3x17 Escape to Amphibia

[7.5/10] I never know how seriously to take Amphibia, especially after the show returned Anne to Los Angeles. I find it easy to accept the loony excesses and narrative conceits when we’re in a magical/mystical land of frog people. I find it much trickier to trigger my willing suspension of disbelief when we’re nominally supposed to be in the real world (albeit one that is dimensionally adjacent to a zany frog world).

Tone is such a tricky thing. We don’t balk when Elmer Fudd gets hit by an anvil in a Looney Tunes cartoon, but we’d blanche if Walter White’s descent seemed too rushed or convenient in Breaking Bad. And Star Wars, that all ages film turned Serious Business:tm:, occupies a strange middle ground where people will tolerate magic powers and fantastical technology, but snipe endlessly over the plausibility of space bombers and character consistency. How realistic your world is, how seriously we’re supposed to take the characters and their journey, and how much the audience can buy into that or not, varies so much from project to project.

Which is all to say that there’s a part of me that loves what the show does with Anne in “Escape to Amphibia”. Amphibia is about growing up, figuring out who you are, and coming into your own, much like its spiritual cousins Gravity Falls and The Owl House. There is something rousing about Anne worrying that despite all she’s been through, this is still too big for her; receiving a benediction from her parents and a recognition of how much she’s grown; and ultimately using her powers, and a little help from her friends, to return the Plantars to their home and stand poised to unseat a tyrant. Hers is a story about self-doubt and hearing from the people who know you best that you have the strength to rise to this moment, and that's lovely.

Anne’s also sympathetic in her fears that, despite everything she’s been through, she’s still just a kid. I wouldn’t say that Amphibia is about going off to college exactly, but it does have a certain energy of going away to summer camp for the first time, or as series creator Matt Braly has mentioned, going to stay with relatives in a foreign country for an extended visit. That concern about whether you’ll be alright on your own, whether you’ll miss your family too much and be able to cope with whatever lies in front of you, is a relatable one.

In-universe, I also like Anne recognizing that it will be hard to be separated from her parents again. One of my favorite moments in this episode is Anne and her parents monkeying around with an ersatz Star Wars display at the Costco knockoff store. We didn’t get much of Anne missing her family in the first two seasons of Amphibia out of a few choice moments. But seeing them horseplay like that feels so recognizable and endearing. There’s a bond there, and you can understand why it would be hard for Anne to let go of that and march into danger. I appreciate the show exploring that anxiety, and having Mr. and Mrs. Boonchuy recognize it and reassure their daughter, in the way a parent telling their kiddo they’re ready for the challenge ahead of them would.

But here’s the disconnect for me. The crusty old grown-up in me says that, my god, Anne is right! This is too much for a kid! No matter how much she’s matured over the course of the past six months or so, no middle-schooler is equipped to fight a potentially deadly battle against a massive army led by a malevolent king who has already shown a willingness to murder children when it suits him. And if I’m a parent, I don’t care how much my young teenager may have grown and become responsible, I’m not letting them go into a deadly battle in another world where I may never see them again, or at a minimum, I would be going along so I could try to protect them rather than just letting them kick off into a wild fantasy realm with vengeful tyrants and killer mantises.

So there’s a part of me that says, “Hooray! Anne is overcoming her self doubt! And has earned the trust and faith of her parents! And has self-actualized in a way that lets her bring her friends home and go save the day!” And there’s another part of me that says, “You maniacs! She’s thirteen! Powers or not, she’s not mentally equipped to fight in a war! And how could you let your daughter just go like that, knowing she’s going to be in grave danger and you might never see her again!”

As Carl Carlsen of The Simpsons once put it, “It’s best not to think about it.” Or, more pointedly, as the theme song to Mystery Science Theater 3000 put it, the best answer may be, “Just repeat to yourself, it’s just a show, I should really just relax.”

