Greetings, one and all, to Retro-Scrutiny. My name is Kendall Charleswell and I am your host this evening.
(And I am Alexia Erizo, joining in today as Kendall’s co-host. Glad to see you’re back, Kendall.)
Thanks for taking over the last time, Alexia.
(Thanks for not leaving footprints on the ceiling anytime this week.)
No problem. Now, the last time we saw the monkey team, they were escaping a mutated monster world after fighting for their freedom. This time around, they’ll be escaping form a different kind of threat. It’s time for everybody to Meet the Wigglenog.
OVERVIEW
The episode begins with Gibson, Otto, and Chiro wearing chest gear and hauling around strange guns while looking for something.
(What are they looking for?)
The others, of course. Nova pops out of nowhere to shoot Otto with her own gun and take him out of the game. Yep, they’re playing laser tag. The game ends after Antauri cheats to take out the rest of Chiro’s team.
(Apparently, they’ve been playing this game for a while, since Antauri’s team has won a total of 346 times. No wonder Chiro’s bored. He wants some excitement!
And that’s when they’re invaded by random gun-toting soldier men.)
Chiro asks all the appropriate questions, such as, “Who are you?” and “What do you want?” and only gets the commander of the squad to say “The question is, ‘What do YOU want, Chiro?’”
(The team evades enemy fire and their toy blasters turn real. They still fight with their powers, because those aren’t broken or anything, so why not?)
After defeating the goons, said goons disappear in puffs of smoke. The leader avoids interrogation by turning into a squirrel. Otto chases after it and Antauri and Nova chase after him. The rest get locked in the room, but escape through a vent.
Otto and the others follow the squirrel, who is chewing wires (Bad squirrel! You don’t know what those do!) and get attacked by its exploding acorns. After tossing them around, the squirrel turns into a window, closes the blinds on itself, and disappears.
(A lot of things disappear in this episode, don’t they? Meanwhile, the boys have reached the Observation Deck and discover they’re trapped in a vast space anomaly. Sparks, however, gets distracted by a mermaid and ends up following it to the main room. This episode is getting weird…)
The mermaid tells him he can have anything he wants as long as he wishes for it before the rest of the team arrives. The mermaid then transforms into the Wigglenog, the most powerful nog in the galaxy.
It is here to grant the team three wishes- well, two since Chiro unknowingly already used their first wish.
The Wigglenog explains the rules of wishing: They can wish for anything except for more wishes and they cannot wish for the Nog to get hurt.
(While they team tries to decide what to do with their wishes, Gibson accidentally wishes that Otto wasn’t ‘such a colossal dunderhead’, causing the green monkey’s brain to grow comically out of his head and making Gibson feel stupid.)
The Wigglenog tries to get to Sparks and Chiro, using their desires against them, only for Antauri to bring them back to reality. The team decide to get rid of the space genie and Sparks breaks the rules by wishing for a giant anti-Wigglenog bazooka. That backfires and the Wigglenog is free to rule the cosmos.
The team attacks, but it doesn’t do a lick of good. Otto ends up deflecting to the Wigglenog’s side and is supersized in order to destroy his ex-teammates in ridiculous ways.
After being granted one free wish to finish the team, Otto wishes that they had never fallen into the space prison in the first place.
(GO OTTO! The Wigglenog is forced to grant the wish, rewinding the entire episode back to the end of the laser tag game. Right before Chiro can wish for something exciting to happen, Otto stops him, saying he has a weird feeling something crazy was about to happen.)
The episode ends with a the Wigglenog in his space prison, yelling and complaining at the Super Robot as it flies away in the opposite direction.
NEW CHARACTER(S):
THE WIGGLENOG (John Kassir): A crossbreed between Genie from Aladdin and Norm from the Fairy Oddparents, this…creature is fast paced, a bit annoying, and fun to watch as he spins circles around the team. He’s not very detailed, but he’s good for what we got.
UNANSWERED QUESTION(S):
- What other Nogs are there?
- Why does the Wigglenog want to rule the universe?
- Who put the Wigglenog in his space prison?
- Does the Wigglenog remember that his plan was reversed entirely or is he mad because he the team was so close to releasing him again?
FINAL OPINIONS:
This episode is a weird sort of filler episode. The animation and humor are fairly decent, as always. But the plot is ridiculous and it ultimately means nothing in the grand scheme of the season. In fact, this episode basically didn’t happen and works in an alternate reality now.
(Stories with genies and magical wish granters are nothing new, especially since most of them have the same sort of wishing rules. But it’s the wish granter that’s usually the interesting part of the episode and the Wigglenog, as entertaining as he is, isn’t fleshed out outside of ‘this episode’s bad guy’, making him the biggest disappointment of the episode.
Other than that, we learn that Antauri cheats at games and we rehash some of Otto’s feelings about being ‘the dumb monkey’. That’s it.
No seriously, that’s it for this episode of Retro-Scrutiny.)
Thank you all for being here today. Its always a pleasure. Tune in next time for more multicolored monkey madness with your favorite duo of Kendall and Alexia.
(Goodnight everybody!)