Review: Dead Pixels “Healthy Balance”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Meg and Nicky’s relationships are still hanging on, but there’s something new to get excited about: Kingdom Scrolls is releasing a new mega patch that’s supposed to fix everything wrong with the game. Usman is able to download the new patch in a matter of minutes, but Meg and Nicky don’t quite have the same luck with their internet in the apartment.

Alison manages to convince them to hang out with her while the patch downloads, but in the end they wind up getting drunk and trashing their router in an effort to achieve a healthier balance in life. The next day, Meg brings Nicky to her boyfriend’s house to borrow his internet.

Our Take:

Dead Pixels is coming to an end of the second season, and things are starting to heat up. Healthy Balance is an episode that does a good job bringing balance to the show itself; giving us perhaps one of the longest stretches we’ve seen yet that takes place outside the world of Kingdom Scrolls. It lets the characters interact more with each other face to face, which makes for some very interesting developments.

We’ve seen and heard firsthand Meg and Nicky’s disappointments with the new release of Kingdom Scrolls, so it makes sense that they’re hyping up this mega patch as a cure all for their issues. Both of them are dealing with difficult things in the real world, and they seem to be channeling all their hopes and dreams into the virtual one in an effort to ignore their challenges. (If you can call getting a boyfriend and being promoted twice a challenge.)

Since the patch takes so long to download, Alison manages to convince Meg and Nicky to join her to help defrost the freezer and clean it out. This is where the really fun stuff starts to happen. Nicky has spent so much time in Kingdom Scrolls that he tries to see video game logic everywhere, like when he announces that the first freezer drawer was a basic level to introduce the mechanics and the real boss is the chicken in the next drawer. We also get a glimpse of more of Alison’s troubles as she finds her credit card frozen in a cranny from a time when she was addicted to spending.

After Alison gets them drunk and convinces Meg and Nicky to achieve a healthier balance between the virtual and physical worlds, things really go off the rails. In their drunken state, they trash the internet and sink their own chances of playing the Kingdom Scrolls patch anytime soon. Usman, meanwhile, is happy in a gaming cafe overseas and has a storyline where the players around him start dropping like flies while he denies the reality of their dead-ness. It’s a little macabre, but a funny way to get him out of the house for once.

Finally, there’s also a subplot where Nicky gets outraged by Alison inviting his virtual girlfriend over to stay with them. He goes around and tries a few things to make sure he’s still a functioning man, but winds up getting a little embarrassed when he gets an erection from staring at Meg’s bra in the laundry. It’s a little creepy but it seems to be leading to the possibility of a Nicky/Meg pairing, which felt completely absent in the first half of this season. Meg might have trouble keeping a normal boyfriend, but as the season finishes up, maybe Nicky will be the perfect match for her?