Review: The Great North “Slide & Wet-judice Adventure”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

The family is excited about going to a new water park, but not everyone is pumped about it. Wolf still has childhood trauma from having his pants fall down at water parks as a child, and he decides to go off to a happy place of his own—but gets trapped in a sewer pipe with rabid marmots. Eventually he escapes and is able to reach his family at the water park…but by that time, all of them are ready to give it the finger.

Our Take:

The Great North continues its sophomore season with another Wolf-focused sort of episode. Slide & Wet-judice Adventure is ostensibly about Wolf coming to terms with his childhood trauma about swimming shorts, but it’s also about just how awful the new water park in town is—and while the episode itself isn’t as awful as the park, it’s definitely one of the weaker ones in a while.

The overall storyline seemed promising at first. Going to a water park should provide plenty of potential for interesting situations and characters to interact with, right? Unfortunately, somehow the episode manages to find the most boring conflicts and then focus on them for long periods of time. I think the worst one is Ham and his quest to get on the lazy river. He just—never takes his turn and then gets surprised when kids keep passing him? It’s lazy writing and a lazy river!

Judy and Moon don’t fare much better. Judy goes on a quest to get nachos, but they’re out of cheese, so she has to venture back through the park and avoid getting the chips wet while searching for the other snack stand—which turns out to also be out of cheese. Moon’s storyline involves standing in a line with an insufferable guy who keeps talking to him. Not exactly groundbreaking TV here, folks.

Wolf’s part of the story was a little funnier, due to the whole ‘sliding down a sewage pipe and getting stuck with evil marmots’ thing, but it also included some of the worst puns I’ve heard this season, like the “no help-ee but your selfie” line. I feel like Wolf is best in smaller doses, and getting so much of him of late and then this episode too did not help.

Overall, I would have to say that despite an interesting premise, Slide & Wet-judice Adventure really doesn’t amount to much. Wolf suddenly remembers why his trunks always fell down, while everyone else in the family gets bored at the water park. Honestly, the best segment may have been Beef getting tied to a metal pole so he can’t attend to the mermaid’s call. Too bad it was only a very small portion of an episode that felt very long.