Back in my review of “Rebrand,” I wrote about my concerns with the upcoming spinoff season of Side Quest, worried that focusing exclusively on the standalone episodes ran the danger of diluting the brand and making them less special. Now that we’ve reached the end of season four, I’m going back on that concern because their stylistic experiments are one of the only things I trust the Mythic Quest team to get right. Looking at a season with rocky pacing and ill-conceived decisions, the main highlights are the standalone “Rebrand” and the somewhat standalone “The Villain’s Feast,” where the show either focused wholly on one character or went full genre tilt.

So I’m now much more inclined to treat Side Quest (originally titled Mere Mortals when it was first announced and smartly retitled since) as something that could be critical to the survival of the Mythic Quest franchise proper. Going outside the box is something that hasn’t worked out for Mythic Quest in the last two seasons, but whenever they have an excuse to take a stylistic swing or narrow the show’s focus, that always pays off. If we have a laboratory for more of these experiments, it could be a creative outlet to spur something new when the original series is running on fumes.

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When I started reviewing Mythic Quest this season, I mentioned that I was looking forward to being on a tech-adjacent comedy beat again after covering the entire run of Silicon Valley back in my A.V. Club days. And over the course of this season, I’ve gotten to use a lot of the same critical muscles. It’s another show about a dysfunctional group of people who work together and form makeshift friendships despite not liking each other all that much. It frequently satirizes real-life industry issues like online free speech, streamer culture, development crunch, and the corrosive use of AI. And it’s also a show unafraid to showcase the more unpleasant traits of its characters, as well as how much they’re willing to sacrifice to succeed in a competitive field.

Unfortunately, what’s also come back to me was my most frequent complaint against Silicon Valley: the way both shows, over and over again, contrive to find a way back to their status quo. After season three of Mythic Q…

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A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how the low stakes of Mythic Quest make it easier to wave away some of the frustrations that come up in relationship to the show’s plotting and pacing. After the events of “Telephone,” I think I need to add the caveat that there’s a limit to how much I’m willing to excuse. We’re at the penultimate episode of the season, and rather than being gripped with tension over how things are going to resolve, the main response is aggravation at the pacing on how any of this is supposed to resolve. It feels like all of the emotional catharsis that should be in a penultimate episode was spent in “The Room Where It Happens,” and “Telephone” is just Mythic Quest spinning its wheels and ramping down its emotional stakes in advance of the finale.

It’s also hard to be overly invested in “Telephone” as it’s an episode that spends a lot of its time on one of Mythic Quest’s less sympathetic narratives, batting around the human pinata that is David Brit…

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The news that Mythic Quest was going to branch out and launch a spinoff series devoted to its beloved standalone episodes was a move I was of two minds about when it was announced. On one hand the standalone episodes are largely (and rightly) considered the best episodes of Mythic Quest, so getting more of them sounded like a winning proposition for the audience. On the other, I was concerned that producing multiple episodes would dilute the effect of any future standalones, the possibility that the creative team would be taking their biggest and most emotional swings outside of the regular season framework that makes them shine all the brighter.

We’ll have to wait a few weeks until the Side Quest premiere to see if the team can maintain the energy across four installments. As far as this season’s standalone goes, it doesn’t dispel my concerns over the experiment but also doesn’t make me feel like said e…

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At its core, Mythic Quest is a show with low stakes. As heated as the arguments can be between different members of the staff, or as dire as things can get with the company’s financial bottom line, this is fundamentally a show about silly people working in the entertainment industry. They’re not saving lives on a daily basis or dealing with problems that affect the real world; they’re making a video game and trying to find ways to either get more people to play it or make more money off the way they play it. And that permits some leeway in terms of getting annoyed with trying to figure out some of the plotting—case in point, the discussion of Dana’s contract last week—since it’s easier to hand-wave things when it’s fundamentally a dumb thing to get worked up about.

It also makes it much more apparent when things stop being flippant and start getting real, and Mythic Quest plays that card twice to full effect in “The Room Where It Happens.” On the professional level, it …

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As a general rule, I’m not much of a fan of time jumps mid-season on a television show. I can accept it if it’s happening in between seasons when there’s real-world passage of time, and I can also accept that shows will blur how much time passes in or between episodes unless focusing on the timeline is built into the series’ structure (i.e. “The Pitt”). Otherwise, if it happens mid-season, it tends to count as a strike because it breaks the flow of where the story is going. Even if they spell out the details of what’s happened in the intervening time, as a viewer you can’t escape the feeling that you’re playing catch-up.

