Review: Camp Camp “Camp Loser Says What?”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Everyone at Camp Campbell (except for Cameron) is taken hostage by the Wood Scouts, who are much more competent under the direction of their new Scoutmaster, Daniel. Everyone tries to warn the Wood Scouts that Daniel is a dangerous cult leader, but considering how Daniel successfully helped them kidnap new recruits, they refuse to listen. Daniel forces everyone to go into town and solicit people to join the Cult of Xemug (under the guise of joining the Wood Scouts, which everyone immediately guesses — save for the Wood Scouts, who remain unconvinced.)

Daniel enslaves the kids to dig a moat around the camp in the shape of Xemug’s summoning symbol. Daniel then prepares to sacrifice Nikki, and the Wood Scouts finally have a private meeting about how maybe the Camp Campbell kids were right. Pikeman wants to remain loyal to his superior, though but loses the loyalty of his fellow Wood Scouts, who walk away. Pikeman changes his mind too late and puts himself in danger of sacrifice like everyone else.

Just as things are looking dark for Nikki and the gang, Xemug himself appears before Daniel and tells him that sacrifice is unneeded. He orders Daniel to go to Antarctica to build a temple in his honor. Daniel agrees and leaves. It is revealed that David, Max, and the Wood Scouts faked being Xemug. The campers are saved!

Our Take

Oh wow, Daniel’s back! Too bad that there was no shock factor in that, considering how little sense this episode made.

Throughout the plot, multiple demands are made for someone to call the police, yet for some reason, no one does. Daniel may have a knife, but he’s a scrawny guy with a violin. He really didn’t have much of a threat behind him. The only reason they wrote Cameron out of this episode was that Cameron would have easily been able to take him out. On topic — it seems like Camp Camp’s new hobby has been doing just that: writing characters out of the plot for the sake of convenience. Considering how much more they could be doing with Camp Camp’s main underlying plot (or even just focusing more on their main cast instead of randomly bringing in guest characters) it just comes off as lazy.

Also, even though David helped in the take-down of Daniel, it seemed off that they barely interacted in the episode. Daniel seemed to serve as a sort of enemy foil to David, so to have all of this happen without any sort of confrontation felt as though, again, they were writing David out of the plot for the sake of convenience. At least in the Halloween special, David threw hands — there wasn’t even a musical face-off in this one. It really just felt like they wanted a Daniel episode but didn’t know how to work him in.

But at least we got a great end-of-episode moral! “It turns out when we decide to work together despite our differences, we can pretty much do anything.” That sure is sweet — and familiar, too! It’s almost like we just had an entire episode that featured the camps coming together and working with their differences! Was “Follow the Leader” pointless?

Everything is starting to feel more and more inorganic with this show. Someone needs to give the writers their compasses back.