Review: Mythic Quest, “Across the Universe”/“Partners” | Season 3, Episodes 1 and 2
Apple’s gaming industry workplace comedy returns for a third season
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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.
Finally getting around to watching these and wanted to drop a comment here to say how excited I was to see EM covering MQ. And like vseveral others, this was also how I found out a show I loved was back so Apple TV+ really needs to work on their promo game.
Looking forward to reading more of your insights Lisa! Lovely stuff here already. For what it’s worth my favorite bit from these first two episodes was definitely David’s increasing exasperation at the questions he was getting while reading CW’s letter. David Hornsby does exasperation so well, it will never fail to make me laugh.
So glad Episodic Medium is covering this show. MQ was one of the pleasant surprises I discovered during my 10 days of Covid isolation last year (I remembered we had 6 months of free Apple TV+ so it was this and For All Mankind) and I wasn't expecting to enjoy it as much as I did. It was something to get me through the day and then I hit the first flashback episode and it took it somewhere special for me.