"Fraggle Rock" Month - Season 2, Episode 8: "All Work and All Play"

Identity has been a major theme so far here in Season Two of "Fraggle Rock".  We've already talked about Boober and Sidebottom.  I will let a more knowledgeable/qualified person discuss the apparently genderfluid nature of the Trash Heap in "The Trash Heap Doesn't Live Here Anymore".  And in the (considerable less heady) episode just previous, "Mokey and the Minstrels", we learned that wanting to be something hard enough doesn't necessarily mean you get to just be that thing you want to be.

And in some respects, today's episode appears to underline that point in red crayon.  It is a hell of a lot more interesting and moving, though.  First of all, this is the very first time we get to enter the hidden world of the Doozers.  Turns out they had a tiny city tucked away within the walls of Fraggle Rock all this time, and we finally get to go inside and meet these little bug-gnome creatures on a more intimate level.  Up until now, the Doozers have always been kind of alien, but this episode sets out to make them more endearing.

I like how Flange from "The Great Radish Famine" is still kind of our emissary into this world; that's great continuity that is!  But the hero of this episode, and in fact the Doozer we will be primarily familiar with for the rest of this series, is his daughter Cotterpin.  As an important side-note, if you've been paying careful attention to this series so far, you'll notice that Cotterpin is our fifth well-rounded female major character in a series full of awesome female major characters and Goddammitsomuch mainstream fiction writers, look at how easy this is!!!

Anyway, Cotterpin is "different".  She's never really been interested in building towers out of radish candy sticks.  Cotterpin, much to the consternation of her parents who are both builders and wish for her to be a builder too, wants to draw in her Sketchbook instead.

Oh, tais-toi, mon coer... 😪

The problem is, building towers out of radish candy sticks is kind of the defining trait of the entire Doozer species.  So Cotterpin decides, instead of going through with Doozer Confirmation, that she'd rather be a Fraggle when she grows up (oh, honey child...)  She has some reason to think this could happen; there is an old Doozer legend where a Doozer who stopped working and started playing all day transformed into a Fraggle.  Now, Cotterpin befriends Red during this misadventure and it is basically the most adorable thing ever.  (Not least because Cotterpin shares a voice/puppeteer with Mokey.  Subtle and awesome, that.)  Red loves to swim.  Doozers are physically incapable of swimming.  And Cotterpin realizes in shame that she'll never be as awesome as Red -- but Red promises there's no reason they can't stay friends.  And excuse me while I turn into a blubbering wreck.

Anyway, Cotterpin returns to the Doozer city in deep shame and has a long talk with an adult Doozer.  And here's where a brilliant episode has its most wonderful moment, since it isn't her father or her mother that she meets upon returning.  It's the Architect, the leader of the Doozers.  And while he has been an authoritative figure towards Cotterpin so far in the episode, here he says that he's realized that he and she have an awful lot in common, and... and...

Aw, damn, here we go again:



I hope you like that .gif; we're going to be seeing it a lot in this series.

Season two, it turns out, has many episodes that further the overarching plot of the series, notably "A Friend in Need" and "A Cave of One's Own".  This one, by far, is the best of them all. 

"Fraggle Rock" Month - Season 2, Episode 5: "Uncle Matt Comes Home"

You guys are ready to see No-Face again, right?  Cause this is another episode that blindsided me.



We wish our friends "bon voyage" and see them off on their long journey, hoping they will experience fun and excitement -- and secretly expecting them to stay essentially the same when they come back to us.  And on the other side of things, that voyaging friend kind of expects life back home to be in a kind of stasis until they return.  It's fascinating because this is all kind of a ridiculous assumption, and we should know that it's ridiculous, right?  Time marches on!  The cruel, inevitable march of entropy spares no living thing.  Yet it's always a huge shock, whether we are the returning person or the expectant relatives back at home, to see just how much has changed.

