“Everybody talks about ‘happily ever after.’ Y’ever try to read about the after? Ya can’t! The book just stops!”
So says King Zøg in the fourth episode of the newest season of Disenchantment, the animated series co-created by Matt Groening and Josh Weinstein, and which premiered Friday on Netflix. It’s a sentiment that many fantasy spoofs and “fractured fairy tales” have expressed in one way or the other, and it’s at the heart of the series’ interrogation and deconstruction of fantasy tropes. The context of Zøg’s lament is the fallout of the events that ended the first season: with Zøg’s first wife, Queen Dagmar, revealed to be a conniving sorceress who turned most of the population of Zøg’s kingdom to stone (they got better), and his second wife, the amphibious Oona, divorcing him and taking up a new career as a pirate, Zøg is disillusioned, depressed, and alone. Alone, that is, until an encounter with the mysterious, forest-dwelling Ursula, a forest selkie who can alternate between human and bear forms with the aid of her magical pelt. Zøg is smitten, and invites Ursula to live with him in the castle, where she struggles with the human business of wearing clothes and eating with knife and fork. Zøg knows her secret, and he senses that she wants to return to the forest: he knows that without her bearskin she will be a human, and belong to him, forever.
Zøg’s brush with temptation is, of course, the setup to a classic fairy tale, and probably the most direct borrowing in this second series of ten chapters. It’s also one of several episodes that focus on side characters, instead of the lead character, Zøg’s daughter Tiabeanie (nicknamed “Bean”). Like previous Groening-created series The Simpsons and Futurama, Disenchantment builds out a troupe of colorful supporting players, and one could even say (cliché alert!) that the series’ setting, Dreamland, is nearly a character itself. New developments in the second season include the continuing aftermath of Dagmar’s betrayal (Zøg spends the first couple of episodes alone, surrounded by the petrified remains of his subjects, and the desolate kingdom is looted by barbarians) and the influx of a population of elves, whose slumlike living conditions are a fertile source for new plots.
Still, Tiabeanie (voiced by Abbi Jacobson) remains the show’s heart, and it is her trials that are the show’s main focus. At the end of the first season, Tiabeanie had been spirited away by her mother, Dagmar, on a ship after Dagmar’s magical attack. Taken to the desert kingdom of Maru, she is introduced to the two mysterious strangers who sent the demon Luci to corrupt Bean, and who were occasionally seen watching her through a magical fire, in the first season: they turn out to be Dagmar’s brother and sister, Croyd and Becky (err, Rebecca). In the first episode, we learn of a prophecy that Bean would be the greatest woman of her age, as well as a family curse: madness, striking members of every other generation. Bean distrusts the obviously unstable Croyd and Becky immediately, only gradually realizing that her own mother is the real threat. Dagmar intends for Bean to fulfill the prophecy, even if it means screwing a painful-looking crown directly onto her head. Even after escaping Maru and seemingly ridding herself of Dagmar and her schemes, Bean continues to dream of her mother and find signs of her lingering influence, including a very creepy music box. Bean’s gradual discovery and processing of the truth about her lineage is the main long-term arc in the second season, and like the first it ends on a cliffhanger. The pleasure is in the many digressions and side quests along the way.
Perhaps it is simply the difficulty of maintaining an air of mystery as characters and settings become familiar, but even as Disenchantment‘s second season shifts between settings as diverse as Maru, the afterlife, and a retro-futuristic city-state, there is less of the awe of visiting new and strange vistas than the later episodes of the first season evoked. In my review of that season, I compared those scenes to early episodes of Adventure Time, in which one of the primary appeals lay in the vast emptiness of the landscape, full of atmosphere and potential. As Adventure Time continued, it became more crowded with recurring characters and settings, and even its weirdest features became downright cozy with familiarity. That feeling of being alone at the edge of the world (or at the edge of a Legend of Zelda world map, which amounts to the same thing) became rarer. A similar process is at work in Disenchantment: even new, strange settings feel like home as long as the characters we’ve come to know are centered in them.
It is the nature of spoofs to puncture, to deflate: it’s probably a mistake for me to expect Disenchantment to maintain a sense of awe in a consistent way when its mode of comedy is snarky, down-to-earth–in short, Gen X. It’s right there in the title! That’s not to say that it doesn’t frequently dazzle, however. The blend of hand-drawn designs over computer-assisted 3-D models is much more seamless and less distracting in this season, for one thing, even as it becomes more ambitious: Hell, to which Bean and Luci travel in the second episode to reunite with their friend Elfo (who died at the end of the first season, and whom they must convince to leave Heaven in order to bring him back to life), is rendered as a cavernous space full of floating stone platforms, constantly in motion; the ninth episode’s Steamland scratches the itch for intricate mechanical and architectural complexities that Futurama regularly satisfied, but with a handsome nineteenth-century overlay, a city of the future as envisioned circa 1885.
Some of the more distracting story elements are also streamlined or absent. Elfo’s unrequited love for Bean, a plotline that never seemed likely to go anywhere interesting in the first season, is tempered in this one by Elfo learning the truth: that Bean chose her mother over him when using the single dose of elixir of life to revive her. Elfo (Nat Faxon) is far too good-natured to hold a grudge for long, of course, but jettisoning this particular subplot makes room for better gags and more compelling stories (including an unresolved tease about Elfo’s own parentage). As Elfo has become a little more world-weary, Bean’s other companion, the demon Luci (Eric André), has settled into his worldly existence, free of the mandate placed on him by Croyd and Becky and apparently abandoning his ambition to earn his wings (give or take a few twists in the “Stairway to Hell” episode). After winning the local pub in a bet (“and you barely cheated!”), Luci finds that slowly poisoning people is rewarding, too.
Ultimately, the theme that has remained constant throughout the series is the difficulty of being a woman in a quasi-medieval society (the “quasi” part allows for direct comparisons to the modern world, of course, and the ways in which things have or haven’t improved). At the beginning of the first season, Tiabeanie found herself unwillingly betrothed to a man she didn’t love (or even know) in order to serve her father’s political ambitions, and there are frequent reminders in the second season of her second-class status: unable to speak at court, left out of battles she is capable of fighting for herself, and even excluded from staging her own play in the theater.
Yet, the show is hardly about victimhood, as the resourceful Bean constantly finds ways to exert her will and insert herself into situations, and the male characters and their issues are frequently B-plots. Moreover, Disenchantment is full of powerful women: Dagmar and Oona, of course, but also the savage Ursula and a number of walk-ons. Bean’s trip to Steamland is illuminating not because of the city’s technological wonders but because women are free there to pursue careers closed to them in the relatively backward Dreamland. Disenchantment pokes fun at the tropes of “strong female characters” (Shelly, a circus performer, is physically strong but her real strength is in being the single mother of two kids) while centering a female perspective. On paper, Bean could easily be taken for a cliché–a hard-drinking tomboy princess–but the tight serialization of Disenchantment allows her something not all animated characters get: a sense of depth and growth over time.
Medleyana 