The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance episode 7

Episode 7: Time to Make... My Move

Obligatory Plot Summary: The Dousan Gelfling Rek'yr drops Rian's group off within sight (distant sight) of the Circle of the Suns, a distant mesa jutting up from the Crystal Sea. Rian's group has to outrace a sandstorm to reach it, and only survive because stone golem Lore carries them up the steep cliff walls. At the top, they find the Heretic and Wanderer, a Skeksis and Mystic, living together. They're both absolutely bonkers, and through an equally bonkers puppet show, explain how they're two halves of the same being and were exiled for suggesting Skeksis and Mystics should get along and work together to figure out a way to rejoin into a single being. The Heretic reveals that he created Lore, and removes the magical crystal, reverting the golem to an inert pile of boulders. The pair inform Rian that to defeat the Skeksis, he needs to retrieve the Dual Gglaive, a magical sword hidden in the Caves of Grot. Speaking of the Caves of Grot, the Skeksis Emperor promises the Arathim Ascendancy (giant hive-mind spiders referred to as Spitters) they can return to their ancestral home in the Caves of Grot if they defeat the Stonewood clan's Gelfling army. The Spitters promise to do more than that. Elsewhere, Hunter (remember him?) captures Rek'yr and his crew, demanding to know where Rian is. Rek'yr resists the torture, but one of his crew panics and tells Hunter that Rian is at the Circle of the Suns. At Stone-in-the-Wood, Aughra shows up to try and talk Maudra Fara out of a frontal assault on the Skeksis. Fara rejects Aughra's counsel, and the next thing we know, Princess Tavra (captured by the Skeksis several episodes back) shows up, wrapped in a cloak. She throws open the cloak and hundreds of tiny Spitters swarm the Gelfling army, latching onto the sides of their faces and mind-controlling them. Completely overwhelmed, the zombie Gelfling army marches off to the Skeksis dungeons. Back at the Circle of the Suns, Hunter shows up abruptly and kicks everyone's ass. Hup brandishes his spoon and charges Hunter, who declares the Podling "cute" before flinging him with bone-crunching force against a distant wall. At the last moment, Archer, the Mystic counterpart to Hunter, shows up and peppers the Skeksis with arrows. Gravely wounded, Hunter grabs Princess Brea and flees.

Musings: There's a lot to unpack here. More plot is crammed into this episode than almost the rest of the episodes combined. The return of Hunter is welcomed, as things always pick up when he's around, as long as he's a puppet and not CGI. Archer shooting him, and apparently shooting to kill, or at least severely wound, was a striking sequence even if expected. Archer, of course, suffered every wound he inflicted on Hunter, and if the Skeksis dies, so does the Mystic. Speaking of, the origin story the Heretic and Wanderer share is not the one from the movie. In the original film, the alien urSkeks cracked the Crystal of Truth in a misguided attempt to rid themselves of evil elements in their nature. In this telling, they were doing nothing of the sort, but rather experimenting on the Crystal itself when things went blooey. That's... significant, to say the least. In light of that, the urSkeks, and Skeksis and Mystics after them, are very much a metaphor for invasive species, which can arrive and utterly disrupt an ecosystem causing the extinction of many species. And disrupt they do--in promising the Caves of Grot to the Arathim, the Emperor intends for the Spitters to destroy the Grottan tribe, then subsequently die themselves as the Darkening--the corruption spreading out from the Crystal--has taken root in the Caves of Grot and are tainting all life there. And while I'm on the subject of Grottans, Deet's casual mention that she has two fathers serves the simultaneous purpose of conveying that homosexuality is an unremarkable reality on Thra, whilst simultaneously causing the heads of "Think of the children!" bigots to explode worldwide. The things I really didn't like about this episode were 1) Gelflings didn't create any of the magic that Princess Brea discovered in and around the throne room. Lore, and everything else, was planted there by the Heretic, 2) the introduction of the magical weapon that can save the good guys from the unstoppable evil. I mean, even the name, "Dual Glaive" evokes memories of the similarly-named Glaive from the 1980s fantasy movie Krull. As it came out not long after the original Dark Crystal I'm certain the name isn't a coincidence. So next episode we're going to get a quest for the Grail... or whatever. What started out as a clever, funny and inventive episode fell back into serious fantasy cliche territory very, very hard. This series continues its bipolar tendencies, as it goes from soaring heights to deep, deep pits of drek at the drop of a hat. I would sincerely appreciate some consistency.

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