Review: Dead Pixels “Crates”

 

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Many months have gone by since we’ve last seen Meg, Nicky, and the gang. There’s an expansion pack of Kingdom Scrolls releasing and everyone is excited about it — except for Alison, of course, since she’s off to a holiday in Greece.

But when the expansion pack turns out to focused on attracting and monetizing kids, Meg, Nicky, and Usman decide to take things into their own hands and show the younger generation of players whose boss.

Our Take:

The second season of Dead Pixels was filmed back in 2019 and originally intended to air last year in the UK, so it’s been quite a journey to release it here. But it’s finally premiering on CW Seed and luckily it doesn’t seem to have lost a step despite the delayed premiere date.

The same lovable cast of characters is back again, with Alison playing the role of the dismayed roommate while Meg and Nicky wallow in the darkness that is their Kingdom Scrolls addiction. There’s always been a bit of tension between Meg and Alison as the two women live out their very different versions of young adulthood, but this episode really draws a line between them as Alison meets an older man in Greece and gets invited to a forest pub walk, while Meg gets annoyed with the kids on Kingdom Scrolls to the point where she concocts a giant death maze to take them out. Meg does accept Alison’s invite to the walk, but bails almost as soon as she arrives — at least it’s a step in the so-called right direction?

Meanwhile Nicky completely loses his cool over the introduction of loot crates. He’s addicted to the thrill of opening crates before he’s even opened his first one, and pretty soon he’s pawning his entire collection of ties and begging for handouts to feed his craving. It’s kind of sad, but also pretty funny to see him resort to things like mugging new players and selling donkey rides on the back of his in-game character.

Usman’s plot takes a bit of a backseat as usual, but with the new influx of younger players to the game, his eldest daughter joins the fun and it’s nice to see the two of them ‘bonding’ like this… until he sacrifices her in Meg’s fake Drake concert death trap, that is. Russel is back, too, although he doesn’t really contribute much except for his jovial demonstration of Nicky’s mugging machine.

The second season of Dead Pixels is off to a solid start with Crates. It doesn’t do anything to shake up the established formula, but the new expansion pack does inject a bit of freshness into the proceedings — as well as a lot of really dumb-looking fish people which Meg rightly ridicules. It’ll be interesting to see where the show takes things from here, whether we’ll continue down the path of Meg’s war against Gen Z or if there will be another overarching plot. It doesn’t seem like the tension between Meg and Nicky was very prevalent in this premiere, but I could see the dynamic between Alison and Meg taking a stronger focus this season.