Review: Mythic Quest, "Heaven and Hell" | Season 4, Episode 10

When I started reviewing Mythic Quest this season, I mentioned that I was looking forward to being on a tech-adjacent comedy beat again after covering the entire run of Silicon Valley back in my A.V. Club days. And over the course of this season, I’ve gotten to use a lot of the same critical muscles. It’s another show about a dysfunctional group of people who work together and form makeshift friendships despite not liking each other all that much. It frequently satirizes real-life industry issues like online free speech, streamer culture, development crunch, and the corrosive use of AI. And it’s also a show unafraid to showcase the more unpleasant traits of its characters, as well as how much they’re willing to sacrifice to succeed in a competitive field.

Unfortunately, what’s also come back to me was my most frequent complaint against Silicon Valley: the way both shows, over and over again, contrive to find a way back to their status quo. After season three of Mythic Quest tried and failed to find a new spin on the natural order of things—failing in large part because they couldn’t make a clean enough break between Mythic Quest and Grimpop—they scrambled to get everyone back under one roof. Now after some fits and starts of trying new ideas, by the end of “Heaven and Hell” we’re looking at a full system reboot with only two notable developments. And while one has the potential for some fun office dynamics in a future season, one is so catastrophically misguided that it feels like Mythic Quest is installing its own fatal system error.

It’s most frustrating because season four was a season that started out strong, with some fun developments established within the new office dynamics and arguably the best non-standalone episode Mythic Quest has ever done in “The Villain’s Feast.” Around the time jump of “The Fish And The Whale” things started to go south, and promising plots got derailed or skipped over in favor of some wrong-headed character decisions. While the leap was clearly done to accommodate Charlotte Nicdao’s pregnancy and avoid either obvious bump-blocking or consigning Poppy to video chat only, it feels like the Mythic Quest writers’ room wasn’t able to adjust in real time and had to scramble to keep up. Looking at the season in retrospect, it would have benefitted the season functionally to be longer or shorter, eight episodes to tighten up the story or twelve episodes to give them room to breathe. We’ve had to rely on filling in the gaps with offhand exposition or the magic powers of Elysium, neither one of which has felt satisfying in execution.

On the subject of Elysium, its glowing Megalon-esque powers now include triggering the latest spin of the wheel and bringing all of Mythic Quest’s former employees back into the fold. After “Telephone” I wrote down a list of resigned predictions for the finale, and Brad, Dana, Rachel, and Jo once again working for Mythic Quest was high up on that list. Credit to a fun opening scene to show those interactions—each of them giving David reasons to go back on his decision the longer they talk—but the foregone conclusion of it all hangs over it like a bad smell. Even if you buy it from the practical perspective that David needs people he can count on or at least whose idiosyncrasies mesh with his own (likely the latter given his complaint about meeting vibes last week), it makes all the hemming and hawing about their rejoining in “The Room Where It Happens” and “Telephone” feel like wasted time.

David’s getting the band back together for sound reasons, as all of the twists and turns of the season have caught the attention of their French-Canadian overlords. For the life of Mythic Quest “Montreal” has been a faceless entity with the last word over the shenanigans of our main cast, the adjudicator of the purse strings and the main word on who stays and goes in the Mythic Quest office. Hearing that the mysterious Jacques and Jean-Luc were finally making an appearance in California to weigh in on the future of the company felt like we’re finally getting to see the wizards behind the curtain, and that the team would have to step up its game (no pun intended) to keep their independence. It also felt like where Mythic Quest could pull in some high-caliber guest stars in a season that hasn’t had many of them, give or take a “Cowboy” Cerrone in “Rebrand.”

Disappointingly it doesn’t go that route, as Jacques and Jean-Luc are caught up in interpersonal feuds that make Mythic Quest’s staff seem stable, and their personal assistant Jean-Georges (Andy Lebuhn) takes over and is able to read them for filth from minute one. On the surface he’s playing along with their requests for Elysium, but ultimately he outflanks Jo’s scheme for his job by giving her the one thing she dreads most: a position of authority as the head of Playpen. Here’s something that has real potential for next season—although Jo’s utter commitment to being a personal assistant has been among the more consistent arcs of season four, it’s kept her character one-note. And as good as Jessie Ennis is at playing that note, seeing her in a reluctant leadership role—especially over David—is a sound idea to put her and everyone else out of their depths.

