Review: Camp Camp “New Adventure!”

Look! It’s the New Crystal Gems!

Overview

The episode opens with Max, Neil, and Nikki finishing up an unseen (ponzi-scheme themed) adventure. The episode is about to close out when Gwen interrupts and demands to know which one of the kids was in the cabin. Max and Neil want to solve the mystery but Nikki mentions she “has plans already” and leaves the case to the pair.

Nikki then joins up with, surprisingly, Nerris and Dolph. The trio is revealed to be very close to one another, all bonded over the fact that they don’t like their identity being based on their archetype/who they hang out with. Nikki admits she feels like she can really “let her hair down” with them. They originally set out to find Big Foot, but get distracted to chase after a body Miss Priss is secretly stowing away. Nerris opens up about how it’s lonely being the only “demi-human”/LARPer around, but Nikki and Dolph reassure her they love playing with her. They get distracted from discovering what Quartermaster is hiding in the bus and find a trailer on fire. Dolph gets homesick and is reminded of “smelting chocolates” with his family. Nikki and Nerris reassure him being homesick is good and normal. After an a-typical run-in with the Flower Scouts/Wood Scouts, they find Neil and Max, who have solved their adventure. Max sees how unexpectedly close Nikki has gotten with Dolph and Nerris, but comments on how they probably “never get anything accomplished.”

Our Take

So, this was clearly an episode where the writers wanted to play around with the idea of the characters having their own lives outside of the main narrative. The moral is defined at the very end, where Big Foot pops out of the bushes to say that Nikki, Nerris, and Dolph getting their adventures accomplished “isn’t really the point.” By the way, this was the funniest bit in the whole episode. Everything else was just wholesome character dialogues meant to flesh out the characters in a way we haven’t seen before.

Or was it?

It’s time to play Good Cop-Bad Cop. The Good Cop says that this was an adorable episode and that the colorful interactions with Nikki, Neil, and Dolph gave the show more dimension. It looked like a fun attempt to get the audience (and characters within the show) to realize that these characters aren’t just decorative pawns for the narrative and that they’re living, breathing people with thoughts and opinions who desperately want to be heard and seen for who they are — not just the archetype they portray. Clever use of the meta!

…Or was it?

Time for Bad Cop. Here’s the bottom line — the main conflict in Camp Camp is the fact that none of the writers can fully commit to making the show as good as it’s shown it can be. As someone who fell in love with the Camp Camp that Camp Camp became in Season One’s “The Order of the Sparrow,” it’s hard to see this show go four seasons having the same writing problems over and over (forced humor in places that ruin an impactful moment, overuse of meta jokes, aforementioned impactful moments not being executed to their fullest, etc.) To have this current episode throws its own narrative-structural problems at the audience (“This is the problem with Camp of Campbell: we become type-cast in our specific, easily digestible roles!” “I feel at times we are destined to wear the mask that others assign to us.”) just seems like an attempt to laugh off a flaw it has, rather than fix it in an organic way. They did this in “Attack of the Nurfs” as well — knowing full well they were using an overused trope, jokingly commenting on it in the dialogue, and hoping that would suffice as an explanation (rather than, like, just making something else.)

Was this episode progress? Sure. Knowing the tonal inconsistencies in Camp Camp, will this ever be addressed again? Probably not. Rooster Teeth writers have a privilege that not many shows have — they don’t have a Disney CEO sitting in a big threatening chair, telling them what to do. They have so much freedom to write what they want, and how they want it — which begs the question: what is stopping them from fixing the problems they know are present?

On the flip side, maybe this was just an attempt to humanize Dolph. Yeah, good luck with that.