My skepticism of this structure is unfortunately validated in “The Fish and the Whale,” featuring a five-month jump forward in the series’ action. While not a bad episode of Mythic Quest, it is one that does hobble some of the work that’s helped get season four back up to peak Mythic Quest levels. Even if it’s justifiable from a production standpoint to…

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Having spent a lot of time catching up on Mythic Quest in advance of the fourth season premiere, something I’ve noticed is how much overlap there is between the cast and the creative team. Even leaving aside Rob McElhenney’s heavy involvement as both showrunner and lead actor, the majority of the ensemble has a writing or directing credit to their name throughout the series. Review the list of episodes and you’ll see a lot of familiar names show up: David Hornsby, Ashly Burch, Charlotte Nicdao, Naomi Ekpergin, even recurring players like Humphrey Ker and Aparna Nancherla.

It came to mind while watching “Second Skeleton,” both because it’s the first shared writing/directing credit for Burch after several outings in both roles, and also because I think it’s something that’s critical to Mythic Quest’s success. Having the main cast so involved in the creative process is intrinsically helpful to deepening the show, making sure everyone is hand in hand with the story they’re …

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When I’m watching an episode for review, I normally pause it at least a few times per viewing, either to take notes or make sure I’ve gotten the quotes right. That held true during watching “The Villain’s Feast,” except the main reason I had to pause it was because I was laughing too hard to take coherent notes in real time. From Jessie Ennis adopting an English accent as Jo delivered threatening exposition to Carol’s outcry of “You gotta trigger-warn a bitch!” to Brad and David having a vermouth fight in the manor’s hallways, this certainly ranks as one of Mythic Quest’s silliest episodes. Much like season one’s “Everlight,” it’s a reminder that for all their dynamics and drama, this is ultimately a team of dorks who take their fantasy a bit too seriously.

Admittedly, as a huge fan of the genre from Sherlock Holmes novels to Clue to the Knives Out franchise, the idea of Mythic Quest going full murder mystery was always going to be an easy sell for me. Yet the longer “T…

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In a recent post, Rolling Stone television critic and friend of the newsletter Alan Sepinwall (buy his book!) awarded Mythic Quest the designation of “one of the best hangs on television.” It’s an honorific that sits well on the third episode of this season, which is simultaneously an episode where next to nothing significant happens and where I don’t particularly care about that. After the season premiere set things in motion and established some potential arcs for the season—Ian and Poppy’s partnership dealing with an oncoming Storm, Rachel and Dana’s relationship dealing with their shifted status—“Breakthrough” taps away at those arcs only so slightly in favor of showing us a typical day at Mythic Quest offices. And that’s not in any way a criticism, as it picks the right pairings and pushes them all to just the right extremes that makes just spending time with them a reward.

The biggest reason why “Breakthrough” represents a typical day at Mythic Quest is that no one is getting any work done, largely due to Ian’s designation of the day as Warrior Within Day. At a certain milestone during each expansion development, Ian’s philosophical side takes over and he decides he needs to get away from the office, so the next steps can be determined by harnessing the natural energy of the elements. (David: “And margaritas, according to the invoices.” Ian: “Yes, there are a lot of margaritas.”) With Poppy deciding to dodge that nonsense with a sick day—more on that later—he expands the invite to other coworkers he identifies in need of focus. Jo’s in the middle of serious contemplation about her professional career after Dana’s comment at the end of “1000%,” and David’s easily bullied into it by the other two after his meeting with Carol is canceled.

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Welcome back to Episodic Medium’s coverage of Apple TV+ comedy Mythic Quest, which enters its fourth season. Lisa Weidenfeld has moved on to a role with the Boston Globe, so Les Chappell is taking over our coverage in the weeks ahead. As always, this first review is free for all subscribers, but subsequent reviews will be exclusively for paid members. To learn more about our coverage schedule for the motnths, see our winter schedule.

