Review: Unicorn:Warriors Eternal “The Mystery of Secrets”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The giant octopus is defeated, leaving the police to clean up the mess as the team try to gather their wits after Copernicus is wrecked. The police follow a rumor from a strange old man to the abandoned church where they briefly confront the fox lady, while the warriors make their way to Otto Industries, where they meet…Otto, who may be the one who creates Copernicus at some point in the future. He is able to put the pieces back together, but is unable to turn Copernicus back on. They are then attacked by the fox lady and are barely able to hold her off until Edred lands a seemingly killing blow. Seng then reveals that Edred knows how to fix Copernicus, but nothing will ever be the same once they do.

OUR TAKE

We have a bit of an emotional disconnect with a good portion of this episode, specifically in how we the audience feel about the potential death of Copernicus versus how the characters feel. Up until this point, he’s been at least helpful in activating the reincarnated heroes in their new bodies and assisting in fights, but he’s mainly in the background aside from that as the focus of the story has been pretty much about Emma and Melinda having their tug of war. That’s still going on this week, with I guess Melinda gaining a bit more dominance since Emma got a peek at her backstory. And of course Melinda, Edred, and Seng would have attachment to Copernicus and be worried about his safety considering they’ve been fighting alongside him for hundreds of years. However, we in the audience haven’t really known him for very long. I’ve seen plenty come to like him well enough since he’s a pretty cool looking robot who wears a hat, but not nearly enough to earn the feeling of fear that he might be dead. I don’t know if I’d say we COULDN’T have made that emotional connection in the five episodes we’ve had, but we haven’t.

It’s not like Tartakovsky hasn’t been able to get us to connect and attach to speechless characters before, Primal coming to mind here, so it definitely could be done. Maybe if Emma, the POV character introducing us to this weird reincarnation deal, tapped into some moments where Copernicus had been a rock for Melinda to lean on, or if he had been showing concern or understanding for her slow adjustment, but…we didn’t get that. Heck, we haven’t gotten Copernicus being very uniquely useful in battle AND we see a (seeming) victory against the fox lady here, so it seems like the only real urgency in bringing him back is…just because they really like this robot. In fact, I think that ends up pointing to a bit of a bigger issue with this show: there’s not really much in the way of stakes or a clear goal for the characters. We don’t know the fox lady’s plan because mystery, but we also don’t know what the warriors need to do besides fight the evil, also because mystery. Maybe we’ll find out what we need to in next week’s episode, which is double the length of the rest for some reason.