"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Shows of the Year 2014

(Photo source: Reddit)

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's time to look back at the biggest standouts of the episodes I discussed in 2014 (in chronological order). "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS. "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week" returns some time in January.

Rick and Morty, "Meeseeks and Destroy" (from January 24, 2014)

"Meeseeks and Destroy" is a great turning point for Rick and Morty. It's where several of the regular characters evolve from being cartoon characters--and mere chess pawns in the writers' crazy and increasingly imaginative plots--to human beings with wants, desires, genuine sadness and occasional compassion, much like the characters on Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon's Community.

We learn that Beth (Sarah Chalke) is having regrets about her marriage to Jerry (Chris Parnell)--being pregnant with Summer (Spencer Grammer) at a young age, while putting herself through veterinarian school, was the main reason why she wedded Jerry--and she's beginning to feel stifled by her suburban existence. As for Morty (co-creator Justin Roiland), he's getting tired of being led around by Rick (also Roiland) through such dangerous adventures on other worlds. After some persuasion from Morty and agreeing to a bet with him, the cynical grandpa, who continually warns Morty that the universe is crazy and chaotic, lets his grandson be in charge of an adventure that's closer to his perception of adventure as simple and fun (somewhere on a Jack and the Beanstalk-like planet where medieval villagers are being subjugated by giants from a much more modernized section of the planet). That is until Morty realizes the hard way that Rick is right about the darkness and dangerousness of the universe, and his notion of adventure as simple and fun is destroyed in that unsettling scene every Rick and Morty viewer has been talking about on the Internet this week.

Yes, about that scene: Since episode one, Rick and Morty has been upfront about being dark-humored and adult, but never have I expected the show to go to such a dark place like it does when Morty is nearly raped by Mr. Jellybean, an anthropomorphic and seemingly benign jellybean, in the bathroom of a tavern inside a stairway on the giants' land. Nothing alters the mood of a comedy like sexual assault, and fortunately, unlike too many other adult animated shows, "Meeseeks and Destroy" doesn't play Morty's moments of terror and subsequent trauma for laughs.

"Edith's 50th Birthday," the infamous All in the Family episode where Edith escapes an attempted rape in her own home, was lauded for its treatment of sexual assault (and the late Jean Stapleton totally owned the episode), but it has also dated badly. That All in the Family episode was made at a time when all comedy on TV contained studio audience laughter or canned laughter, so you get these annoying and strange studio audience giggles during the serial rapist's attempted attack and the scenes where Edith is wracked with PTSD (I don't care for the TV version of M*A*S*H, partly because of the canned laughter, but I always liked how the M*A*S*H producers, who opposed the CBS execs' insistence on a laugh track, refused to add laughter during the surgery scenes). You wonder if maybe All in the Family would have been better off taping "Edith's 50th Birthday" without the studio audience due to the seriousness of its subject matter, but then without that live audience, you wouldn't have gotten that classic moment where the audience cheers and goes crazy when Edith smashes a burning cake into the rapist's face and escapes. The stupid laugh track is a common thing you have to put up with when rewatching all those terrible and awkward '70s and '80s Very Special Episodes (VSEs) All in the Family is responsible for unleashing. It served as a cushion of comfort for '70s and '80s viewers, reassuring them that this is a light comedy first and a drama second. There's no such audio of laughter to be found in "Meeseeks and Destroy," which is why I find it to be more effective about the horror of almost being sexually assaulted than "Edith's 50th Birthday."

The bathroom incident introduces a compassionate side of Rick, whose treatment of Morty has bordered on abusive, ever since he insisted to Morty in the premiere episode that he smuggle extraterrestrial plant seeds inside his butt as if he were a drug mule. Despite moments like that, we know Rick cares a bit for his grandson because he'd willingly blow up civilization if doing so would get Morty to score with the girl he's crushing on. That great moment where Rick sees Mr. Jellybean stumble out of the bathroom in bruises created by Morty, silently puts two and two together and gives Mr. Jellybean a steely-eyed stare is further proof that Rick cares for Morty, as is his hilarious final act in the medieval village immediately after he and Morty find out the identity of the villagers' king. Fuck with Rick's family, and you're eradicated from the universe, no matter what social standing you are.

I'm making it sound like the near-rape scene brings "Meeseeks and Destroy" to a screeching VSE halt. Fortunately, "Meeseeks and Destroy" doesn't awkwardly turn into a VSE after the incident or end with Rick and Morty breaking the fourth wall to give the number of a counseling hotline like so many VSEs would do (although it does end with Rick breaking the fourth wall, not for PSA reasons but to put a button on an intentionally lame one-liner with what he mistakenly thinks is an old Arsenio catchphrase). It just treats the near-rape like the unsettling and horrible thing it is, doesn't try to preach about the horribleness of it and moves on. It's a grown-up and sophisticated way of handling such a subject, compared to how the VSEs would poorly stitch together their serious subjects with bits of comic relief or reassuring messages.

And I haven't even talked yet about the brilliance of the B-story. The B-stories on Rick and Morty have gotten increasingly ingenious, ever since the superintelligent dogs' conquest of Earth in "Lawnmower Dog." To keep Beth, Jerry and Summer from constantly turning to him for solving their problems, Rick presents them with a Meeseeks box, which, when its button is pressed, summons a Meeseeks ("I'm Mr. Meeseeks! Look at me!"), a jolly, genie-like blue creature whose purpose in life is to solve someone else's problem, and it's their only purpose because the Meeseekses wink out of existence immediately after accomplishing their tasks. Summer's Meeseeks helps her to become the most popular girl in school, while Beth's Meeseeks helps her to become a more perfect and pretty woman, as we see in an amusing restaurant scene where, over lunch, he drops some motivational advice to Beth as if he were every single magical gay BFF in every crappy rom-com. But when relentlessly mediocre Jerry asks his Meeseeks to help him take two strokes off his golf swing, Jerry fails to fix his swing, which keeps the Meeseeks in existence longer than he expected and causes him to push the button to summon another Meeseeks to help him help Jerry. When neither of them can help Jerry, they call on more and more Meeseekses to appear until all the Meeseekses go insane and agree that the only way they can disappear is to kill Jerry.