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Messing with the status quo is always a dicey proposition for a creative endeavor. While there’s always an instinct to grow and evolve, there’s also the risk of sabotaging what worked and what people were showing up for in the first place. You never know for certain if the changes you’re making are going to be for the better, or if you’ve fully thought through what you’re going to do differently. And if you’re going to make a major change, you need to have a plan in place for what happens if it doesn’t work, because otherwise it looks like you did it only for the purposes of making a change.

That pressure to iterate without losing sight of what works has always been a part of the Mythic Quest narrative, and it’s now become part of the Mythic Quest meta narrative. Season three tried to flip the script by splitting the team up into dueling teams of Grimpop and Mythic Quest, and while not a total debacle, it was a serious creative misstep for the series. It became clear early that there wasn’t a plan for how those organizations were going to function without their missing pieces, and consequently the show felt like a lot of narrative flailing around. Character arcs were missing direction, it was hard to explain just what Grimpop was doing at any given moment, and the potential of a Mythic Quest movie arc was abandoned before achieving anything. Even if by design to show how much these weirdos may need each other, it never fully clicked, making the season-ending choice to return Ian and Poppy to Mythic Quest register as a sigh of resignation.

Thankfully the two-part season four premiere turns that sigh from one of resignation to relief, evidence that the Mythic Quest creative team took advantage of the extended two-year gap between seasons to figure out what works. Once again, every character is on the same floor, with Ian and Poppy rejoining the company as co-creative directors and Dana’s fledgling new studio brought in as freelance content developers. The goal is once again the same for all of them: to make Mythic Quest a financial success, and along the way antagonize your coworkers out of ambition, insecurity, or boredom. And most critically, despite pulling everyone back together, it doesn’t feel like a hard reset, allowing various developments of the last season—even some of the questionable ones—to play out in the new setting.

The most reassuring sign for the new season is the way that both “Boundaries” and “1000%” treat the conflicts between Ian and Poppy differently than previous ones. After three seasons of conflict, the two have finally come to an understanding on being partners, and landed on an equilibrium between their various manias. (Part of that includes restrictions on Ian sharing ideas after working hours, including but not limited to: dreams, visions, epiphanies, and/or paradigm shifts.) Both episodes still have a central conflict between Ian and Poppy, but they both come out of trying to manage new territory: In “Boundaries” Ian wants to know why Poppy won’t tell him she has a boyfriend, and in “1000%” he gets defensive about how that changes her commitment to their partnership.

Importantly, both cases also feel a lot less charged than previous fights the two have had about their respective working styles, as opposed to their weird mind games or power plays. Ian doesn’t try to come up with some elaborate scheme to figure out why Poppy won’t tell him about her new relationship, and it’s ultimately David who makes it weird—which is of course what David does best—and it leads to a reasonable discussion. It also doesn’t try to introduce some new layer of romantic tension, as Ian only cares when it turns out her new relationship is as much creative as it is physical. And when Ian and Poppy temporarily split from each other, it doesn’t take long to get to a heartfelt admission from Ian and an acknowledgement from Poppy they don’t need to have a heartfelt admission every time. In the past these could be issues that would fester for a few episodes, and in both cases things get resolved and they move on to their next conflict.

Of course in saying that they’re handling this in a more mature way, I’m grading on a curve, and the execution of all of this is still grounded in comedic idiosyncrasies. After so many jokes at Poppy’s expense when she’s declared she’s “great at sex” to the blank stares of everyone else, it’s nice to see her happy in that realm, and I share the joy Charlotte Nicdao gives to Poppy as she tries to play it cool with her blatantly obvious double entendres (so obvious even David can figure it out, with the cutaway to his and Ian’s conversation one of the first episode’s best gags.) And while we don’t need any further illustration that Ian and Poppy are at their core nightmare people to work with, seeing them forced to experience that firsthand thanks to Poppy’s AI avatars—which I dub AIan and PoppAI until they’re named otherwise—is a home run idea in its execution. It’s especially good given how on point both are with their real-life counterparts’ failings: AIan pivots from a heaven to hell expansion without batting an eye, and PoppAI decides that its processing time is best spent coming up with thousands of dad-focused sexual innuendos.