This episode nails that feeling beautifully, and let's talk about it before I start bleating "Landslide" at you.  Uncle Traveling Matt, as advertised in the title, has come to visit Fraggle Rock after exploring the human world for, let's say, about a year.  When he left, Gobo was much less mature (indeed, he even looked younger thanks to some early installment weirdness regarding his character design.)  Matt still treats his nephew as a naive little kid, a well-meaning but misguided older relatives often do.  And honestly, it's heartbreaking to see (the reprise of "Every Mornin'" is a hell of an "I'm not crying, YOU'RE crying" moment.)

Uncle and Nephew eventually reconcile, but it takes surviving a rough journey and some intervention from Wembly before they come to an agreement.  At the end, the feeling is more bittersweet than anything, but at least the two explorers of Fraggle Rock have come to respect each-other.

"Fraggle Rock" Month - Season 1, Episode 21: "Gobo's Discovery"

All joking aside, "Gobo's Discovery" blindsided me.  I remembered this one as the episode where Gobo gets all emo and there's an invisible monster or something.  I did not recall the reason for Gobo's angst, and while there is an effectively scary invisible monster, the real invisible monster here is all in our hero's head.

Gobo, as I have already mentioned, is our de-facto leader and an explorer.  In this episode, we learn that he never really called any of this into question, but a particularly terrifying visit to Doc's workshop got him thinking.  And he realizes that he never asked for this life; it was kind of thrust upon him by his uncle.  There's a long path of risky decisions and shattered childhood dreams stretching behind him and a lifetime of danger and fear in front of him.  All of this causes Gobo to suffer what can only be called the Fraggle equivalent of a mid-life crisis, and he spends most of the episode moping in bed.

That's some heavy stuff for a kids' show isn't it?  I don't think this is the kind of problem you're going to see tackled in "Super Why".  This is where "Fraggle Rock" is at this point in the series.  No subject is off-limits.  This is the kids' show that isn't afraid to go there.

The other Fraggles are desperate to get Gobo out of his depression.  And mind you, that's before the invisible monster (the one who is not inside our hero's head) attacks the Rock.  At that point everyone is clamoring for Gobo to get off his fuzzy butt and help drive the beast back into its lair.

The conclusion to this episode is kind of fascinating.  As an explorer, Gobo has developed skills that none of the other Fraggles have.  He really is the only one who can save everyone from the monster because he knows where it came from and how to trap it.  And he learns that even if exploring isn't what he's always wanted to do, at this point it's what he's meant to do.  So, kids, even though you may grow up and not be where you dreamed you'd be as a child, other people are going to be counting on you, so it's almost kind of selfish to mope all day that you grew up to be an accountant instead of a rock star.  Again, that's pretty heavy and unexpected, but it's another big step in humanizing (or Fragglizing?) Gobo. 

Next week, we'll start in on season two - and I'll be writing the reviews right after watching the episodes this time instead of all at once.

"Fraggle Rock" Month - Season 1, Episode 19: "The Great Radish Famine"

So before we get into the big ideas in this episode (about which, in the good old bad old days of the Internet, essays were written.  Long ones), let's talk about world building.

There are, generally speaking, two approaches you can take with creating a setting.  You can do what most shows do and focus on the story and just make stuff up along as you go, making sure you keep everything moderately consistent -- or not.  Or you can do what the writers of "Fraggle Rock" apparently did: invent an entire imaginary world from the ground up and then play in the giant sandbox. 

That's kind of amazing.  I can't think of another children's program that sinks so much energy in creating a consistent fantastical ecosystem.  "Great Radish Famine" is the first episode that spells out explicitly the fact that we've been exploring a completely realized interconnected world.

There's a damn good reason why they spent so much time on this world, and you can think of this episode as the "Fraggle Rock" writers' thesis statement.

Up until now, we've been primarily concerned with Fraggles.  We have only very briefly visited the Gorg World, and the Doozer World.  Both Gorgs and Doozers have been presented to us from the Fraggles' point of view as mildly interesting (or dangerous in the Gorgs' case) Others.

