Walking in a Winter WondLa land.Wait, that’s not right, we talked about WondLa’s second season back in April, didn’t we? Yeah, we certainly did, but it looks like Apple really just wanted to be done with this show and gave us the last batch of episodes as a Thanksgiving aperitif. It’s certainly not a filling show, or even that entertaining at the end of the day, but it’ll clear out the flavor of whatever you were watching before. And it’s one episode less than the previous seasons, so it’ll be over in almost the same time it would take to watch your first Christmas movie of the year. Last time on WondLa, Eva 9 learned she was a clone and reached more humans after trekking through a hostile post terraformed Earth populated by strange creatures, but soon found that the humans were being raised to fear and hate those outside. She tried to protect the Heart of the Forest (not to be confused with the Heart of the Forest in Fionna and Cake’s current season), but was cut off from it by her embittered older clone, Eva 8, who herself was captured by the scheming Cadmus Pryde, who planned to use the Heart to remake Earth for humans once again.As I’ve covered the previous two seasons of this show, the word that has always been present in my head when thinking about it has been “basic”. It feels like the skeleton of a story that does appear to have skin, but there’s no muscle, not tissue, no blood, just a husk. This show is twenty episodes total, what would be a full SINGLE season for a cartoon not even a decade ago, because that’s just what making television is like now, even if it’s for a cartoon. And because of having so few episodes, there is very little room to do much for the characters and setting to feel like anything other than the platonic ideal of a plot structure, but end up feeling like every adventure show and none of them all at the same time. The first season was…sufficient at being about Eva learning about herself and the world as she entered a land she had no way to prepare for. It wasn’t anything mindblowing but it was an okay start. The second season put what she had learned to the test when placed back in the ideological boxes she was raised to be in, and breaking out of it to practice empathy for everyone, human and alien alike, which is a solid route for a second season, but with only seven episodes to do so, a lot of it fell flat, including the season finale that was meant to make things feel dire.And now we’re at the third and final season, which I suppose makes sense seeing as these are based on a trilogy of books, and the main present conflict is an oncoming war between radicalized aliens and radicalized humans, the latter being led by Eva 8, and Eva 9 trying to stop the battle before anyone gets hurt. But this has SIX episodes now and the first doesn’t have Eva 9 until the end, making a lot of what is trying to be build up to the final battle fall flat too. It also doesn’t help that the show is rather blunt with its theming, with many characters repeatedly uttering “there is no them, only us”, or when someone says “they’re the monsters” another character pushes back “no, YOU’RE the monster!” I understand this is made for children, but I could point to at least five other kids shows that came out in the past year that handle all of these ideas in a far more sophisticated way. It’s a good message for sure, especially in current times (and ironic considering this came from Skydance Animation which just bought Paramount to use as a propaganda arm for the Trump Administration), but you’ll get it better from just about anywhere else, and as soon as I’m done with this review, I’m probably never going to think about WondLa ever again. And that’s probably as good a summary of my thoughts as you’ll get. It’s a last puff of dry air in your face and then it’s gone.