Review: Krapopolis “Contagion”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Deliria alerts Tyrannis to an incoming plague of Empathy, which threatens to destroy their society by forcing people to see things from another person’s perspective. This is especially bad when a force of invading troops arrive, with only Hippocampus there to hold them off, even when they all come down with Empathy. Tyrannis and Deliria find the source of the disease, a long defeated Titan, and retrieve the cure, some mushrooms, and clear things up.

OUR TAKE

Krapopoplis returns for the back half of its first season with…a perfectly adequate episode. That really says it all, doesn’t it? Going through the first twelve of these, I almost never got the sense that the show as a whole was ever more than just…okay. As such, I haven’t exactly missed it during this month and a half break, but I’m not exactly dreading talking about it more either. It continues to be functional and meeting average standards. I expect that will be the case for the rest of this season, but we may see some clearer steps one way or the other as we get to the second or third. Case in point, this episode uses the show’s typical format to explain the origin of another modern issue, this time being the lack of empathy in the world. Though unlike money or social media, the topics of the last two episodes, empathy (or lack thereof) is a bit more nebulous and not as tangible or measurable, so it’s a bit of an odd thing to focus around in this way. And apparently the stance this show has on empathy as a concept is that it is a bad thing that will kill us all if we let it…I think. It’s kind of hard to tell what they’re going for.

Being empathetic, in certain situations, can actually be important and crucial for creating and maintaining relationships, professional or intimate, but conversely, you can’t usually empathize your way out of someone trying to kill you and take your stuff, which seems to be the scenario they’re using as an example with the invading Spartans voiced by Kumail Nanjiani. Except when the issue is that people are literally invading your land to kill you, the problem isn’t with the concept of empathy, so whatever points the episode is trying to make end up all messy. Oh, and we have the third episode in a row with a narrator explaining how the events of this episode went onto impact something in this show’s version of the modern world, but this time it’s a different person entirely. I thought it was weird that they did it twice, but now this makes me wonder if they planned to have some ending narration for EVERY episode before focus groups or executive notes or something got them to remove it from most of them. I guess we’ll see if they keep showing up in the remaining episodes. Apparently this season will be around eighteen episodes, so we may have just a few left!