Review: Mythic Quest, "Boundaries" & “1000%” | Season 4, Episodes 1 & 2

Apple TV+'s video game comedy returns after two years firmly back in its comfort zone

Image: Apple TV+

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.

Image: Apple TV+

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.

Image: Apple TV+

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.)

Image: Apple TV+

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?”