The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance episode 10

Episode 10: A Single Piece Was Lost

Obligatory Plot Summary: An explosion shakes Stone-in-the-Wood, startling Rian. Deet, it turns out, is making smoke bombs that are mostly harmless but she hopes they'll confuse and distract the Skeksis. There's another almost-romantic moment between Deet and Rian, but Deet's eyes glow, reminding the viewer that's she's got the corrupting Darkening inside of her. Various Gelfling groups begin arriving at Stone-in-the-Wood to face off against the coming Skeksis attack. Back at the Castle of the Crystal, the Chamberlain reneges on his promise to free the Gruenacks. The Gruenacks, realizing they'll never be freed, find and pocket an Arathim stinger (at least, that's what I think it is) from the Scientist's lab. The Emperor goes to the pit where the Darkening is, and draws is into his staff to use as a weapon. As the Skeksis march off to war, the Scientist is left behind. Angry at not getting a chance to win glory, the Scientist plays a game of make-believe, pretending he's the Emperor and terrorizing the Podling slaves. About this time Hunter wakes up from being mostly dead. After the Podlings flee in terror, Hunter derides the Scientist as a coward and races off to join the battle. The Gruenacks cut their bindings and rebel against the Scientist. The fight is jarringly brutal, with the Scientist throwing one into the Crystal pit and bludgeoning the other to death. At Stone-in-the-Wood, Rian challenges the Emperor to single combat. The General fights in the Emperor's place, and after briefly overwheming Rian with his superior size and strength, the General finds himself on the receiving end with nimble Rian manages to stab him with the Dual Glaive. The General's life force flows into the Glaive. The General's about to die, when Rian declares out of the blue, "I am no killer" and spared the General. War then breaks out. The female Gelflings fly in, dropping smoke bombs (which don't smoke all that much but make big explosions). The Skeksis' battle armor, however, has knife and axe catapults built into it, and Maudra Fara takes a fatal wound after pushing Seladon out of the way. Fara's fizgig wails in despair. Away from the battle, the Chamberlain finds the wounded General hiding. The General asks his friend for help, but the Chamberlain kills him instead, saying "You took my seat on the council." About this time, Hunter shows up, grabs Rian and destroys the Dual Glaive with his bare hands. About this time, on the other side of Thra at the Circle of the Suns, Archer revives, says "The hunt must end" and throws himself off the cliff to his death below, simultaneously ending Hunter's life as well. As Hunter dies, Aughra is reborn from his ashes. All the other Gelfling clans arrive then, and the Skeksis, as powerful as they are, have already lost their two strongest warriors and are doomed. The Emperor, however, unleashes the Darkening from his staff like he's impersonating the Emperor from Star Wars. He attacks the Gelflings with the nasty purple stuff, but Deet steps up and says, "I've seen that movie, too. Here's my Yoda impression!" She catches the Darkening Lightning, takes it into herself then throws it back at the Skeksis. The Collector's head explodes in a gooey, gross mess. The Skeksis flee. Gelflings celebrate. They find a single crystal shard in the pommel of the ruined Dual Glaive and realize it's from the cracked Crystal of Truth, and the shard is actually their hope against the Skeksis, not the Glaive. Deet flees Rian and the other Gleflings, the corruption of the Darkening radiating out from her as she runs. Back at the Circle of the Suns, Hup mourns the loss of Archer, but--with neither the Heretic nor the Wanderer to be seen--finds the amulet that controls the stone golem Lore. And at the Castle of the Crystal, the defeated Skeksis arrive in a state of near panic until the Scientist reveals his latest creation--the giant, insectoid Garthin, and undead construct stitched together from Arathim and Gruenack parts. The end.

Musings: Holy hell, this episode pissed me off so much. Not because it's terrible. No, there were parts that were great. But the parts that sucked, ye gods, they sucked so badly they undermined everything that was good. The core problem is that the show lost its nerve. I don't know if it was producer Lisa Henson or director Louis Leterrier or screenwriters Jeffrey Addiss & Will Matthews, but the worst moments came when the show jarringly pulled back from being a serious show about a people facing genocide to being a safe, kid-friendly puppet show. When Rian, abruptly announces his refusal to kill the General, it defied all logic. The Skeksis had slaughtered hundreds of Gelflings, and had boldly announced they would continue to do so. They'd lied. They'd corrupted Gelfling society. They'd betrayed everyone and everything who'd ever trusted them. They killed his father, Ordon, and his lover, Mira. They freaking drained Aughra, essentially the avatar of Thra itself. Rian had challenged the Skeksis to war, then the Emperor to single combat. For him to suddenly decide killing is beneath him is a weird morality lesson that may be okay for comic book super-heroes but not Gelfling when the alternative is genocide and extinction. It. Makes. Zero. Sense. What does he think will happen next? The Skeksis say "My bad" and play nice from here on out? Another example of the Gelflings playing at war but not fighting to survive were the embarrasing "smoke bombs." They neither exploded enough to injure Skeksis nor smoked enough to have any appreciable impact on the battle. After setting up the Gelflings to be in a fight for survival the previous nine episodes--where Seladon has been shown as ready and willing to kill and sacrifice innocent Gelflings just to hang on to her illusion of power--the sudden shift to the idea that Gelflings are kind and gentle and do not kill is utter bullshit. They've shown themselves more than willing to slaughter Arathim, for crying out loud! That's not just bad writing, it's insulting writing. The Skeksis lost three of their number during the battle with the Gelfings, and up to that point had been viewed as godlike and immortal. Instead of celebrating, the Gelflings and their Arathim allies should've swarmed the Emperor and his party and strung them all up, then marched on the Castle of the Crystal, killed the Scientist and his single Garthim, then restored the Crystal. In any sane, logical universe this would've happened. Oh, sure for the sake of continuing the series such an action needs to fail--I understand that. But right now, it's happening because the Gelflings are being idiots, and the narrative only progresses because it's an idiot plot. Also, from a dramatic point of view, bringing Aughra back the episode immediately following her apparent death just diminishes that earlier sacrifice. You've got to sell the death, and make the viewer believe this timeline really is diverging from that of the movie, so when Aughra returns, it's a dramatic, mind-blowing moment. You don't hit the reset button at the end of Infinity War. You hit it to start the finale of Endgame, the payoff to an epic amount of struggle and sacrifice to reach that point. That's a worthy payoff, not Aughra coming back through no action of her's or the Gelflings', but rather a character who's been offstage for 95 percent of this series.

You know, I really like this series in many ways, but I hate it just as passionately because the lazy, bad, poorly-thought-out moments betray those good ones. The plot relies on coincidence and deus ex machina way too much, and for all the creativity and imagination on display, there are equal measures of Hollywood cliche at work as well. I sincerely hope this series gets renewed by Netflix for a second season, but for the love of Pete, I hope they invest as much effort in the scripts as they have in the amazing puppetry on display. The Henson Company is better than this--the showed that much with Farscape back in the day. I'm just ready for them to prove their storytelling chops can match their ability to produce glorious eye candy.

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