the close of the credits they didn’t get picked up yet.

Splat.

Ratings

I 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. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.

The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; high ratings are not necessarily better and low rating are not necessarily worse. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.

Story: 5/10. There was only one plotline. There were two very minor subplots that I could identify (Launchpad’s self-confidence and Webby’s feeling of belonging in the family), but neither of them received real in-depth treatment. Normally a single lineaer thread won’t get more than a 3 or 4, but in this case it did bifurcate enough to provide a certain complexity. With something like two dozen characters in four or five different locations, it mattered less that they were all part of the same story.

While I’m not thrilled with the “loophole” the writers found in the contract, it’s clear from context that they weren’t thrilled with it either.

Writing: 7/10. Cleverly written and actively funny. It’s not perfect; the dialogue was sometimes cliched, such that I was able to predict the next line a fair few times. But I very much enjoyed the self-awareness that the episode displayed.

Production: 7/10. Top-tier voice acting from top-tier voice actors; I knew they did a good job, but I was surprised at the end to see just how many famous names were in the credits. There were good scene transitions and comedic timing throughout. The animation was at the high end of standard; in particular I think they enjoyed showing off with the camera movements surrounding the circle-of-nephews skydive at the end.

This really deserved an 8, in fact, but I’m docking it a point for the frankly unforgivable abridgement of the Ducktales theme in the opening credits. I’m sorry, but when you’ve got a song as good as that in your IP you do not shorten it to just “Ducktales, woohoo!” and walk away. You play the entire damn thing. No, the instrumental version over the end credits isn’t good enough. You play the entire damn thing⁹.

Characterization: 7/10. Most of the heroes were pretty generic; I still don’t know the difference between Huey, Dewey, and Louie and don’t know if there is one. There were a few tantalizing hints to the other heroes’ backstories, particularly the Headless Horseman and Darkwing Duck (though the latter is a bit of a cheat because I already know all about him).

But the real star of the show is Bradford.

The mark of a good villain is that they have a good argument, and most of his argument is good. He imports the logic of reality to Ducktales and points out what would be obvious if this weren’t a TV show: Kids should be kept out of danger. There are things duck was not meant to know, seals that should not be unbound, gates that should not be opened. It’s likely that many episodes of the series consist of the family trying to stop whatever evil they themselves have accidentally unleashed. Stopping them from doing so really would make the world safer.

And then he betrays his allies not out of a desire to be evil but because he recognizes that they are no less responsible for the chaos than the heroes were! It wasn’t very smart of him to do this before he defeated the McDucks, but I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that he took his position to its logical conclusion. In this, he avoided the illogical trope (present in too many works to count) in which the good guys are held responsible for mayhem because their mere existence attracts bad guys. I was prepared to give a whole album side on the subject, and was glad that I wouldn’t need to.

Accessibility: 4/10. A fairly simple plot when all is said and done, but there are too many characters to count.

I mean that literally. There are so many characters that I couldn’t keep track of them across scenes. Is this a new duck? The same duck that I saw three scenes ago? Just how many ducks are there on this show???

Can’t we erase just one or two of them from existence? It’d make my life easier.

And I had an advantage - I knew about some of them already. I can imagine how much worse it would be if you watched this without knowing that there are two engineering ducks, not to mention Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

Closure: 8/10. The episode ends like I assume many others did, with the family flying off to another adventure, and the overall status quo unchanged. But the writers worked hard to pull in as many characters into the finale as possible, bad guys and good guys alike. This gave the finale a real sense of occasion that went beyond its frankly generic plot.

Do I want to watch the series now?

The whole of this episode is decidedly greater than the sum of its parts. It didn’t have the sort of complex plotlines that I crave, and while the writing and production values were above average they weren’t stellar. And yet I enjoyed every minute of it! I want to learn more about the Headless Horseman and his prophecy of doom, I want to watch Darkwing do his thing, and I want to see what I’ve been missing in the main series.

My only concern is that the show might lean too much on the nostalgia and the inside jokes. Those are good in moderation, and especially good in a finale, but if there’s too much of it in the rest of the show it can very quickly get to be an irritant.

But that’s a mild concern at most. I want to watch this and I don’t want to do it alone. Time to call the kids over.

Is there a series finale you’d like me to try? Join our Discord or leave a comment below.

1. We watched about half of the first season.

2. Huey, Dewey, and Louie, of course, but don’t expect me to know which one is which.

3. My guess about the nieces earlier was clearly wrong.

4. What.

5. I recognize this character from the original series, but I forget his name.

6. I forget her name. Starts with an M. Morgana?

7. See? This is why you never negotiate with evil.

8. A horrifying and perverse result. Erasing someone from existence is much worse than merely killing them!

9. Writing this footnote ~15 hours after I watched the episode, the Ducktales theme is still stuck in my head. And no, that’s not a complaint. I’m enjoying it immensely.