"Existence is pain to a Meeseeks, Jerry, and we will do anything to alleviate that pain!," shouts one of the Meeseekses while holding hostage at gunpoint the customers and waiters at a restaurant where Jerry and Beth are dining. Jerry has had a rough last few episodes, from seeing his mom make out with her new and much younger lover at Christmas dinner--while his dad's bizarrely okay with it--to having what he thinks is the best sex he's ever had with Beth when he unknowingly bangs an inanimate digital clone of her. So seeing Jerry rise to the occasion for once during the hostage situation--instead of the advice of a Meeseeks, a boost of confidence from Beth is what helps him to finally perfect his swing and send all the Meeseekses away--is a nice break from his spiral of patheticness.

Jerry's triumph is also a nice break from the dark examples throughout "Meeseeks and Destroy" of why the universe is, in Rick's words, a crazy and chaotic place. Yet another dark example pops up in the post-credits tag when the village chooses to sweep Mr. Jellybean's pedophilia under the rug, which is both comedically pathetic and, as we've seen from headlines like Joe Paterno's decision to keep quiet about Jerry Sandusky, sadly all too common in this crazy and chaotic universe. The tag is one of several dark touches that have elevated Rick and Morty from a solid Adult Swim show to one of the 2013-14 season's best new comedies, live-action or animated.

Memorable quotes:
* "Hey Rick, you got some kind of hand-shaped device that can open this mayonnaise jar?"

* Attorney: "Your Honor, I'm from a tiny person's advocacy group, and I have here in my hand a motion to dismiss! These little men were never read their giant rights and are therefore, free fi to fo home." Rick: "What the hell is he talking about?" Attorney: "They're free to go is what I meant. I-I'm deconstructing o-our thing we say. For giants. Nobody got that? Whatever."

* "I can't take it anymore! I just want to die!" "We all want to die! We're Meeseeks!" "Why did you even rope me into this?" "'Cause he roped me into this!" "Well, him over there, he roped me into this!" "Well, he roped me into this!"

* "Jerry, maybe it's time I take that trip I always talk about." "Where would you go?" "I don't know, man. Italy, Greece, Argentina..." Jerry, doing a half-assed Carnac impression: "Countries known for their sexually aggressive men."

* "Wait. Destroy it. Our people will get more from the idea he represented than from the jellybean he actually was."

***

Rick and Morty, "Rick Potion #9" (from January 31, 2014)

The recently renewed Rick and Morty started out as Justin Roiland's profane riff on the friendship between Doc Brown and Marty McFly in the Back to the Future movies (and now stage musical?!--why?!). With the addition of Dan Harmon to Roiland's vision, it's morphed into a dark--and unmistakably Adult Swim--take on the well-traveled heroes of both The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which Harmon grew up reading, and Doctor Who, which Harmon references on Community in the form of the fictional show Inspector Spacetime (even composer Ryan Elder's Rick and Morty theme tune is sort of a takeoff on Murray Gold's updated arrangement of the old Doctor Who theme during modern Doctor Who's first three seasons).

Modern Doctor Who has sometimes attempted to explore what happens when the Doctor winds up making things worse rather than making them better (like what Russell T. Davies did with the 10th Doctor during the classic bottle episode "Midnight"), but on Rick and Morty, Harmon wants to go a step further and see what it's like when you strip away the whimsy, the heroism, the ultra-competence, the pacifism and all the other comforting things that make the Doctor such a beloved part of the family-friendly half of British TV. For instance, what if Ford Prefect--who was basically a Douglas Adams clone of the Doctor--was responsible for the destruction of Earth instead of the aliens who blew it up to make way for a "hyperspace bypass" that's under construction? Or what if the Doctor was a total sociopath and instead of saving lives and trying to avoid violence as much as possible, he didn't mind resorting to murder, which is how Rick handled an alien who attempted to molest his grandson last week in "Meeseeks and Destroy"?

This week, in "Rick Potion #9," which is credited solely to Roiland, Rick and Morty does an inspired--and thanks to all the David Cronenbergian body horror imagery, delightfully grotesque--spin on "What if the Doctor's scientific expertise kept ruining everything and plunged Earth into an apocalypse?" I love how the apocalypse is the result of an experimental love potion that was lying around Rick's lab like some unread indie comic I bought at APE in Sucka Free about a half a decade ago but have never gotten around to flipping through and is gathering more dust than a "Which racial terms are not allowed to be said on the air?" manual at the offices of Fox News.

Morty uses the potion to get Jessica, the classmate whose breasteses he dreamt about caressing in the pilot, to fall for him at their school's Flu Season Dance. But of course, the potion, which Rick warns Morty not to use on her if she has the flu, goes wrong when it's combined with Jessica's flu microbes and it ends up infecting everyone else at the dance. So in addition to both female and male classmates wanting Morty's body, all the faculty members become infatuated with Morty as well. Soon the rest of the world follows suit, except for Morty's loved ones, who are immune to the effects of Rick's potion because Rick's not much of a fan of incest, whether it takes place inside Morty's math teacher's pervy dream world or at 9pm on Sundays on HBO.

Each of Rick's attempts to undo the potion's effects results in the rest of Earth's population experiencing different stages of mutations, one more horrible than the next. Rick's Cronenberging of the world gets so bad that he starts referring to all the mutated humans as "Cronenbergs." Only when the world's in complete shambles does a loser like Morty's dad Jerry get his chance to step up and take charge, and while he and his wife Beth's transformations into trigger-happy, post-apocalyptic action heroes are full of badass lines delivered with Ash from Evil Dead II-style aplomb by Chris Parnell and Sarah Chalke, it feels a little repetitive coming right after Jerry's victory with his revamped golf swing in "Meeseeks and Destroy."

"Rick Potion #9" was actually the first episode (after the pilot) that Harmon, Roiland and the other voice actors worked on, but Harmon and Roiland pushed it back to halfway through the first season because they felt it made more sense to air it at this later point. So while the change in air order results in a character who was previously established as an eternal fuck-up turning into a winner two episodes in a row, the decision to delay "Rick Potion #9" also makes the episode's downbeat final scene--soundtracked to the funereal strains of Mazzy Star's "Look on Down from the Bridge," a song that was also used on The Sopranos--much more powerful.

Rick's ultimate solution to all his previous mistakes is the kind of deus ex machina I don't think I've ever seen before in sci-fi, and it's another example of how brilliantly plotted Rick and Morty has been each week. With his portal gun, Rick simply abandons the monster-infested Earth he's inadvertently created and takes Morty with him to an alternate--and completely identical--Earth where they can start anew and replace that Earth's Rick and Morty, who died in a lab experiment without either Beth, Jerry or Summer to see them perish. Rick uses his portal technology to pinpoint the exact moment when their alternate counterparts died so that he and Morty can immediately bury their counterparts' corpses and take over their identities without Beth, Jerry and Summer noticing.

