Review: Camp Camp “Mind Freakers”

Sometimes you gotta know when to just go along for the ride. Sure, things may seem insignificant and or noticeably flawed, but when you’re simply having fun, who cares? You can go on for hours about how some things don’t make sense or aren’t realistic, but is that really worth mentioning if folks want to just be entertained?

I really liked the movie Now You See Me. I understand the flaws of how certain scenes don’t work, or how the twist at the end shouldn’t happen that way, or how there are moments where the director just had to be on drugs to think that would hold up to even the most basic logic. However, I was so sucked in with how the pacing, dialogue, and characters kept a snappy and well-timed rhythm with everything going on that I couldn’t help but enjoy myself. And, from what I’ve heard, this is the similar attitude to stage magic (which Now You See Me was largely about) in general. Everyone knows it’s a trick, but they love to be convinced that just for a second, magic is real.
SPOILERS AHEAD

This segues into the focus of this week’s episode: The stage magic obsessed kid at the camp, Harrison. Like the other kids, we’ve seen Harrison in background and small gags here and there throughout the season, usually in conflict with LARP kid Nerris. I figured this would mean that they would have to share and episode to pay off all that set-up, especially since the other campers and staff mainly group them up as “magic kid and other magic kid”, but if you’ve been following my coverage of this series so far, you know I’ve long since abandoned hope of the writers actually coming to logical conclusions with these characters.

So Harrison is having an outside show with Nikki as his mesmerized assistant. Max and Neil walk into the scene from somewhere, and since a huge chunk of Neil’s character is “the science kid”, naturally he’s got a stick up his ass about something as trivial as a stage show, pointing out the answers to all of Harrison’s tricks. It’s just sort of the role of the skeptic in stories about magic shows to be an asshole about needing to be right, ironically past the point of rationality. Everyone else wants to have a good time and enjoy the show, but then someone has to poke holes in things, making them look like an asshole in the end. Sometimes it’s even a case of magic actually being real, so the skeptic looks like both an asshole AND a moron, but the similarity is that they can never just have RATIONAL skepticism, they are just a jerk for not believing a non-quantifiable thing right off the bat. There are exceptions, and I’ll get to those later, but on with the episode.

But as an aside, and this might be reaching, but coupled with how easily she rolled over for Erid back in Ep 4, Nikki’s behavior here seems to suggest that despite her take charge and gung-ho nature, she’s just really easily influenced and gullible, which actually allows her to keep her more likable character traits while making her more endearing. The one thing against this is the Dolph stuff in Ep 6, but she WAS busy looking for Neil at the time, and also I’d just prefer to forget the Dolph stuff. And Dolph overall.

Anywho, after enough prodding from Neil, Harrison goes for “the greatest trick of all”, which turns out is making Max vomit up multiple handkerchiefs and a rabbit…which was apparently intended to happen to Neil instead. Because there is no clear cut explanation for how this trick could have worked, Neil becomes obsessed with figuring it out. Of course he never does and becomes increasingly unstable to the point of trying to recreate it by stuffing the same handkerchiefs from the trick down Nikki’s throat. All throughout, he’s only focused on how even using magic tricks as a recreation are an affront to scientific theory, and generally being a self-centered asshat about it. What’s weirder is that Max, the kid who made it his sole mission to bring down a guy who he dislikes simply for being happy and positive, doesn’t relate to this at all or even notice the parallels. He just has to deal with throwing up random junk and trying to process it. Notice I don’t give Max the same praise for having conflicting traits like I do Nikki? Well, that’s because, unlike Nikki, most of Max’s traits aren’t nearly as consistent (aside from just being an ass, but that’s Neil’s job this time), so he comes off as a device to be used in only specific conflicts, as opposed to a living and breathing person who observes things and has regularly expected behavior.

And then there’s the way magic is treated as a concept in this episode. Despite all his planning and mental breakdowns, Neil never proves how the trick works. Additionally, despite attempting to disprove magic in a way that would have certainly gotten Nikki killed, she’s perfectly fine because Harrison convinces Neil to believe in magic momentarily. So, as far as we know, in this universe, magic just exists. Things just happen inexplicably and that’s the only explanation. Even if Nikki is seen as impressionable and naïve, ultimately she’s correct in just believing in things to spontaneously happen.

I’m reminded of a couple of examples along this same type of plot: Young Justice’s “Denial” and King of the Hill’s “Sleight of Hank”. Both have a story involving magic being brought up with certain characters playing the part of the skeptic for varying reasons. In YJ’s case, Wally West AKA Kid Flash has difficulty believing in the idea of magic while fighting a magic-using super villain when he’s grown up and been exposed to so much that can be explained scientifically, even if said science is pretty fantastical (considering he’s in a superhero universe). Eventually he learns to understand that not everything can be understood or has an explanation, which is difficult for even the most grounded skeptics to accept. In King of the Hill’s version, Hank Hill is a realist who doesn’t care to day dream, believes in hard work and pay off, and has been taught at an early age to be reserved emotionally, while his wife Peggy and son Bobby like to use their imaginations and are sometimes overly optimistic and idealistic. After having a fight about painting clouds in Bobby’s room, the Hills end up seeing a magic show which Peggy enjoys, but Hank can’t help but pick apart. Like with Neil, when Hank sees a trick that he can’t explain, he constantly pesters Peggy (who volunteered for the trick) to tell him how it was done, but she refuses because she simply wants to enjoy a good show even if she knows it’s fake, while Hank just wants to show how fake the performance was to prove a point. After fighting for long enough, they get so mad at each other that Peggy kicks Hank in the shin, he kicks back, and they start laughing, even if they have no idea why, helping Hank understand, like Wally, that there are some things that don’t need to be understood to be enjoyed.

It might be due to the time restraints for all I know, but Camp Camp basically boils this type of story down so much that the ultimate meaning is lost. Magic exists, random things can happen for no reason, and characters just have to accept that regardless of how little sense it makes. Neil just looks worse as a character for all his trouble, and that’s just supposed to be the joke we take from all this. Sometimes you need to just go along for the ride, but have enough dignity to know when you’re being taken for one.