This episode marks our first extensive visit to the Gorg and Doozer worlds.  In particular, this is the first time Doozers become actual people to us viewers.  Up until now they had about ten lines of dialogue in total and were basically fantasy Mound Termites -- if Mound Termites were adorable little bug-people who build their giant nests out of piles of candy.  They'd be developed even more in later episodes, as would the Gorgs (we'll get to them tomorrow).

The key concept in this series is that all three of these species are intelligent, noble, profound, and dependent on each-other in some way or other -- and each one thinks that they have nothing in common with the other two.  And the brilliant thing is that, in point of fact, Fraggles are very different from Doozers who are in turn very different from Gorgs.  This episode throws them all into a crisis with apocalyptic stakes and if they're ever going to survive it, they need to at least acknowledge they each depend on the other while having to deal with their differences.  (Note how parts of this episode illustrate the sheer difference in scale between the three worlds!)

The very greatest scene in this episode happens in the last few minutes.  We get one of the most genuinely sweet songs of the entire show in a scene that honestly gets me every damn time.  And immediately afterwards, we see a hilarious and surprisingly cynical dip into (dare I say?) political satire.

And here's the wonderful part.  After all that, we get some reassurance from a voice of authority character that even though that last scene looked bad, very bad, things are going to be alright.  This was the big turning point because the various worlds are now at least aware of each-other.  They know they have at least one thing in common, and it set the stage for more crossovers between the three -but really, four- worlds.

"Fraggle Rock" Month - Season 1, Episode 17: "Marooned"

Well first, here's the succinct version of my reaction to "Marooned":



Okay.  This episode's gonna make you cry.  A lot.  (If it doesn't I want nothing to do with you.)  Let's try to discuss it without breaking down again.

One of the main reasons why I have such nostalgia for Jim Henson's productions where so many other shows I watched as a child are forgotten is this: the Muppeteers weren't shy about making their young audience feel ways about stuff.  The Muppets could go to some pretty unexpectedly sad places as discussed here, and there were moments in "The Muppet Show" that blindsided and haunted me both as a child and as an adult with their open poignancy.  It certainly helps that, above all things, the Muppets are sincere.  "They are vain and hopeful, selfish and generous, complicated and true," wrote Roger Ebert in his review of "The Muppet Movie", and this quote has stuck with me forever because it is dead on, "They mirror ourselves, except that they're a little nicer."

So what we have here in "Marooned", which many "Fraggle Rock" fans agree may be the best episode of the first season and perhaps the finest episode of the entire series, is essentially a bottle episode (of the Trapped in a Freezer subtype).  And it is a character development episode, as so many bottle episodes are.  And, again, like many bottle episodes do, the two characters being developed here are two characters who haven't had much to do with each-other and don't seem at first glance to have anything in common.

But Great Gorg is this one effective.  And for me the reason is this: the two characters trapped by a cave-in here are Red and Boober.  At this point in the series, we don't know much about either character.  Boober serves as kind of a foil to the other Fraggles; while other Fraggles don't seem to worry about anything, Boober worries about everything.  The only thing he seems to have a grip on is laundry; it's the thing he's in charge of, so it's the only thing he feels he has control of in his life.  And as for Red... well, I'll discuss her in more detail in a future episode review.  But right now, we know that she's a very active wild child who has some insecurities carefully buried deep inside.

In short, we have two characters here who, I just realized here, kind of personify two very different reactions to anxiety.  You can either let it control your life, or bury it deep within you to save face -- but also make it all the more intense when it does break out.  When Red and Boober find this common ground, it's incredibly moving.  The song they sing together during this moment is haunting.  People, this is up there with "Feed the Kitty", the "Married Life" sequence in "Up", the "Souls don't die" scene in "Iron Giant", and the flower scene in "Brave Little Toaster" in terms of, "You can gauge whether you raised your kids right based on their reaction to this."

(I'd be remiss if I did not mention that this episode also has one of the most downright adorable Doc and Sprocket B-plots.)