The act of burying his own horribly mangled corpse in the soil does such a number on Morty's psyche that all Morty can do afterward is sit silently in a shocked daze, not to mention the fact that he's surrounded by a family that looks and behaves exactly like the one he's spent all his life with (alt-Beth and alt-Jerry argue just like Beth and Jerry do; alt-Summer is glued to her phone just like Summer), but it isn't the same one he's spent all his life with. Meanwhile, Rick, with booze in hand, of course, nonchalantly eases his way into this alt-Earth as if he's done it a million times before. In one of the most memorable lines in GoldenEye, the Sean Bean character attempts to cut 007 down to size by telling him that he knocks back martinis to silence the screams of the men he's killed. I wouldn't be surprised if the booze similarly helps Rick to dull the remorse that Morty is now feeling and that I imagine a younger Rick must have felt too when he first encountered crazy situations like this.

This eerie and dramatic conclusion to a comedically chaotic episode would have felt heavy-handed had Adult Swim aired "Rick Potion #9" right after the pilot. But reshuffling the episode order--so that "Rick Potion #9" takes place after the Inception-esque mind-fuckery in both "Lawnmower Dog" and "M. Night Shyam-Aliens!," Morty's disgust over killing his loved ones' demonically possessed alternate reality clones and his near-brush with sexual assault inside that men's room--makes Morty's concluding expression of both despair and exhaustion resonate more. Because Rick and Morty isn't a serialized comedy, I wouldn't be surprised if the show never addresses the change in universes again and presses on as if nothing drastic happened. But that look of despair raises a bunch of questions about the rest of the season. Is Morty starting to wish for a life away from Rick? Does Rick even care about the destruction he leaves behind wherever he goes? Could he be an even bigger monster than the Cronenbergs he created back in the old universe?

By its second season, The Venture Bros. grew from being a Jonny Quest parody to something much richer. With the one-two punch of "Meeseeks and Destroy" and now "Rick Potion #9," Rick and Morty is already showing signs of doing the same thing: outgrowing its Doctor Who parody trappings to become its own animal, a lot more ferocious--and frequently funnier--than the classic that inspired it.

Memorable quotes:
* "The Flu Season Dance is about awareness, not celebration. You don't bring dead babies to Passover."

* "We interrupt Pregnant Baby with breaking news!"

* When Morty accuses Rick of being way more irresponsible than him, Rick's dismissal of love potions as being nothing more than roofies is so damn terrific: "All I wanted you to do was hand me a screwdriver, Morty. You're the one who wanted to me... wanted me to... buckle down and make you up a... roofie juice serum so you could roofie that poor girl at your school. I mean, w-w-w-w-w-a-are you kidding me, Morty? You're gonna try to take the high road on this one? Y-y-you're a little creep, Morty. Y-y-you're-you're just a little creepy creep person."

* And now, some pre-makeout banter that would never be uttered on Doctor Who: "I wish that shotgun was my penis." "If it were, you could call me Ernest Hemingway." "I don't get it, and I don't need to."

***

Space Dandy, "Plants Are Living Things Too, Baby" (from March 7, 2014)

In the preview for this week's Space Dandy episode that followed last week's episode, Dr. Gel (Unshou Ishizuka), the gorilla scientist from the Gogol Empire who's obsessed with capturing the titular alien hunter, complained off-screen about having to die at the end of every story and wasn't too thrilled to learn from his assistant Bea (Kosuke Hatakeyama) that he wouldn't appear at all in the next one. During "Plants Are Living Things Too, Baby," I didn't miss Dr. Gel at all.

Easily the most visually stunning Space Dandy episode so far, "Plants Are Living Things Too, Baby" proves once again that where Space Dandy excels is not in its slapstick or its running gags like Dr. Gel's incompetence as a villain (Dandy never notices his presence, and if the parallel universes theory regarding Space Dandy's self-contained continuity each week is true, neither do Dandy's parallel counterparts). The blundering villain who's continually unable to catch or kill the person he hates the most is a gag that's been done before, and with much funnier and cleverer results in shows like The Venture Bros. Where Space Dandy excels the most is in its willingness to experiment each week, either story-wise or visually, like general director Shinichiro Watanabe's previous shows Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo often did. As I've said before, Space Dandy has the feel of an anthology, with the only constant being Dandy, QT the robot, Meow and their ship, and with a different animator taking a stab at directing each week (not to mention a different artist being assigned to design each alien world that's visited by the Aloha Oe crew).

Those of the show's haters who wrote off Space Dandy right after its premiere (because of either the fan service during the Boobies breastaurant scene or the mostly forced attempts at humor in that first episode) are missing out on some intriguing excursions into different sci-fi subgenres, whether it's the space race genre a la Redline or zombie comedy. They're also missing out on some just plain good short story writing, like in last week's uneven but enjoyable "The Lonely Pooch Planet, Baby"--which came up with a nifty explanation for the whereabouts of Laika, the ill-fated dog inside Sputnik 2 during its 1957 orbit around Earth--and in this week's episode, the first one Watanabe has written since the premiere.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Space Dandy, "Never-ending Dandy, Baby"

This is the 100th edition of "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week" (formerly known as "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner"), in which I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

I can't believe it's taken me until "Never-ending Dandy, Baby," the final episode of Space Dandy, to finally notice that the first Japanese lyric in the opening theme "Viva Namida"--"Doko kara kita ka nante wakaranai hodo no hibi de" ("These days, I don't know where I've come from")--ties in to Dandy's lack of knowledge about his origins. Although "Never-ending Dandy, Baby" doesn't explain where Dandy came from--his past remains a mystery, and thankfully, in this way-too-origin-story-obsessed age of entertainment, the series finale doesn't care that it remains that way--it does conclude Space Dandy's run on a spectacularly animated and entertaining note that's most fitting for an anthology-like show that, like I said last week, has captured the adventurous and exploratory spirit of both The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the original Star Trek. In "Never-ending Dandy, Baby," Space Dandy even finally shouts the original Trek out in an eyecatch where the show's title is displayed in the classic Trek typeface.

