Review: Harmonquest “The Starshade Expense”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The heroes (including both Lymric and Fondue) are tumbling in forever space when a space pirate named Tampa Bay comes by to offer them a lift. He does just that, and everyone heads into some sort of downtown area where Tampa gets them shopping and eating pizza. Eventually, we leave and we hear a song from Fondue just before Tampa’s ship comes face to face with Vortheon and Lymric gets turned to evil and goes nuts on everyone.

Vortheon kidnaps Fondue and spawns a monster against the ship that has already been decimated with injuries. Back in Lymric’s head, he has to thumb wrestle his own demons so as to cede control of his mind and get back with his team in a battle against evil. Tampa actually beats the shit out of the monster almost single-handedly but dies in the process.

Our Take

Nothing like 22-minutes of Carl Tart doing his best Cookie Monster impersonation. I really wanted to just slam my head repeatedly every time he had lines in what was by far the biggest miscast of the season. In any event, I laughed quite a bit at Lymric’s wrestle with his demons coming down to a thumb war. An epic, elongated story arc crashes down in the most nominal way in the process and I loved every second of it. Unfortunately, as could be told by the crowd’s response, a LOT of jokes misfired, especially those from Dan’s confusing dual personalities. The plot of the show kicked off almost like a shonen anime in that we are relegated to a bunch of innocuous events that lead to an epic clash, an interesting way to construct this week’s show, but rewarding nonetheless. Unfortunately, most of the comedy elements don’t work this week.