Review: Paranormal Action Squad “Orb’s Orbit”

The way this thing ends has us scratching our heads.

Spoilers Below

While Paul is making his pitch to the Nobel Prize committee (none of whom show up to the presentation), Orb is captured and brought back to Orbicon where she is held prisoner and eventually sentenced to spend 1000 years in a cave. Fortunately, Eddie, Paul, and Vanoss are able to find her in time before she is officially sent off, but not before Eddie is sucked into a whole headed to a new world. What world you ask? To be continued…

Our Take

We’ll get into a bigger picture review in the season recap next week, however, it’s very interesting how the finale episode of Paranormal Action Squad finishes…

That said, I really loved Orbicon and kinda wish we had spent more time there and learn more about Orb’s backstory. For example, who is this crazy bitch, and what are her true intentions? Why did she get rid of Eddie the way she did, and does she have an ax to grind? The Tron-inspired settings were really well-done, and actually, this episode featured the series’ best background designs to date. Little things like minimalistic updates to Orb’s gestures while the camera is panned out and we can only see her silhouette, or at the start of the series when Paul had the projector’s image across his body as he was running. I’ve seen bigger animation studios do less with more money, and I think it speaks to how good the producers of Paranormal Action Squad are and hope to see their continued growth in an upcoming season or even another series altogether.

I do think the dialogue was a bit bland this week, and I’m not even sure why this show is getting into the “outer space” game that is already preoccupied with lots of other animated shows that do the crazy settings better. I think the writers could’ve stayed on Earth and kept playing on the more rudimentary myths and legends like Bigfoot. Everyone’s doing outer space right and different dimensions, so these guys better come up with something really special next season to stay potent.