As far as the rest of the Mythic Quest family goes, the best decision made between seasons is pulling Dana’s fledgling studio into the office. Mythic Quest has always struggled to give Dana something to do, bouncing her from tester to streamer to assistant to aspiring coder to independent game developer over the course of three seasons. And while this new role as rising star isn’t immediately interesting for Dana as a character, it does help the series get more of a foothold into real-world issues, given how much proper compensation has been a flashpoint topic for the video game industry in recent years. Placing Playpen ahead of Mythic Quest in Montreal’s eyes positions her as a more organic disrupter to the status quo, and a more interesting challenge to Ian and Poppy’s partnership than each other.

Making Dana part of the Mythic Quest orbit is also a perfect generator of interoffice conflicts, which “Boundaries” explores to great effect. The Dana and Rachel relationship has by and large been one of the show’s steadiest after it was formalized in season two, and with Rachel still Mythic Quest’s head of monetization, it pushes them into uncharted territory of juggling professional and personal lives. Here they’re making an effort to draw the line—or at least rely on a literal one in the parking garage—only to tiptoe over it almost immediately as Rachel drops hints that Dana’s game is more profitable than David would like to let on. Much of Mythic Quest’s dynamic turns on how little life any of these people have outside the studio, so this challenge is promising territory to explore.

More critically in the short-term, Dana’s studio illustrates one of the smartest decisions at the tail end of season three, reuniting Jo and Brad and setting them on a common goal of Dana’s success. After flailing around, Brad is back to being the office’s apex predator, rattling David’s nerves (“Twig snap!”) in the hunt for both compensation and in-game currencies. And in her third assistant position over the course of the series, Jo embraces defending Dana’s interest with the same level of moral-free tenacity she brought to serving David and Brad. Both Danny Pudi and Jessie Ennis are at their best when their characters get to be unapologetic about their awfulness, and with Dana mostly a passive character in these circumstances, there’s every indication they’ll be allowed to play to those strengths.

While “Boundaries” takes gentle steps to reset the office dynamic, “1000%” goes even further by paying direct homage to season one’s “Dinner Party.” It’s the same problem of Mythic Quest dealing with a problematic player base—in this case PlayPen users who are using the cartoon avatars to simulate sex acts—and it follows the same narrative structure. David descends into the creepy basement to get bad news from Sue, reassembles an ethics committee to decide how to address the problem, and the committee experiences scope creep and goes off the rails. It’s so obvious in its execution that I almost expected Pudi to cock his head Abed Nadir-style and make a comment about how shows try to reboot by returning to familiar episodic constructs. (That instead falls to David, trying and failing to argue that sequels are always better than the first installment.)

Yet despite the obviousness of the homage I don’t mind, and not just because “Dinner Party” is one of the best early Mythic Quest episodes. It’s a sign season four remembers what season three forgot: that the true strength of Mythic Quest is putting all its weirdos together and letting them bounce off each other. Between Carol wanting to get her drink on, Rachel offering her ill-conceived arguments about being pro-yellow emoji, Brad pushing for in-game currency, and David utterly failing to keep things on track to the point of deleting all the meeting notes, we’re sitting in pure Mythic Quest comfort zone territory. And after a bumpy third season and the longest gap between seasons to date, I’ve got no problems if they want to stay there for a while.

Stray observations

• Welcome back to Episodic Medium’s coverage of Mythic Quest! I’m honored to be picking up the torch from Lisa Weidenfeld’s excellent season three reviews, and glad to be covering yet another dysfunctional tech industry comedy after reviewing the full run of Silicon Valley back in my A.V. Club days.

• Sue’s back! I’m always overjoyed to see Mythic Quest’s basement-dwelling community manager, criminally underused in season three with only one appearance. And with the reveal of all her “sisters” in her church, we have another piece of evidence that she might be an unwitting member of a cult.

• The slapping down of phones is the best recurring gag of “Boundaries,” especially when Poppy tries and fails to pull it off.

• Poppy’s new boyfriend Storm meets with initial approval from Ian: “He’s like kind of masculine, kind of femme, but he’s totally nailing both.” Poppy: “It’s like nailing two people at once.”

• Rachel becoming and remaining head of monetization for Mythic Quest remains one of the more baffling choices of season three, but it pays dividends in season four by turning her into a different layer of annoying. In addition to her emoji takes she’s gone down the conspiracy Tiktok rabbit hole and is living off tasting menus that might be affecting her health: “I am not getting the gout! I just love duck liver mousse. And my toe hurts.”

• Poppy on the virtues of PoppAI: “She also never needs to sleep, shower, pee…” Ian: “You already don’t do most of those things.”

