Review: Camp Camp “Time Crapsules”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

David instructs the kids to create time capsules. While a discussion of past items is brought up, Nurf reveals he found Gwen’s old diary. Max then reads the grandiose fantasies of her future life Gwen had as a little girl aloud, causing everyone to laugh at her. Gwen starts crying and runs away. Max is startled by his own awakening conscience and reflects on how much he’s changed over the summer. He decides that the only way to make himself feel better is to apologize to Gwen and make amends (which Nikki and Neil remark is a selfish act if he’s only doing it for himself.) While Max attempts to rectify things with Gwen, the kids struggle to fill their time capsules — consumed by the anxiety that their hopes and dreams for the future will be doomed like Gwen’s.

When Max fails at recreating Gwen’s old childhood dreams, he explodes at Gwen for not cheering up so that he can feel happy again. Gwen yells back, telling him that good people don’t do “good” things out of selfish desire. Max snaps at Gwen, harshly declaring that she fucked up her life. Gwen coldly tells Max that he hasn’t changed, and that he never will. David interrupts the two with the time capsule ceremony.

At the capsule burial, Gwen breaks down and warns the kids they’ll all be failures like her, which puts the campers in hysterics. Then, Cameron Campbell appears at the ceremony to tell the kids that despite the probability of not ending up where they want to be, they need to make something out of their failures if they fail, like he did with Camp Campbell. Gwen and Max make amends, while everyone burns their capsules.

Our Take

Here we are, at the Camp Camp season four finale. The show has been through so many narrative twists and turns — always ending with one singular, emotionally climactic final episode to cap off every season with. However, season four didn’t go out with a bang; but rather, a muted (albeit sweet) note to end upon. In comparison to the other season finales, this one didn’t pack the same surprising punch. It felt as though it was just a particularly good episode of Camp Camp. Good, but not finale material.

One thing it did was tie up the overlapping theme of the season: change. Max felt conflicted in his treacherous road to becoming a better person, because he’s starting to realize that being a good person isn’t just about doing good things. It’s about intent. While the season set up for David and Max to be contrasting in their differing developments, the finale paired Max with a character who usually doesn’t get the same spotlight that he and David do. That character is Gwen.

Gwen was an interesting subject of focus for the final episode. Considering that she spent a previous episode telling her father that she was proud of who she is and what she does, the fact that she spent this episode mourning what she originally wanted from life was a fascinating choice. It makes her point of view unreliable when it comes to herself and how people view her — and it’s the most humanizing thing they’ve ever done with her character. Gwen spent the last few seasons just sort of being an angry, hormonal millennial, but this episode (and season) gave her the depth she desperately needed.

Still, though, while the episode wrapped the “change” arc up, it felt cheap that the original setup for the juxtaposition between Max and David went unused. It was presented in the first episode and then casually (in that annoying meta way that Camp Camp loves to execute so much) mentioned in passing by Neil as a joke. The episode didn’t do a great job of piecing together its season theme of change, but it did do something else: it served as a reminder for us to not mourn our failures, but to make successes out of them. It served to highlight the importance of understanding that life doesn’t have a script, nothing usually goes the way we planned, and where we wind up is probably a different place than where we imagine — but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing, nor does it have to be the end.

Despite its pitfalls, we celebrate this finale as proof of how much the show has grown since its beginnings.