Review: Krapopolis “Vengeance Will Be Nine”
Overview
A determined child enlists Stupendous to track down her father’s killer; Tyrannis agrees to pose as Viscera’s boyfriend.
Our Take
Vengeance is actually the name of the child that gets Stupe’s attention in her quest for revenge and she’s voiced by the super-talented McKenna Grace.
Shlub is the MVP here. Our favorite slacker gets high on lettuce—which is the single most random and brilliant inciting incident for a quest we’ve seen all year—and promptly starts talking to Colin, a sentient bottle. The ensuing journey to the Caves of Digor, complete with a hastily acquired dragon trap, is pure, beautiful sight-gag comedy. The payoff, however—Vengeance discovering the truth about her father’s death—adds a surprisingly heavy, grounding element to the plot that makes the journey feel worthwhile. It’s the classic South Park move: use a talking bottle to deliver profound character revelations.
Viscera enlists Tyrannis to pretend to be her boyfriend, roping Deliria and Hippocampus into the most needlessly complicated ruse in the history of interpersonal demon-drama. This plot is brilliant because it takes the lowest-stakes situation (a bad ex) and handles it with the highest-stakes theatricality (a fake relationship involving three other people). It culminates with Bloodmouth going nuclear and evoking the Ritual of Rektahl.
What this episode proves is that the creative team has the dexterity to handle both the episodic, nonsensical quest comedy (The Shlub/Stupendous plot) and the serialized, dramatic character insanity (The Viscera/Bloodmouth plot). The dialogue is sharp, the setup is absurd, and the payoffs are worth the emotional whiplash.
