Local school ski trip gets interrupted by giant snake man.
Lazy, unfunny, synopsis writer finally finishes an episode.When I said I was dreading this episode I didn't expect that it would take me this long to get back to this. But whatever. We're here. We're doing this.
We open with Phobos giving Cedric two tasks. The first task is that he try to gather information from the townspeople in Meridian for information about what happened to his sister, which seems like something that they should have figured out ages ago. He's had 13 years since she disappeared, plus the 3 years since I wrote the last update, and he already knows that she's on Earth. She was basically a newborn when she was brought to Earth. I don't think it takes much to figure this one out.
Regardless, Detective Cedric is on the case I guess which brings us to his other task: Defeat the guardians by separating them from Will so they can't transform. Some of the more astute viewers out there will note that Phobos kind of accidentally tried that last episode with the Tracker, to which some rushed writer who probably had to deal with a billion rewrites for this episode will tell you to stop asking questions.
We cut to the school where Matt and Will are making googoo eyes at eachother. Will turns to Cornelia and we get the following exchange:
Will: "I think Matt likes me."
Cornelia: "Well what makes you say that?"
Will: "He's not looking at me."
Both Cornelia and the audience sigh in unison.
Later in the cafeteria the girls and Elyon are talking about an upcoming ski trip the school is taking. Another topic of discussion is that there's a new student from Switzerland in the school. This mysterious new student waltzes in and basically every male side character, even Irma's creepy stalker, swoons all over her. It's discovered that Sandra is planning to attend the ski trip and since Sandra and Matt made goo goo eyes at each other Will decides the girls are going on the Ski trip too.
After Cornelia and Elyon stop at Cedric's bookstore, partially to swoon over that hot, totally not secretly an evil snake man book store owner, and partially because the writers needed a way for Cedric to know where they are.
I for one find all of this gratuitous exposition most interessssting.Caleb is in this show too so we get set up for a subplot about the girls thinking he doesn't know how to have fun or something as well as more of him being the straight man for the Girl's antics. Blunk stows away on the bus because he's in the show too and it's off to the hills.
This whole Will being jealous of Sandra plotline feels pretty out of place for a show that despite being based on a comic series from an italian magazine based on girls was adapted to primarily appeal to a primarily male demographic. I suppose when your main cast consists of five girls, a socially inept rebel leader from another world, some weird gremlin garbage goblin thing, and the incompetent tyrant and his snake friend it makes sense that this is the well they'd come to but still. You would think that considering the writers are already essentially trying to appease Disney's demands to put a circle shaped block in a square hole in terms of demographics for this show they would try to find plotlines for the show that are more easily relatable for their primary intended audience but that's not what we're going with.
And with all the snowboarding and skiing in this episode taking up this show's already meager animation budget, there isn't much room for the cool fight scene with Cedric to make up for it. The whole show has had something of an identity crisis so far. It just doesn't have the animation budget to sustain the kinds of action scenes that it needs to appeal to its primary demographic, which is a problem that absolutely plagues the show's first season.
Caleb somehow managed to convince Yan Lin to drive him to the Ski resort so I guess she's in this episode now. Maybe we will finally learn more about her. We can learn all about her days as a guardian, or how she adjusted afterwards, and… she is literally only in this episode because they needed Caleb to get to the ski resort so they could resolve his subplot that doesn't really add much to the episode isn't she.
Will challenges Sandra to a ski race to decide who will get to sit next to Matt on the bus ride back. It's been established throughout the episode that Will doesn't know how to ski so the natural question is how does she intend to win the race?
The answer of course is by cheating. She attempts to convince Cornelia and Taranee to go along with this but they refuse. She then turns to Hay Lin who reluctantly agrees to use her powers to help Will win.
Just a lovely chat with the friendly neighborhood snake man.Cedric manages to capture Blunk after the girls find out he tagged along. He attempts to interrogate Blunk for information but then sees Hay Lin and Will flying along and decides to follow them instead. Cedric causes an avalanche in an attempt to keep the other girls distracted while he goes after Hay Lin and Will. All of the side characters are conveniently able to get inside so only main characters get buried under the snow… or just conveniently trapped in weird air pockets. That's how Avalanches work right?
There is no escaping a determined Jehovah's Witness.Honestly I don't have much more to say about this episode. It's just so bland. The only really interesting thing to say about it is that Will never really gets any kind of comeuppance on her attempts to cheat within the episode which is surprising for a kids show. Sandra is never seen again which is kind of a bummer. A better episode could have probably made decent use out of having a more antagonistic character in the school who isn't completely incompetent like Ulriah and his goons.
I could joke about how Caleb conjures up a helmet out of nowhere when he goes snowboarding or joke about the scenes where the skis Yan Lin gave him disintegrated but I'm just not feeling it. The world building on Meridian is probably the strongest part about the first season and while it is nice to have a break form that now and then to keep Earth relevant, the Earth stuff has to actually be interesting and it just isn't.
The episode ends with something interesting however which leads me to a theory I have about it. The girls and Caleb discuss the fact that according to the portal map, no new portals have formed recently. They take this to mean that Cedric hasn't returned to Meridian.
However we know this is false. Cedric was on Meridian at the start of the episode which communicates to the viewer indirectly that he has some way of traveling between Earth and Meridian without using a regular portal. Either the writers fucked up or we have a mystery on our hands. Or it could be both. That's always possible.
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