• Cannot overemphasize how happy I am to have Brad and Jo reunited as a gruesome twosome, reinforced in these interactions over Rachel and Dana possibly getting a dog:

  • Jo: “I looked through her texts to gain advantage in the relationship.” Brad: “I taught her that.”

  • Dana: “Jo, some of these dogs have owners.” Jo: “It won’t be a problem.” Brad: “Now she’s teaching me.”

• “If you text her so much as an emoji, I will fire you faster than you can say ‘microaggression.’”

• “Can we make ‘cringe’ a slur?”

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There are times watching this show when it’s hard not to have the really basic takeaway that making things is hard. Sure, the specifics of why fluctuate episode to episode, and since this is a TV show, all the pitfalls are heightened, but a lot of it comes down to the near-impossibility of making and selling a thing that people like. 

For Poppy this episode, she’s gifted the double whammy of realizing how ill-equipped she is to actually sell a product, followed by the news that her product is basically unsellable anyway. Granted, it might have gone better if she hadn’t targeted the investor she previously told to “suck a duck.” But you can make something really good and ambitious in this world, pour your heart and soul into it, and still be told by an investor that your idea isn’t worth investing in because it won’t be profitable enough. It’s a reminder that there are roughly infinite factors that all have to align perfectly for something like this to work. It’s not jus…

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Well, that was a fight three seasons in the making. After spending most of an episode doing a somewhat typical round of Ian and Poppy bickering over the office ecosystem, the surface level feud ballooned into a knock-down, drag out fight over whose fault it is that their partnership isn’t working.

The show has toyed all along with Ian as a stereotype of a certain kind of creative visionary—a handsome fit white guy who’s arrogant, legitimately talented, and a little out of touch with reality due to his success. But it’s always offered him up as a welcome rebuttal to how defensive and possessive of success that type of person can be. It’s not just that he’s capable of recognizing the abilities of others. It’s that he seems to want to actually nurture that success instead of becoming jealous and protective of his own victories. The whole concept has always been a fantasy of a person like him actually being able to share a pedestal, particularly given who he spends all that…

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Editor’s Note: Since Lisa filed this review earlier this week, Apple TV+ announced a Mythic Quest “extension series” titled Mere Mortals based in part of what they refer to as the show’s “departure episodes,” such as this week’s “Sarian.” It’s scheduled to debut in 2023.

There’s just something about the annual standalone episodes that really frees Mythic Quest up to take big emotional swings, and “Sarian,” Season 3’s outing, is no exception. Here, at last, is the origin story of how Ian and Poppy met, but as is typical for these episodes, it’s not totally clear that that’s what we’re getting until the end. Instead, what we get, at first, is a threaded exploration of Ian and Poppy’s lives at the very pivotal age of 10.

They’re both facing different challenges at that age, but the episode makes a strong argument for why that’s a good point to check in with them. Sure, we could have seen them both as surly teens rebelling against the world, but it’s that much more meaningf…

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One way to get around a drifting third season in which your characters are all separated from each other? A standalone Christmas episode that throws them all back together for silly reasons.

“12 Hours of Christmas” is probably not going to go down as the greatest episode in Mythic Quest history (commence your arguments in the comments about what is), but it does serve as a good reminder that it’s nice to get these folks in a room together. For one of the only times this season, the whole gang is hanging around MQ HQ. David and Jo try to make the perfect Christmas for their employees, as in one that involves working an overnight shift to keep the MQ servers running as each time zone opens their Christmas presents. Ian and Poppy have nothing better to do because they’re both oddballs who are semi-estranged from their families, so they kick around the office. And Brad works his usual wizardry to keep Rachel and Dana focused on a monetization strategy and in the office.

Some…

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If ever a show could be said to be treading water, this might be it. Halfway through the season, GrimPop has completely reversed course and decided to abandon a game they spent a year building, and one they accepted a lot of seed money to make. Instead, they’re going to release their own video game building program that Poppy put together in a day. 