In a nice bit of role reversal, Dandy, who was about to be captured by the Gogol Empire when Space Dandy last left him, is the damsel in distress for most of the episode, and Scarlet and Honey, the characters who would usually be the damsel in distress in a story like this, are instead given the task of rescuing him together with Meow and QT by their side. The Gogol Empire has always wanted control of Dandy because the abundance of pyonium, "the God particle," in his body will give them immense power over space and time, much like how the evil corporation on Orphan Black wants to maintain control of the bodies of Sarah and her sister clones for commodity reasons (and misogynist reasons as well).

Dandy is a pawn in a battle between the Jaicro Empire, led by Johnny (Hiroshi Kamiya), the wanna-be rock star who temporarily shirked his duties as a soldier and a spy to join Dandy's short-lived rock band in "Rock 'n' Roll Dandy, Baby," and the Gogol Empire. The latter gets caught in an inner power struggle of its own, between Dr. Gel and a double-crossing Bea, whose loyalty to Dr. Gel turns out to have been an act, and Bea's actually been attempting to have Dandy all to himself so that he can gain control of the various universes on his own.

Although the space battle imagery is spectacularly visualized by the BONES Inc. animators, and the Hawaii Yankee, the Aloha Oe shuttlecraft that can transform into a Hawaiian shirt-wearing mecha, makes one last crowd-pleasing, fan service-y appearance, the battle for all existence is the least interesting part of the finale. Where "Never-ending Dandy, Baby" starts to really distinguish itself as a Shinichiro Watanabe series finale is all the material after Dandy chooses to steer Dr. Gel's Statue of Liberty ship on his own (the Aloha Oe is too badly damaged) and right into the maelstrom created by the Super Hulkider, the Gogol Empire's ultimate weapon, in order to use the pyonium in his body to overpower the Super Hulkider and save all existence. In the finale's only emotional moment, Dandy takes one last look at his four friends on the ship's monitor as he attempts to withstand the rigors of the maelstrom and pilots himself to his own likely demise (but because this is a comedy first and foremost--and because Dandy has never exactly been Alan Alda in space--he sneaks a peek at Honey's thong). He proceeds to unleash on the Super Hulkider the full power of his pyonium, but he winds up wiping out all existence.

Then a certain narrator who's been a part of almost every Space Dandy episode and has been the most Douglas Adams-esque element of the show summons Dandy and presents him with a huge offer. The narrator reveals that he was God all along, which means that when the narrator turned into a zombie at the end of "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby," an early episode that remains the show's funniest half-hour, not even God was immune to becoming a zombie, which may just be the nuttiest thing this show has ever accomplished. Try to beat that, American Horror Story.

As a reward for sacrificing himself to attempt to save all existence, even though he didn't exactly save it, God offers Dandy the chance to replace him as God and be in charge of a bunch of newborn universes when the current ones cease to exist. But when Dandy learns becoming God doesn't allow him to touch any kind of matter, particularly breasteses, he rejects the offer. Dandy basically tells God to fuck off, without exactly saying so. He'd rather be a free spirit than an authority figure tied down to obligations like overseeing the universes, so the option he non-verbally chooses instead is to return to the Aloha Oe, at a point in time that resembles his normal state at the start of the series, with no Meow on the ship (heh, Meow got screwed over again), with just QT in tow and with a course heading for Boobies the restaurant.

That point in time reveals that what has taken place is the longest non-Futurama time jump in recent TV history, longer than either the five-year time jump on Young Justice: Invasion, True Detective season 1's 10-year time jump from 2002 to 2012 or the 100-year time jump during the end credits of 30 Rock's series finale. The show has skipped ahead to 14.8 billion years (!) after Dandy rejected God's offer, which means the various--as well as now God-less--universes have survived countless attempts by the likes of the Gogol Empire and its descendants to destroy them. It's not specified if Dandy has already experienced a lifetime's worth of adventures after his encounter with God or if Dandy's about to start a whole new cycle of adventures, but the ending confirms two things: Dandy never ages--another clue, along with the lack of DNA, the pyonium in his body and the ability to cross dimensions, that he's some sort of godlike being--and in a sign that Dandy has grown and softened a bit after his heroic deed, his fetish has changed from boobs to a less juvenile fetish for ladies' calves.

Dandy's refusal of godhood is another example of how he's a Captain Kirk type through and through, and that's why the Trek-style eyecatch (which is followed after the commercial break in the finale's Japanese airing by a Star Wars-inspired eyecatch) is a perfect eyecatch for this finale. He's too much of an adventure-seeking spirit, and an authoritative desk job like God's would be too stifling for him. His rebooted life also leaves open the possibility of either an animated feature film version like Watanabe's Cowboy Bebop: The Movie or a series of OVA (original video animation) projects like the direct-to-video Futurama movies and Warner Bros. Animation's direct-to-video DC Universe Animated Original Movies (that's the format I'd prefer to see Space Dandy come back in rather than as a theatrical feature). The "May be continued?" title card after the end credits is basically an invitation for the show's non-Japanese fans (it's more popular outside of Japan than within it) to make enough noise to cause BONES to bring back Space Dandy in some form.

But would a two-hour animated theatrical feature--which, like the Trek movies, would have to be designed to satisfy two different audiences at the same time (the show's fans, the mass audience that's not so familiar with Space Dandy)--be an effective representation of what made Space Dandy enjoyable on the small screen? I don't think it would. What made Space Dandy stand out was its anthology nature and the week-to-week unpredictability of not knowing what to expect from whatever idiosyncratic special guest animator was recruited to direct, and the only way a theatrical feature could capture that essence of Space Dandy would be to do it as an anthology in the style of Batman: Gotham Knight and Robot Carnival, rather than as a straightforward sci-fi actioner that's more in the vein of this action-heavy finale and Cowboy Bebop: The Movie. Otherwise, just like the literal throne that Dandy declined to accept from God, the two-hour format would be too constraining for what Space Dandy is capable of when it's at its best.

Plus I'm satisfied with the 26 episodes we've got, even though some of them didn't always work, particularly the earlier ones that preceded "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby." Twenty-six episodes are the perfect length for marathoning an entire run of an animated show, especially Watanabe shows, and Space Dandy is no exception, although the more self-contained nature of its episodes would have made it better suited for an additional 13 episodes or more after the initial 26 than either Cowboy Bebop or Samurai Champloo were. Bebop and Champloo finished off their 26-episode runs at logical endpoints for Spike Spiegel and the Fuu crew, respectively, while Space Dandy wraps up its run with Dandy and QT off on another adventure, even though it's just another visit to Boobies.

