Review: Moonbeam City “Quest for Aquatica”

Spoilers Below

In an effort to avoid a station-mandated CPR class, Dazzle decides to solve an already closed suicide case by building an animatronic dolphin that will go under the sea and interview any potential witnesses to a girl’s drowning. The potential witnesses? The dolphins.

A local crime syndicate rears its ugly head as an organization that captures dolphins and uses them in races. With the suicide case officially solved, this becomes Dazzle’s next excuse to skip out on CPR training. Dazzle heads down under water with Chrysalis and her dad only to come face-to-face with Rad’s Orca-bot. Rad pulls a trap on Dazzle that sees his dolphin put out of commission by the aforementioned syndicate just long enough for Rad to make his claim on free race tickets for life (albeit with provisions).

A big race is upon us, and Dazzle decides to make a ‘splash’ by sending his dolphin-bot into some oil drums that causes a big explosion. The case is solved, Splasha is free, and Rad ends up in Russia where fans drop car batteries into the water while he swims around in his orca suit.

Our Take

This is one of the episodes that seems to be more prevalent in Rad and Dazzle’s competition in that, Rad makes sure he destroys Dazzle’s reputation no matter how much it costs. This is my favorite thing to watch because Rad’s counterattacks are usually absurd as compared to Dazzle’s more novel approach.

One of the more boring concepts that seem to be happening this season is that we are set to meet EVERYONE’s parents. Dazzle, Pizzaz, Rad, and first up Chrysalis all have parent episodes, so looking ahead, look forward to meeting a bunch of extensions of family trees. This week’s episode kind of threw away Chrysalis’ dad despite the fact that Pat Warburton is guest star. I kinda wish he was more important to the plot or was a bigger player in the grand scheme of things, but really Chrysalis’ dad was just there with really no rhyme or rease.

I did love the subtle nods to sci-fi lore, however. When Dazzle is underwater his dolphin’s mapping looked like a cross between Asteroids and Tron and I couldn’t help but marvel. You’ll see heavier sci-fi influences as time goes on, but I don’t want guest stars just for the sake of guest stars. Family Guy does that enough and it already drives me nuts.