Review: The Great North “Dungeon Aunt Dragons Adventure”

Overview

Aunt Dirt’s interest in a role-playing game leads to a quest for vengeance. Beef is overtaken by a fascination in bead crafts.

Our Take

This week’s episode of The Great North focuses on random activities kids do when they are bored out of their minds, D&D and arts & crafts. We’ve actually seen a number of examples of animated adaptations of D&D games most recently with Prime Video’s Legends of Machina but in the very short stints of the producers of the show actually showcasing the action whilst playing we get something closer to Harmonquest but it really doesn’t matter because we unfortunately don’t spend a lot of time there anyway.

Instead we get a rather typical mystery with Moon and his pals and another hobby obsession with Beef and the other Tobins to keep them occupied. This week’s episode is an odd duck because as unimpressed as I was about the Jay Kasten-written script about D&D but with no elongated gaming sessions that would’ve seen a much more ambitious adaptation by the producers, I was equally blown away by Mario D’Anna’s directing during the beads B-plot, especially when it came to producing the actual bead effects. Everything from when the beads get assembled to when they get all over the floor so the family starts slipping and sliding, Mario really crushed the sensibilities that come with the strife of dealing with the after effects of a hobby that never should have been invented in the first place.

We only have one more episode of The Great North on Sunday nights before the show makes its summer 2025 schedule move. Is the ice in Alaska starting to melt or will the show be able to showcase enough to get another season?