Although the end credits sequence for "Never-ending Dandy, Baby" is neither as moving as the Bebop finale's end credits nor as uplifting as the Champloo finale's end credits, it's my favorite end credits sequence out of all the different ones Space Dandy has done this season. The sequence is nicely soundtracked by the '80s freestyle throwback jam "Space Fun Club" by Japanese rapper Zen-La-Rock (with an artist named Robochuu as the guest feature), a tune that falls under Watanabe's unusual mandate that no piece of music on Space Dandy can contain any instruments that were built after 1984. The "Never-ending Dandy, Baby" end credits are a terrific way for the animators to convey that life goes on in space while Dandy and QT continue living their free-spirited lives off-screen, as the sequence scrolls past nifty glimpses of an outer-space drive-in, a few other similar examples of Futurama-esque architecture and a school of giant space swordfish.

About halfway through Space Dandy's first season, I wondered if the show would emerge as another Watanabe classic. Now that its run is over, I can safely say that after following up first-season high points like "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby" and "Plants Are Living Things Too, Baby" with a bunch of equally distinctive installments like "The Big Fish Is Huge, Baby" and "A World with No Sadness, Baby," yes, Space Dandy can now take its place beside Bebop and Champloo as a Watanabe classic.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: South Park, "Go Fund Yourself," and Space Dandy, "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" (tie)

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

The last time South Park was on the air, Trey Parker and Matt Stone put together perhaps my favorite South Park episode in years, "The Hobbit." Like many latter-day South Park storylines, "The Hobbit" lampooned a reality TV star whose show will no longer be relevant a year after you first watch South Park mock it--in this case, Kim Kardashian--but then the episode concluded on an unusually devastating note and critiqued the pressures placed on girls to fit certain beauty standards, without turning all Diff'rent Strokes preachy on us during its critique. For its 18th-season premiere, "Go Fund Yourself," South Park critiques another issue, and it's been a huge one in the Native American community for over a year now: Dan Snyder's stubborn refusal to change the racist and outdated name of the NFL team he owns, the Washington Redskins, which resulted in Native American groups starting a "Change the Name" movement.

Throw in a bunch of hilarious gags about the evilness of Snyder's fellow NFL team owners and the recent ineptitude of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in how he's handled Ray Rice's domestic violence incident--we have South Park's amazingly fast turnaround to thank for those gags about Goodell--and you've got a solid season premiere that's the cathartic laugh we needed after months of constantly being subjected to appalling examples of how much of an evil organization the NFL is, from the head injury scandals to its hypocrisy regarding women's issues. "Go Fund Yourself," which has Cartman, Stan, Kyle and Kenny launching a startup where they make money doing absolutely nothing, also contains some jabs at the dumbest aspects of Silicon Valley culture. Those aspects are always worthy of a skewering because I'm currently stuck living in Silicon Valley, and I despise all things having to do with Silicon Valley culture. It's nice when latter-day South Park goes after subjects that aren't reality TV for a change.

But what really bolsters "Go Fund Yourself" is all the satirical material about the NFL (Snyder enters the picture when he demands that Cartman and his friends stop calling their startup the Washington Redskins). The episode's portrayal of Goodell as a malfunctioning robot is laugh-out-loud funny and perfect, especially in a week when ESPN punishes Bill Simmons for speaking his mind about Goodell's ineptitude and bizarrely gives the Grantland editor-in-chief a suspension that's longer than the one the annoying Stephen A. Smith received for blaming domestic violence victims for provoking their attackers. ESPN's tongue is so far up the NFL's ass it can report to you on SportsCenter what the NFL had for lunch.

***

There's only one episode of Space Dandy left, and at this late point in the game, all we know about the past of Dandy--this doltish hunter of aliens who knows as much as we do about his origins--is that his body was infused with an enormous amount of a highly coveted element called pyonium (also known as "the God particle," it's the same element that once caused QT to increase in size when Dr. Gel's ship accidentally blasted him with it); he's a middle school dropout; he used to date a female heart-in-a-transparent-box who hails from the fourth dimension; and the pyonium enables him to cross dimensions and remember every single one of them, including dimensions where he died. In "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby," we now find out he has no DNA, which confirms a theory I've had since "A World with No Sadness, Baby": Dandy isn't human, baby.

I think Dandy's either the escaped result of an experiment to construct a person out of pyonium or a god who developed amnesia, much like Will Smith in Hancock. Since then, he's been wandering space without any cash in a clunker of a ship for a long-ass time, barely aware of his special pyonium-related power, which the Gogol Empire wants for its own nefarious purposes. Like I've said before about any theory I've had regarding any mystery on Space Dandy, I could be wrong either way, and we'll see how wrong I'll probably be in the final episode of Space Dandy's way-too-brief run.

In the meantime, "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" is an interesting case of a bottle episode of an animated show that's clearly a bottle episode--BONES Inc. reportedly went all out with the animation for the finale and needed to rush out an episode that's not as expensive--but instead of putting together a clip show like Space Dandy general director Shinichiro Watanabe and Manglobe once did for Samurai Champloo, BONES chose to set most of the episode inside a courtroom to cut costs. The episode actually works despite its downsized scope. For one thing, "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" isn't recycling old material like those superfluous clip shows do. It's 100 percent new material, including the flashbacks to the crime scene where Dandy inadvertently became a murder suspect, and I'll take a courtroom trial with completely original content over a clip show any day. Plus the whodunit that "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" writer Dai Sato came up with is simply diverting and full of what the NBC announcer who used to record all its promos (before Dorian Harewood's current stint as the voice of the network) would intone were "those Law & Order twists."

"Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" is more of an homage to the courtroom drama genre than a parody. For the first half, it's played completely straight to trick us into thinking a sad, remorseful-looking and mute Dandy really did kill an alien named Guy Reginald, a rare Lumetian (his race is named after the late director of 12 Angry Men and The Verdict), right in front of Reginald's hot wife Rose, a waitress at Dandy's favorite hangout Boobies (both Reginald and Rose are named after the writer behind 12 Angry Men, Reginald Rose). Instead of aping the original Law & Order, which I don't think is even popular in Japan (and if it were popular over there, Sato would have been aware that Law & Order never spent as much time in the jury room as "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" does), the episode has more of an Ace Attorney vibe. Ace Attorney is a popular Japanese series of video games where the player gets to be heroic lawyer Phoenix Wright and make legal decisions instead of shooting at zombies or enemy soldiers. I knew all those hours of watching X-Play on G4 despite not being a gamer at all wouldn't go to waste someday.

