Review: WTF 101 “Expeditions”

A thousand miles to nowhere.

After Professor Foxtrot and Dr. Gamma’s battle, River has been thrown into an alternate plane of existence known as the Q dimension. Mindy and the others want to get her back, but the professor is wary of going to a place she describes as a prison for mad scientists. In order to illustrate her point, she wants to take the detention gang to three of history’s worst journeys.

She begins with a Swedish hot air ballooner who tried to invent a way to make the vehicle’s steering more reliable. This fails almost immediately, and he’s forced to jettison the entire contraption. Unfortunately, he gave up too much ballast, so he was tossed through the air due to a combination of his low weight and the freezing of his balloon when he reached high altitudes. After two days, however, he crash-lands onto an ice float. He tries to escape in multiple directions, but to no avail. In the end, he and his companions froze to death camping out on the icy embankment.

Next, Foxtrot transports the group to a Scottish colony set up in the Americas. The colony is in dire straits. Because of a territorial dispute with Spain, no one is willing to trade with the settlers, except for the British, who will only give them booze. Their current food supply is also rotted, and the camp is riddled with disease. After the original settlers mostly die off, two more waves of colonists show up and die in similar numbers. The Scottish government also pumped so much money into the project that it bankrupts the whole country, and they are forced to unite with England to survive.

Finally, the gang goes into outer space to see the first spacewalk. Too bad the Russians hadn’t quite figured out all of the kinks. The cosmonaut’s suit inflates, making him unable to fit back into the spaceship. After a herculean effort that nearly caused the man to die, he does make it into the cockpit, just in time for a massive systems failure. The ship crash-lands in the Siberian tundra, with the AC stuck on full blast. The cosmonaut is forced to camp in the freezing ship until the next day when he’s rescued from the aggressive predators that surround him.

Mindy, tired of Foxtrot’s shenanigans, take her magic laser pointer and cuts a path to the Q dimension. They quickly find River but are ambushed by Dr. Gamma. She neutralizes Professor Foxtrot’s pointer and now has the whole gang at his mercy.

Our Take

WTF 101’s formula had started to become a bit stale, so the B-plot having to do with the mad scientists is at least a good instinct. Unfortunately, it’s not terribly compelling. The show is, by its own admission, Rick and Morty by way of The Magic Schoolbus, but it could certainly work a little harder to hide those influences. With the Q dimension this week, it would not surprise me to learn about WTF’s equivalent of the galactic federation next week, in between Dr. Gamma serving as Professor Foxtrot’s substitute magical educator.

WTF 101 just feels a little unambitious to me. The show seems far more interested in its reeducation aspects than it does in any of its character work, so this overarching plot comes across as tacked on. I think the show investing more in variety where it does care would be more in the show’s (and the audience’s) interest than Professor Foxtrot getting the better of Gamma over the next episode or two.

Adam Conover is a fun voice cameo for Dr. Gamma, but it once again calls to mind comparisons to Adam Ruins Everything at a time when the show should be avoiding it most.  None of the plot machinations feel like they matter anyway, though. There is no world outside of the detention room of Dunning-Kruger High School. While each of the individual characters has their own quirks, I don’t really have much of a reason to care for any of them. I had actually just completely forgotten River was missing because she’s just a collection of stoner clichés with a queer twist.

This is a show with a lot of constraints. Trying to be an irreverent educational program and an interesting sci-fi adventure is a lot to do in eleven minutes. Some might say that it’s impossible. Even if it isn’t, though, WTF 101 needs to make some choices about what it wants to be and/or prioritize. Because, as of right now, the show is trying to be both things at once, and failing to make much of anyone happy.