The truth is that it’s simply a conceit of the genre. Harry Potter fights Voldemort and his goons multiple times, because when you’re a middle-schooler it’s fun to imagine yourself standing up to the forces of evil, even if the grown-ups would be reckless or neglectful to let it happen. Avatar Aang stands up to Firelord Ozai, even though he’s just a kid, because it’s another power fantasy about growing up. The Pines Twins, and Luz Nocera, and Finn the Human all face down the ultimate bad guys, even if they have help from adults, because they’re our protagonists, and it’s cool, and even stirring, to see them rise to the occasion. Consuming kid hero stories means letting the kids be heroes, even if it means the desiccated corpses-in-waiting like yours truly, who have young people near and dear to our hearts, wring our hands over the idea of vulnerable youth being put in harm’s way, when that happens all too often in the real world.

If this were a lesser show, I think it’d be easier to write off. But Amphibia is a series with the chutzpah to confront Sasha’s epiphany that she’s been a bad person and her rocky but earnest desire to change, to grapple with how Anne and Hop Pop establishing a relationship of trust again after Hop Pop’s lies isn’t necessarily a straight line, to depict a tender but heartbreaking remembrance by Anne and Sprig of their absent parents, and most recently, to show Anne writing letters to Sasha and Marcy’s parents trying to alleviate their worries.

In the real world, losing your child for five months would be devastating and traumatic, with no parent signing up for their kid to trundle off to god knows where for god knows how long. Letting another set of parents go on wondering and waiting without giving them more information and bringing them under the tent would be cruel. And rescuing your friends and allies from the FBI would be dangerous and possibly deadly.

But this isn’t the real world. It’s a fun, loony, oft-profound but also inveterately light-hearted kid adventure series. So instead rescuing your friends from the FBI means a zany scheme with plenty of slapstick, comical misdirects, and of all things, a sideways homage to the Darth Vader hallway scene in Rogue One.

I’m not complaining. I can't pretend it’s easy to resolve in my brain, but “Escape to Amphibia” is an entertaining, well-built episode of the show. Many shows in Amphibia’s subgenre have a communal spirit to them, so just like it was heartening to see the citizens of Wartwood stand up for Anne; it’s nice to see the friends the Plantars have made in Los Angeles come to their rescue as well. I’ve never been a big fan of Mr. X, but he works as an antagonist for a wacky caper like this one, especially when being hoisted by his own barrel of kombucha.

What’s more, the construction here is sound. Our heroes have a clear goal, generate enough power with the portal constructed by Terri and Dr. Jan to get the Plantars home and rescue the Plantars from the FBI to make that possible. Accomplishing all of that shows Anne’s leadership capabilities well, gives her a chance to fail but bounce back with the admiration and acceptance of her parents, and vindicate the connections everyone’s made in L.A. much like the connections Anne made in Amphibia. Heck, we even get a solid setup and payoff with Hop Pop’s avocado fixation and the giant mantis from the beginning of the episode. (Though the realist in me tore my hair out yelling, “You let a killer mantis through the portal into a room with your parents?!”)

There is a nice synchronicity with Anne’s Super Sonic abilities powering up the portal, much like the blue gem was necessary to power the calamity box in the first place. THe notion of the music box having a particular tune and resonance frequency that creates its coordinates (with a Close Encounters homage) is a nice touch that adds the patina of science to the proceedings. And our heroes winning the day, making it through the portal, and getting the Plantars back home only to see Amphibia overrun and devastated by King Andrias’ forces is a timely gut punch to make clear to the audience that this is only half the battle, and to remind our protagonists that there’s much more to do.

I just have to reconcile myself to the fact that as much as Amphibia sidles up to the emotional strain of parents and children being separated from one another, to the fearsomeness of a heartless enemy, to the anxieties of growing up, it’s only going to go so far, and only going to approach them in the safe confines of a light adventure show. That is as it should be for an all-ages television show, even if it rankles the aged curmudgeons who see the moments when this show takes its premise, its characters, and its emotional beats a little more seriously, and yearn for a little bit more.