In the second half of "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby," things get nutty, and the case goes from appearing to be a noirish crime of passion to turning out to be an absurd foofaraw involving a kid who was angry at his best friend for blocking him on Chwitter, Space Dandy's Twitter knockoff; a runaway baseball that contains a massive amount of pyonium like Dandy's body does; Lumetian pro wrestlers' secret identities; and Reginald's sleep apnea, which fooled his wife and the coroners--the dumbest coroners in the galaxy--into thinking Reginald was dead. Dandy is exonerated, and in the episode's best gag, the judges learn why he was being tight-lipped and reserved all through the trial. For a while, I thought the reason why Dandy was immobile was because he skipped the trial to hide from the court and replaced himself with a realistic-looking rubber decoy, but it turns out that he was actually asleep in the courtroom the whole time.

Then things turn serious again in the episode's great cliffhanger ending. Before "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby," Dandy never once got face-to-face with the Gogol Empire--every time Dr. Gel would come close to capturing Dandy, the alien hunter would be unaware of the presence of Dr. Gel's ship and then Gel's ship would immediately get blown up before Gel could get his mitts on Dandy--but now Dandy and the empire finally get to see each other when the empire's troops surround Dandy outside the courthouse. The conclusion of "Dandy's Day in Court, Baby" also marks the first time that the "To be continued" graphic at the end of many Space Dandy episodes isn't a joke.

Whether Dandy turns out to be a god or the God (or neither), I don't want Space Dandy to end because it's shown so much creativity in its brief run. An extra season of a few more special guest animators bringing their idiosyncratic flair to Dandy's universe(s) would have been nice. It's funny how I initially thought Space Dandy was going to be Shinichiro Watanabe's first artistic failure and just another lewd sci-fi comedy. Instead, it's turned into something better and unexpected: an anthology-like show that captures the adventurous and exploratory spirit of both the original Star Trek and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--and more effectively than the last time Star Trek hit the screen. Now that's a feat as impressive as anything pyonium can do.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Space Dandy, "Lovers Are Trendy, Baby"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Kimiko Ueno is a writer to watch. She's responsible for two of Space Dandy's funniest episodes, "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby," a frenetic half-hour that's grown on me since its airing in July, and last season's "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby," a riff on the zombie genre that features the show's most sublime use of its Douglas Adams-style narrator (his matter-of-fact narration is an element of Space Dandy that plays better in subtitled Japanese than in English because matter-of-fact foreign narration, whether it's delivered by a Japanese announcer or a British documentarian, is just funnier, and not for xenophobic reasons).

In "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby," the pulling of "cosmic pubes" caused Dandy, Meow and QT to ping-pong back and forth between other dimensions. In those other realities, they had awkward and often argumentative encounters with their parallel counterparts, who were completely different from all the other much more identical parallel counterparts we saw in previous and subsequent episodes, that is if Space Dandy viewers' theory that each episode takes place in a different reality is a correct one (the counterparts Dandy, Meow and QT met in "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby" more closely resembled the stars of animated shows that are way more popular in Japan than Space Dandy, which has failed to catch on with the Japanese public and is a more popular show over here in America). For instance, in one reality, Meow was a sexy woman in a dance leotard instead of a male cat, while in a much more emo reality, he was a terrifying-looking cyborg with a frozen smile who spoke only in creepy-sounding electronic meows that would constantly drive his morose shipmate Emo Dandy to want to kill himself. And like "Sometimes You Can't Live with Dying, Baby," "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby" made sublime use of the narrator at one point and had him bickering with his parallel counterparts as well.

Ueno also wrote "Rock 'n' Roll Dandy, Baby," a Behind the Music-like rockumentary parody where would-be rocker Dandy spent more time bickering with his bandmate over what to name their band and how their merch should look than actually creating music. "Lovers Are Trendy, Baby"--in which Scarlet (Houko Kuwashima), the prim Alien Registration Center clerk who always rejects the unregisterable creatures that Dandy brings to her, pays the pompadoured alien hunter to pose as her boyfriend in order to ward off her stalker ex-boyfriend Dolph (Kazuya Nakai)--isn't quite as funny as those three previous Ueno episodes, but it reteams Ueno with director Masahiro Mukai, who helmed the chaos of "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby."

Mukai brings much of his visual panache from the cosmic pubes episode to this one as well, especially in any scene involving the machine gun-wielding silver and red mecha from the show's opening titles, which finally makes an appearance here and turns out to be piloted by Dolph. Because this is a sci-fi comedy show full of spaceships and giant mechs, instead of stalking Scarlet in a tourist disguise or in a Spider-Man costume, Dolph spies on her from the cockpit of his floating mecha, the winner of the least conspicuous stalker vehicle of the year.

You keep expecting Mukai to stage a battle between Dolph's mecha and Dandy's Hawaii Yankee, a Hawaiian shirt-wearing mecha that's been absent this season, but they never get to the fireworks factory, and "Lovers Are Trendy, Baby" is the lesser for it. However, "Lovers Are Trendy, Baby" scores points for getting a man and a woman who's constantly repulsed by him to bond over the film and TV work of Chuck Norris, action genre veteran, famously wooden actor, ubiquitous Internet meme and right-wing nutjob.

For most of the episode, Dandy and Scarlet have nothing in common, and Dandy is constantly at his worst behavior during their pretend dates on the romantic getaway planet known as Trendy. He spits game at some other hottie in the middle of his beach date with Scarlet, which sends her unleashing her fury at him, while my favorite running gag has Scarlet frequently apologizing to little kids for Dandy snatching their belongings from them and making them cry.

But then Dandy unearths Scarlet's DVD copy of Missing in Action from the mess he's made of her house after he tries to protect her from a man-faced spider straight out of John Carpenter's The Thing (if that house is a vacation rental, I can't wait to see the discussion she'll have with the constantly broke Dandy over how to cover the damages), and their adoration of the Missing in Action star begins to bring them closer together and raises the possibility that this fake couple could turn into a real one. Dandy and Scarlet also out themselves as fans of the short-lived Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos, an actual kids' cartoon and one of many inspirations for Adult Swim's upcoming '80s cartoon spoof Mike Tyson Mysteries, which will star the voices of Mike Tyson and Norm Macdonald.



