What do I know about this series going into it?
I’ve seen its rectangle on Netflix a few times. I know it’s animated. Nothing else.
Recap
We gaze into the cosmos as an echoing voice tells a poem about the fallen one, about darkness, and everything burning when a star dies.
The opening credits are very short and very strange: they depict a woman standing with her arm outstretched until she is lifted up by a titan. Then a title card appears: Book 7: Dark, Episode 9: Nova.
Ezran1 holds up the Novablade, and talks about how this blade is part of his family’s destiny. And he’s going to use it to kill “Aravos”. But his friend isn’t as enthusiastic: “What if it’s a trap?” she warns. “What if Aravos deliberately gave you the riddle that led you to the blade, so you’d think it was your idea?” Ezran acknowledges that this might be true, but he doesn’t care. He climbs onto the back of his silver hippogriff, named Zym, and tells his yellow frog pet, Bait, that he can’t promise (something – I assume that he’ll return). They take off and begin flying towards their destination.
Suddenly the hippogriff is surrounded by crackling energy and the two of them are teleported to a new place: a sort of circular demiplane with a whole host of creatures in a tableau. There’s an enormous dark elf, who is the thing from the opening credits that I thought was a Titan; based on his demeanor and dialogue, clearly the bad guy. There’s a man with a staff and a coin that he keeps waving around as if it’s an invisible bow and arrow, opposing the dark elf. There’s another elf, with a real bow and arrow, getting ready to assassinate the staff-wielding man. There’s an elf with an Irish or Scottish accent, flying around the circle on a dragon. And there are two other dragons, one male, one female, who are facing off against each other, the female begging the male to remember how much he loves their son (my guess, either Zym or Ezran).
Dark Elf tells Staff-Wielder to “act quickly”. But the elven woman, Rayla, begs Staff Wielder “not to do this”, calling him Callum. Callum says he has no choice: if he doesn’t do this, everyone will die.
Suddenly, though, an enormous pink octopus tentacle appears out of nowhere and grabs the archer. This distracts Callum. And now it’s too late to do whatever he was going to do; the Dark Elf, who is the aforementioned Aravos, says that if Callum casts the spell now he will “belong to me”.
Callum casts the spell anyway. And a zombie pixie lands on Aravos’s nose and snarls at him.
I have no idea what’s going on.
Aravos opens a portal and tells “Claudia” to flee through it because he doesn’t want to watch another of his daughters die. He is then tackled by the two dragons, who appear to have settled their differences.
Rayla sees Claudia fleeing through the portal and shouts: “We have to stop her!” Her familiar(?) holds the portal open before it can shut, and two soldiers run through it.
The dragons grab Aravos and fly off with him, tossing aside his sword-scepter-thing, which shatters on the ground. Outside of the demiplane, in the real world, a black circle vanishes, revealing the sun behind it. And all these monsters that were terrorizing humanity start to disintegrate in the sunlight. So I’m guessing Aravos blocked out the sun, and shattering his sword-scepter-thing broke the spell.
In the other world, Claudia corners the two soldiers who had chased her and uses her magic to grab them in arms made of rock that sprout from the ground. “Were you going to give up on me?” she demands. “Your sister?” They nod. She is about to crush them to death but stops. “I’m still nice,” she says, and grows wings and flies away.
The sun being revealed, someone mentions the prophecy: “When a star dies everything burns.” This is clearly about to happen right now, though I don’t understand how removing the thing blocking the sun counts as the sun dying2. So a dragon stands above the people of the town to shield them.
Meanwhile, Aravos taunts the dragons holding him in the air. They too are disintegrating in the sunlight, and once they do, “I will return to the world without you archdragons to protect it!” So the dragons bite him until he shatters. The female dragon tells the male she will always love him, and then they explode.
Silence. Darkness.
Fade in on a memorial ceremony, where Ezran lights a fire in honor of the dragons. “We almost gave up everything we are in order to stop Aravos,” he says later that night3, but thanks to the archdragons we didn’t have to. It’s now up to us to make a better world.
Ezran’s brother approaches him and tells him he needs him. “Brothers,” they each say in agreement. “Brothers,” Zym the dragon-not-a-hippogriff answers. They freak out; they had no idea he could talk.
Later, King4 Ezran presides over a council meeting. They talk about Aravos coming back in seven years but in the meantime we can rebuild. Ezran says: No, we won’t rebuild. We’ll build something new! Rayla is the only one who recognizes this as nonsense; everyone else applauds as if this is the most brilliant thing they’ve ever heard.
What did Ezran mean by building something new? He has plans to break ground on a new city, which will be exactly on the former border between the human and elven lands. Objections are raised in the crowd: But who will be in charge of this city? The answer: You will. All of you. Democracy!
A stammering elf explains that the city’s name is going to be Evrkynd (pronounced “ever-kind”). Everyone cheers at this news. Then the elf explains that this is because it is a city where everyone will be kind to one another, and everyone cheers again5.
A man and an elf sit in a forest at night. The elf says he misses “her”, and the man wonders where she is. The camera zooms out and flies up into the cosmos, focusing in on who they were talking about: Claudia.
Two elves on a dragon’s back fly to meet King Ezran. He’s not happy to see them but agrees to do so anyway. One of them approaches Ezran in abject contrition: I lied to myself about how being an assassin would help bring peace, but now I know that I am wrong and I will accept justice. I think he killed Ezran’s parents.
Ezran says he’s going to forgive him. He doesn’t know how yet, but he will try. In the meantime, can you at least tell me if my father had any last words.
The assassin doesn’t know how to answer that, and we see why in a flashback: he had burst into the room and shot the king with an arrow. During the arrow’s flight, just before getting killed by it, the king had turned to the assassin and squawked.
