Review: Hot Streets “Hot Streets Disease; Hot Streets Begins”

Hot Streets Season 2 comes to a climactic close.

Overview

In “Hot Streets Disease,” Branski is tasked with defeating the Porcelini Man, who turns innocent people into artsy statues. However, Hot Streets discovers that Branski is infected with Hot Streets Disease — a disease caused by following too many orders on cases, causing a pseudo-imaginary pink pony to fart in the agent’s face (ultimately killing them.) Branski must retire from Hot Streets and befriends Jon — a boy aspiring to be a Hot Streets agent. While Jet Jr. and French are going to silly extremes in order to beat the Porcelini Man, Branski sends Jon in to do the job for him. When Jon becomes endangered, though, Branski disobeys Jet Jr.’s orders to stay out of it and kills the Porcelini Man — sacrificing himself for Jon. Since he refused to follow an order, his Hot Streets Disease is cured.

In “Hot Streets Begins,” the world is being threatened by a gigantic a**hole opening up in the sky. Jet Jr. allows Hot Streets to be run by the Global Director, Stinkeroni. Stinkeroni fires Jet Jr. and tells Hot Streets to pay no heed to the world’s new stench. Jet Jr. leaves and runs off to marry a Martian jet princess. Months later, our beloved core team of Hot Streets members has gone renegade in an attempt to thwart Stinkeroni’s plans to engulf the world in stench. Jet Jr. eventually returns to help, but Soo Park is the one who returns with the answer for how to stop them. She hacks into a lost signal Chubbie Webbers sent when he was a genius, and finds that they must “plunge a reflective prism” into the hole. Jet Jr. braves into it by turning into a crystal and saves the day. Hot Streets thrives once more.

Our Take

Thus ends the second season of Hot Streets. Not letting fans down, the show took its underlying plot to the center stage in its finale, highlighting some great character moments and salutes to previous episodes.

Kicking things off with “Hot Streets Disease,” it executed a concept unique to the show’s setup which played into Branski’s main character trait — that being, his dedication to Hot Streets cases. While the pony added to the low-brow reputation the show already has, it simultaneously punched up the show’s surrealist charm. Like many other Hot Streets episodes, it occasionally suffered from a case of, “where is the punchline?” for its jokes, but it also had some nice character moments. Branski’s life outside of work was fun to watch, and so was his relationship to Jon/Tony. The cutaway gags to French and Jet Jr. were a fun mixup, too. It’s rare to see French stand up for himself — even if it takes him dying to do so.

With “Hot Streets Begins,” there were a lot of conglomerate nods to the entire season itself. Characters, jokes, and one-liners littered the episode as it fleshed itself out into one of the most plot oriented stories yet. Hot Streets appears to have such a broadly creative cast of alien characters and worlds — it makes for some pretty interesting stories. However, the show limits itself to crude gags too often to be pleasurable. With a show like this, it’s obvious that there’s a desire to have as many wacky, over-the-top happenings involved in every episode, but with crude humor, sometimes less is more. Still not entirely sure how to feel about how Jen apparently has a fart fetish? (Why did both of these episodes have so much to do with farts?)

Qualms aside, Jet Jr. and Soo Park’s character comebacks were definitely the highlights. The false foreshadowing with Jet Jr. and Soo Park’s face-off for the final episode was actually pretty welcome, considering how their characters shined brighter than any of the core Hot Streets’ members. If the villain was a little more creative, it would have been better — alongside the animation.

At least it tried to take things tip to the lip.