For some reason, I'm having flashbacks to Chris Rock's old "Terry Armstrong" bit about athletes who always refer to themselves in the third person. Chuck Norris' intro for Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos makes Chuck Norris' show look like a fake Chuck Norris cartoon from Robert Smigel, but it's not a Smigel TV Funhouse segment about the Chuck Norris-ness of Chuck Norris. Karate Kommandos was an actual half-hour piece of shit from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! creators Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, whose Ruby-Spears studio also produced the inexplicable Rambo cartoon, which was a 30-minute commercial for a Rambo action figure line, and the occasional TV Funhouse target Mister T, which starred the A-Team scene-stealer as the coach of a multiracial team of mystery-solving gymnast kids (Mister T makes the Brady Kids Saturday morning cartoon look like Shakespeare).

If Dandy and Scarlet bonded over the much more revered Bruce Lee, whom Spike Spiegel idolized and emulated during Space Dandy general director Shinichiro Watanabe's more serious Cowboy Bebop (and is far less problematic to Asian Americans as a martial arts hero than his white Way of the Dragon nemesis), it wouldn't be as amusing. Because Dandy the bumbling lout and Scarlet the lonely office drone are kitschy Watanabe characters, as opposed to badass Watanabe characters like Spike and his femme fatale love interest Julia (although Scarlet has a badass side that she expresses in her Jeet Kune Do skills), it makes more comedic sense for Scarlet and Dandy, who's delusional about his prowess with the ladies, to idolize the similarly delusional Norris than to idolize Bruce. The star of both Karate Kommandos and the frequently ridiculed Walker, Texas Ranger was under the delusion that America would take seriously his warning that re-electing President Obama would bring about "1,000 years of darkness." (Dandy's also delusional about being an intergalactic celebrity, just like how Peter Quill thinks "Star-Lord" is a name everyone in space is familiar with during Guardians of the Galaxy. Junichi Suwabe, the Chris Parnell-esque voice of Dandy in Japan, is great at portraying this delusional and self-absorbed side of Dandy, so it's fitting that Suwabe was chosen to dub for Chris Pratt in the Japanese release of Guardians that's opening over there tomorrow.)

The references to a real-life obscure cartoon instead of a made-up one with a dumb-sounding and unconvincing fake title are a nice touch in Ueno's script, as are Scarlet's evident fetish for '80s action stars (it's not surprising that one of her exes is a blond jerk named after Dolph Lundgren) and the episode's open ending, which was clearly influenced by Watanabe's love of ambiguity. For anybody in the audience who might be a shipper of Dandy and Scarlet (and I keep coming back to this, but God, the word--and very concept of--"shippers" make me wish they never existed), the ending is pure torture, but for the rest of us, it's one of many reasons why Watanabe, whose work has proven that he's as far from the dark ages of Ruby-Spears as one can get, makes several of the best animated shows to come out of Japan.

According to Space Dandy's alien alphabet, the logo on Scarlet's bikini says "Elle."

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Space Dandy, "A World with No Sadness, Baby"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Vox posted an intriguing and controversial profile this week about Sopranos creator David Chase that's key to understanding "A World with No Sadness, Baby," the occasionally confusing but visually sumptuous Space Dandy episode that takes place on a mysterious planet of the dead and is one of the few Space Dandy episodes written by general director Shinichiro Watanabe. The part of the lengthy Chase profile that everyone on the Internet is most interested in--other than for click-baity, traffic-generating reasons--is Chase's latest reply to "Is Tony dead?," the question that's nagged Sopranos fans since "Made in America," The Sopranos' divisive, open-ended final episode, wrapped up the mob drama's run seven years ago, to the tune of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'."

Chase's laconic answer was "No, he isn't." But after the publication of the article, he immediately retracted his answer. "To continue to search for this answer is fruitless. The final scene of The Sopranos raises a spiritual question that has no right or wrong answer," wrote Chase's publicist in a statement to the press. Whether or not Tony got whacked in the diner always mattered to Chase the least (I never gave a shit about whether or not Tony got whacked either, just like how I don't give a shit about the overly giddy, "look, Tony died in that restaurant because look at all the clues in the restaurant and look at that line about how you don't see it coming when you're whacked!" camp). Chase blurted out "No" to the Vox interviewer, not to reassure the Sopranos fans who cared only about the most lurid moments of The Sopranos, like who got killed this week or who Tony is banging this season, but simply because he's tired of being asked that question (they're the kind of fans who want everything to be spoon-fed to them--I wouldn't be surprised if they moved on from The Sopranos to more subtle fare like Jersey Shore and Keeping Up with the Kardashians--and they've failed to grasp the ambiguity that Chase emulated from European cinema, which is why Chase has contempt for them).

What clearly matters more to Chase than "Which characters will live and which ones will die?" are the fallacy of the American dream that Chase's hardware store owner father bought into, the emptiness of post-WWII prosperity and the search for enlightenment (Chase is an agnostic who became alienated by the Catholicism of so many Italian families like his own; he believes that enlightenment is found not in God but in art, whether it's an Antonioni movie or Parisian ruins). They're themes that permeated not just The Sopranos but also Chase's lukewarmly received debut as a film director, 2012's Not Fade Away, and even--and this isn't mentioned in the Vox profile--the episodes Chase wrote earlier in his career for The Rockford Files, particularly "Quickie Nirvana," the 1977 Rockford episode where Chase expressed skeptical opinions about both cults and organized religion that make you say, "Wow, how the fuck did NBC allow much of this to air?" As The Sopranos' run wore on, Chase became more interested in those profound themes of artifice and enlightenment and much less interested in the mob soap opera stuff (this is why all the Sopranos clones that emerged on network TV due to The Sopranos' popularity sucked so much: they only cared about who lived and who died, and those shows' creators and their network bosses didn't understand that the scenes of Tony or Carmela in therapy and the conflict between Tony and his cantankerous mother Livia were what made The Sopranos unique and popular, not the violence).

Where this Vox piece on Chase ties in to Space Dandy--and this is the moment that fascinates me way more than "Is Tony dead?"--is Chase's statement that "I'm not a religious person at all, but I'm very convinced that this is not it. That there's something else. What it is, I don't know. Other universes. Other alternate realities." Chase's fascination with alternate realities explains not just the unusual 2006 Sopranos episode "Join the Club" (where a comatose Tony dreams of an alternate life as a salesman with no ties to the Mafia and no Jersey accent, so "Join the Club" offers glimpses of how the late James Gandolfini sounded in real life, without that accent), but Watanabe's similar fascination with alternate realities in Space Dandy episodes like "A World with No Sadness, Baby" as well.