Ezran: “He what?”
Oh, says one of the guards. This changes everything! There were rumors going around after the king died.
Let me guess: The king’s consciousness is actually in Zym the dragon, who has been guiding his son all this time; this also explains why Zym is able to talk.
Cut to a couple of soldiers climbing onto another dragon. They unfurl a scroll showing a drawing of a strange bird. “We’ve got a bird to find!” So the king switched bodies with a bird?
At night, Callum has a surprise for Rayla. He blindfolds her and takes her to a bridge, where he and Bait have trained a bunch of smaller frog creatures to sing. She tells Callum he’s ridiculous. He stammers, but she tells him she loves him and kisses him.
The camera pans up to the sky again, and text shows what “Leola” wants every child to know:
Unresolved questions
What will happen when Aravos returns and the archdragons aren’t around to help anymore?
What happened to the king? Did he really switch bodies with a parrot?
Will humans and elves live in peace?
How far gone is Claudia down the road of evil? Is she redeemable?
If everything not underneath the dragon burned, how did the forests and other buildings survive?
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: 7/10. There were clearly many different plot elements that came together in the climactic battle: the archer trying to kill Callum; the tentacle that stopped him; Rayla flying on her dragon; whatever Aravos is trying to do; the two archdragons battling; Claudia’s relationship to the Dark Elf; the two soldiers that chased her through the portal. That scene was obviously a culmination of everything the series had done up until this moment.
I didn’t understand a word of it, and still don’t.
But I’m still giving the story high marks. It’s my policy to give a finale the benefit of the doubt when it comes to plot points that I don’t understand, as long as those I did understand were handled well. And the rest of the episode was more comprehensible, and the plotlines there were satisfyingly complex: the story with the assassin and Ezran’s father; the power dynamics between humans and elves.
Writing: 2/10. The script was, to be honest, pretty terrible.
Ezran takes off to fly towards the climactic battle, but only after taking off does he realize that it’s too far away, but then he makes it there anyway, but then he does nothing to contribute to the battle once there. The city’s name is revealed, everybody cheers for it, but only then does the character explain what the city’s name means, at which point everybody cheers again – retroactively making a mockery out of the first cheer, because they didn’t know what it meant yet. Zym talks for the first time, in a revelation that contributes nothing. There were “strange rumors when the king died”, the specifics of which we aren’t going to mention, but whatever they were they imply that it was common knowledge to everyone but the king’s own son that the king had switched bodies with a bird, yet knowledge not quite common enough for people to act on it.
The entire episode was like this.
Production: 3/10. The voice acting was horrendous. Ezran delivered every single one of his lines as a declamation. It didn’t matter if the character was supposed to be sad, joyful, triumphant, relieved, or even asking a question; it always sounded like he was standing before his subjects reading a decree off of a scroll. He was the worst, but most of the other voice actors had a similar problem - which makes me think it was the fault of the director rather than the actors. The only real exception was Aravos (see below).
The animation was pretty beautiful, and they did a good job with Aravos’s facial expressions (again, see below), but they could’ve done more to individualize the characters’ faces. I regularly got characters confused.
Characterization: 3/10. I really, really liked the three-dimensionality of the villain. Aravos’s line about not wanting to see another of his daughters die was so heartfelt that for a very brief moment I wondered whether I had things backwards and he was the good guy. This clearly wasn’t the case, which is why I didn’t put it in the recap, but that moment stuck with me. It’s not something you usually see in children’s television.
My curiosity was also piqued by the way he kept encouraging Callum to do… whatever it was that Callum was trying to do. On the one hand, Callum seemed certain that his spell would defeat Aravos once and for all - but on the other hand, Aravos was arrogant and smarmy and smirking and encouraging the whole time he was trying it. Was Callum’s plan somehow going to play directly into Aravos’s hand, making him stronger rather than weaker? Or would it have defeated Aravos at the price of turning Callum evil, this being the “we almost gave up everything we are” that Ezran was referring to? The voice actor and the animators worked well together to give the villain a palpable “heads I win, tails you lose” vibe.
I got very little sense of anybody else’s personality, however.
Accessibility: 2/10. One of the most opaque finales I’ve done so far, which came as a surprise. This is one of those rare children’s animated shows that you really can’t just jump in and watch from any point. I was clearly missing a truly enormous amount of backstory.
Closure: 4/10. The bad guy has been sealed away… for only seven years? That’s a very, very short time for plots like this; usually such things are for 700 years or 1,000 years or some other conveniently round but large number. Seven years isn’t long enough to justify ending a series – and, combined with the other dangling plot threads such as the kingbird and the human-elven city, means there isn’t as much closure here as there should be.
Do I want to watch the series now?
It’s a pity, because the plot looks great. If the quality of the production were even slightly higher I’d have enthusiastically recommended the series to my kids. And if it were a lot higher, I’d have gladly sat down to watch it with them. But the writing just isn’t there, and nor is the voice acting.
Name given in captions
While editing my notes, I’ve thought of a possible explanation: maybe the thing blocking the sun was a sort of “dark star”, so the prophecy was activated when that died.
How long were they standing there?
When did this happen?!
I really, really hope that “Evrkynd” has some sort of meaning beyond that explanation, to justify the enormous cheer that came before the explanation.
Regarding note 3: this show is notoriously bad with time skips.
And the Finale does suck. Everything is rushed and badly written. The producers are pushing for another season.
But the first arc, the first three seasons, is great. You should definitely check out. The final episode of season 3 would have made a fantastic series finale, in my opinion.
I came here from Reddit and just loved everything about this, your execution, the comments.