Is this what this season is about? We’re five episodes in, and it’s still not totally clear. I’m starting to feel like the Bobs in Office Space, staring at Ian’s scenes and asking, “What would you say you do here?” Poppy has a complete crisis about her inability to create a fun game, but instead of talking it through with Ian, she gives up. It also doesn’t seem like he’s been weighing in on anything up to this point, despite the fact that he’s slapping his name on whatever they end up producing. Does he care? His main interactions with Poppy so far this season have been to offer genial support for whatever she’s doing, but t…

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Breaking up the band, as Mythic Quest has chosen to do in its third season, is a good way to mix up established patterns and character beats on a show. It forces characters into trying new things, and stepping outside their comfort zones. But it also means that many of the things that worked on the show are sidelined, and we’re missing the chance to see all of our faves bounce off of each other.

And while I’ve called out the odd journey Brad has been on all season for lacking direction, it’s hard to think of a character more stranded by the new circumstances than Ian. For the first two seasons of the show, he was the visionary: an arrogant, successful man who had a lot of things the other characters lacked, but who was nonetheless concealing a deep well of pain. More importantly for the dramatic arc of the show, he was also gradually revealed as a committed and thoughtful mentor, who despite his many privileges wanted to build a bridge for people to follow him to the to…

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If the first two episodes of this season of Mythic Quest were intricately threaded examinations of where recent events have landed its characters, the third is a refreshing collection of disparate but funny misadventures. If there’s a throughline, it’s David and Poppy’s continuing and doomed quest for Ian’s attention, but “Crushing” is mostly interested in having a good time, and at that, it succeeds.

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What do you do after you get exactly what you thought you wanted? That’s the question lurking beneath the new season of Mythic Quest, which dives into the aftermath of Ian and Poppy’s decision to depart from the company and strike out on their own. Finally, they don’t have to deal with David harshing the vibe and trying to babysit them, and conversely, David doesn’t have to put up with their egos anymore. Even Carol in HR gets in on the action, with a cushy promotion and freedom from the constant HR difficulties involved in dealing with all of these people. 

The two episode premiere does the heavy lifting of both explaining how the events of the Season 2 finale have shaken out in the interim, and setting up the new evolving conflicts, with the first focusing on walking through what’s up with everyone since we last checked in with the MQ team. We get a glimpse of Ian and Poppy’s futuristic office, and some evidence that their new company, GrimPop, is still working out the kinks. David reigns over a more peaceful MQ HQ, with Jo leaning in to her responsibilities as his assistant, and Brad smooth talking his way through a parole hearing. And C.W.’s absence, which had become apparent in the off-season thanks to an announcement that F. Murray Abraham wouldn’t be returning, is explained by an author tour. 

There’s an overall sense of arranging all the furniture onstage: here’s what you’re going to be getting this season. It all leaves the second episode free to dive into more interpersonal conflicts between everyone, as Ian and Poppy try to figure out how to work together productively, David becomes obsessed with figuring out why Brad took a janitor job at the company, and Carol tries to figure out exactly what her new job is.

The new dynamics are wish fulfillment for everyone (well, maybe not Brad), since all of these people have spent the first two seasons of the show getting frustrated by their colleagues. And it’s an almost meta way for the show to embark on its third season—it’s a complete reset for all of the running plotlines, and also a way to thumb its nose at its audience (yes, the show has a nose in this metaphor. Bear with me). You thought these folks were feeding into each others’ dysfunction? Well, here you go: They’re free.

Of course, wish fulfillment, whether for these characters or for us as viewers, is never that simple. It’s an ambitious starting point for the show to take as it heads into its third season. Rather than rest on the laurels of what won praise in the early going, it’s setting off in a new direction. And much like Ian and Poppy, it’s full of talent..but failure always lurks if you step off the path of what’s tried and true. 

Right now, GrimPop, their new venture, is full of potential. They’ve got the flashy new office to prove it, but we also learn in the first episode that they’ve also burned through all of their seed money and Poppy can barely pay rent. And that new office looks like a spaceship, but is virtually impossible to navigate. Lines and doorways may make for a blah design, but they do help you find your way around, you see. Meanwhile, in the second episode, we see that David’s freedom from spending every waking hour dealing with the dynamic duo means he doesn’t actually have anything to do, a problem that afflicts Carol as well, but with a sour twist—her flashy new position as head of DEI comes with neither the ability nor the expectation to affect any change.

The only person not experiencing growing pains is Brad, who coasts through his parole hearing and then provides the perfect hire for Carol: a person of color, and a convicted felon, whose presence proves that Mythic Quest is serious about advancing diversity and inclusion. He’s definitely up to something, and goes back to playing everyone off of each other, but to what end isn’t immediately clear.