Like Chase, who's a fan of the ambiguity of Antonioni movies like Blow-Up, Watanabe traffics in ambiguity, and it's part of why Watanabe's work fascinates me more than the work of other Japanese animators. Cowboy Bebop opened and closed with a badly wounded Spike Spiegel at the brink of death, and Watanabe said he left it up to the viewer to decide if Spike really did die when he collapsed to the ground at the end of the Bebop finale. "A World with No Sadness, Baby" is more conclusive about Dandy than either Spike's collapse or Tony's last scene in the Sopranos finale: Dandy's clearly dead from the first moment we see him marooned on Planet Limbo after a dangerous encounter with a "dark nebula" (by the way, the visuals of the planet of the dead that were crafted by BONES Inc. and guest director Yasuhiro Nakura are extraordinary; we're talking feature film-quality visuals here, and they're given pitch-perfect musical accompaniment by guest composers Ogre You Asshole, a Japanese rock band that counts Johnny Marr as one of its fans).

We also learn from Poe (Kaori Nazuka), the entity who's fallen in love with Dandy and is the physical manifestation of both Limbo the planet and Limbo the plane of existence, that Dandy is a much more powerful being than he realizes, and that power of his has something to do with his parallel selves. The absent-from-this-episode Dr. Gel and the Gogol Empire's relentless pursuit of this unlikely "chosen one"--a vain idiot who's a dick to his shipmates on the Aloha Oe and cares only about "food and boobs" (he's basically an overgrown teen)--makes more sense now.

Where "A World with No Sadness, Baby" gets ambiguous and open-ended is the final scene of Dandy back on Limbo, the reason for a bunch of "What happened to Dandy after his time on Limbo ended?" comments and theories on Reddit and other forums. Here's how I interpreted the moment: what we're seeing is a flash-forward to the very last scene of the entire series, at a point in time after Dandy's actual final death, as well as long after Dandy--or one of his parallel selves--was accidentally whisked off to the distant future at the end of "A Race in Space Is Dangerous, Baby." Dandy's returned to Limbo, but at a point in time before the planet used up all its energy and ended up destroying itself to send Dandy back (but as a comatose Dandy) to the Aloha Oe to save Meow and QT from the dark nebula. He's there to reunite with Poe and the rest of the friends he made on Limbo and then take them along with him to heaven. So it's basically the second-to-last scene of the Lost series finale, but without the hugginess and hokey, New Agey sentimentality.

I might be wrong about the final scene--and we have a few more episodes to go before I'm probably proven wrong--but it implies that Space Dandy will be headed towards a more profound direction for the remainder of its run. It's a good thing I read the Vox piece on Chase after watching "A World with No Sadness, Baby" because Chase's alternate realities discussion helped clear up the confusion I initially had about both the final scene and Dandy's reappearance on a planet that ceased to exist. The scene seems to be hinting that the show's closing arc will be the redemption of Dandy the asshole, as Space Dandy starts to delve more into Dandy's parallel counterparts and perhaps will show how Dandy's inevitable reunion with his other selves mirrors his growth as a person, like how the Sopranos characters' discussions about "What's the purpose?" echoed Chase's preoccupation with "this is not it."

The "redemption of an asshole" arc is kind of a tired one. But I like how Watanabe handles the arc in "A World with No Sadness, Baby" in his typically open-ended way, by fracturing the time frame and leaving all the moments of Dandy's maturation from vain idiot to selfless person (who, if I'm not mistaken, will end up saving the universe from the Gogol Empire) off-screen. Watanabe's basically done a series finale before the final episode has even aired. It's a ballsy move. (The odd placement of that final scene on Limbo has also made me realize that Tony's subconscious yearning for an uncomplicated alternate life in "Join the Club" is more of a conclusion to The Sopranos than the actual final episode itself. Tony's scenes as Kevin Finnerty of Kingman, Arizona could be interpreted as a visit to the future heaven of his choosing, that is if he ever stops being an evil bastard after the events of "Made in America.")

"A World with No Sadness, Baby" is an interesting turning point in Space Dandy's run--and at such a late point in the run too. Thanks to the questions of life and death pondered by Dandy and the Limbo inhabitants in "A World with No Sadness, Baby," this slapstick animated sitcom about an alien-hunting idiot who hops from planet to planet and dimension to dimension without ever really experiencing any growth as a person has proven naysayers like the Gray Lady wrong (care to take back those words about the show being nothing but cringe-making fan service, Gray Lady?) and suddenly turned into something more meaningful. It's like when The Sopranos quickly proved to be more than just the "Look, it's Analyze This on a weekly basis!" gimmick that was emphasized in HBO's misleadingly lighthearted, Get Shorty-inspired first-season promos and emerged as something richer and more complicated: a darkly comic and often brutal exploration of seeking enlightenment and realizing the fallacy of the American dream.

I was prepared to hate "A World with No Sadness, Baby"--the episode preview's images of an unkempt Dandy in longer hair that's more fitting for Emo Dandy from "I Can't Be the Only One, Baby" had me worried that the episode was going to be an overly dour one--but for an installment centered on the heavy subject matter of mortality, "A World with No Sadness, Baby" is surprisingly not-so-dour. The show's sense of humor remains intact, like when a pack of what I assume to be grief counselors confers with a depressed bar patron ("Keeping death at a distance and not thinking about it--that is like averting your eyes from death")--but they do so completely in song--or when Dandy responds to Poe's admission of love for him with "Well, I'm so handsome you probably couldn't help it." "A World with No Sadness, Baby" is more entertaining and satisfying than any episode about a sentient planet/plane of existence that falls in love with a lead character who's just died (and wants to be alive again) has any right to be. Space Dandy never fails to surprise. "Don't stop believing," indeed.

Stray observations:
* I'm fond of the '50s War of the Worlds ship-style creature design for the Limbo inhabitants who ended up destroying most of their homeworld through warfare.

* I'm also fond of how the magazine Dandy and Meow are ogling during the preview for next week's episode, "We're All Fools, So Let's All Dance, Baby," is a mag full of spreads featuring '70s and '80s Japanese swimsuit model Agnes Lum.