It’s the only slightly tedious note of the first two episodes, which are otherwise about people taking baby steps towards becoming new versions of themselves. The show has been toying with the question of whether people can change since its earliest episodes, and here comes a character in Brad who seems determined to drag everyone back to square one. But in doing so, he only proves that he’s the one who can’t change. This is a flaw that’s existed from the start with the character. Once you establish that Brad is the smartest guy in the room, and he always gets the better of everyone, where does the character go? The conflict with his brother last season only exacerbated these qualities. Sure, his brother won some of the time, but their conflict was really only a heightened version of what he does with everyone else, but with a more worthy opponent. The show is clever enough to be going somewhere more exciting than this, but for now, Brad’s very much up to his old tricks, messing with David and beginning to tempt Jo back to the dark side once he’s safely on staff again.

It’s a shame, too, because he ends up interfering (intentionally? Accidentally? Brad makes us all a paranoid David) with Ian and Poppy’s dynamic right after a conversation where they seem to finally understand why they need each other. They both think they’re the true visionary in their project, and in the new, uh, Hall of Heads (?) in their space office, they can both program the perfect counterpoint to the other’s argument that they matter most. Ian is basically constantly at risk of quoting Elizabeth Holmes, whereas Poppy’s argument that charismatic showmen are con artists falls apart when presented with the example of Nikola Tesla, an undisputed genius who lacked Edison’s business sense and died penniless. It may be an extreme way of looking at the situation to suggest Ian would end up in prison without Poppy, and that Poppy would die alone in poverty, but the ideal partnership is one where each person brings their own skill set to bear, filling in the gaps that the other person can’t. At their best, Ian and Poppy can do that for each other, and their portmanteau of a company name even reflects that. It’s both of their names, but you can also read it as the melding of two ends of a creative sensibility spectrum, with one end being grim, and one being pop (though arguably Poppy has a more grim outlook, and Ian has more of a pop one, a statement with which he would undoubtedly disagree).

Still, despite the fraught road ahead, it’s C.W.’s sendoff at the end of the first episode that emphasizes what all of these lost visionaries so easily forget: that being around each other, for all the headaches, made them content. That doesn’t mean they all need to go back to the prior incarnation of their work situation, but it might mean that they could look for new ways to be in each other’s lives. The concluding moments of that first episode work to cast doubt on the whole premise that anyone is growing and changing, though, given that Ian and Poppy’s grand new venture is only a different floor of the same building. Can anyone change? Are all of these people doomed to fall into their old bad habits? Only Brad knows.

Stray observations

• The payoff to the “Hokey Pokey” conversation being Carol, in full awareness, hiring Brad to check off a box and then saying, “I’m going to put that on the website because [singing] that’s what it’s all about” was the joke that made me laugh most. It’s such a flawless conclusion to the earlier conversation about being figureheads. 

• Runner-up best joke is of course Ian flagging down a random MQ staffer to ask her what her dreams were, only to have them all be dog-related, and then when he really pushes her to not say dog, she pauses, and then in desperation says, “cat?”

• Real talk, though: what the heck is a dog farm?

• Woof, that hint of a plot about Ian trying to change Poppy’s diet and exercise was a mess. There’s a very good explanation for why he might want to do that (there’s been a running thread about her stomach trouble, and she eats candy and gas station pizza), but it treads into dicey territory by not making it clear that’s why he’s doing it, and instead he’s accidentally suggesting a woman needs to hit a Peloton while she eats.

• As far as I can tell, no details have been released about why F. Murray Abraham left the show, but whatever happened, he gets a sweet sendoff here (including the episode title, which becomes a real heartbreaker in context). I’ll miss the kooky energy he brought to the place, although it’s a little hard to imagine where his character would have fit in this season. Presumably he would have gone to GrimPop, right? 

• Regrettably little to say about the (old) testers, who started out as a way for the show to offer some insight into life at MQ beyond its power players, but are now just kind of…around? They’re cute but they really, really need to get incorporated into the main plot more here. 

• Relatedly, GrimPop seriously needs more employees, but the show seems to have lost interest in the nitty gritty of the staffing needed to craft a video game. Poppy is doing Computers and Ian is doing Ideas, I guess.