Jo’s promotion is the one surprise as all of the other office subplots feel deflated, played for a couple of laughs and then moved on. Rather than take the money and run, or find some way to turn it around on Anna and have her arrested for corporate espionage as part of their twisted romance, Brad decides not to go through with things and go back to his old role, sending one penny via room service as a final pożegnanie to that relationship. And Carol’s subplot edges towards something surprising with the tease of a Mythic Quest polycule and then pulls the “it was all a dream” card, both denying any solid resolution and underlining that she’s gone from being the office’s lone voice of reason to another one of its hot messes. There’s no real sense of resolution, instead a halfhearted shrug to tie things up before the finish line.

If the supporting cast is steering away from those changes, our main characters are steering into the skid. After the blowup in “The Room Where It Happens” and the subsequent deflate in “Telephone,” going into the finale there’s a bit of exhaustion in terms of how we’re supposed to feel about where Ian and Poppy are leaving their relationship. Poppy’s accepted David’s offer to be sole creative director, and now Ian shows up saying it’s the right thing for both of them to walk away from the company entirely. In a season where both have been trying to make adult decisions, it’s about the most adult one either could possibly make. (As adult as it can be given one of the parties has tape in their hair and a rudimentary understanding of crude hand gestures.)

I’ve said before that despite the repetitive nature of this push-pull relationship, these interactions and moments always work because of how good Rob McElhenney and Charlotte Nicdao are at playing this relationship. That applies here as well: seeing Ian say “It’s just a video game” to convince Poppy she can move on from Elysium is a genuinely devastating moment, given from “Sarian” we know how much video games mean to both of them. And the way their goodbye at the airport is handled is perfectly understated, bidding farewell without major tears or any big speech, just a quiet acknowledgment of everything that’s gotten them to this point. If this was the final beat to a season or even series it’d be an entirely satisfying close, fulfilling the Dark Quiet Death creative prophecy that no partnership in this field lasts forever.

That is until we get to the last scene of the episode, as Ian returns to the Mythic Quest offices to start work on something—apparently either his resignation from last week meant nothing or Mythic Quest really needs better security screenings—and Poppy surprises him with the news that she channeled the Friends series finale and got off the plane. This is an annoying moment to undo a lot of the previous emotional beats I’ve praised, but it’s believable in the moment given how Poppy’s able to read why Ian did what he did and turns around his statement about fixing things that can’t fully be fixed. Once again, if that had been the final beat of the episode it’d make for a solid if somewhat frustrating beat, that this friendship is something where they’re both still willing to put in the work and acknowledge that it is work.

And then, pure catastrophe:

The final beat of the episode and the dumbfounded reaction of horror on both their faces was similar to my own reaction watching it happen, though they didn’t have the multiple outbursts of “No!” to go along with it. I am sure that there are some Ian/Poppy shippers out there in the Mythic Quest fandom who were rewarded by this, but I’ve never been one of them—if anything I’ve been impressed by the series’ dedication to focusing on a toxic platonic friendship. (Not to mention enjoying the constant revolted responses both of them have had whenever the prospect of them being together comes up, which have never had any energy of being that they doth protest too much.) For them to go here feels like nothing less than a complete betrayal of everything the show’s creative team has said in interviews over the years about not going this route, and given the characters involved it’s genuinely uncomfortable to witness.

There’s only two likely solutions to this from a narrative standpoint, neither one of which bodes well for the course of season five. Either the writing staff backpedals rapidly on this development and restores them to friendship, in which case this comes across as a clichéd move made solely to establish a cliffhanger ending. Or they try to explore the idea of Ian and Poppy in a romantic relationship, which even if we leave out those feelings of betrayal sounds like the formula for a lot of unpleasant episodes given how much evidence we’ve seen about how co-dependent and destructive Ian and Poppy’s friendship can be. (And that’s not even getting into the brewing Storm of Poppy not following through on her plans to emigrate, or bringing a baby into this relationship with reams of evidence about how Ian is incapable of being a parental figure.)

The cynic in me also sees this cliffhanger as an attempt to force a renewal from Apple TV+, given that Mythic Quest hasn’t been renewed at the time of writing. If so, it’s a poor time to bluff, given recent reports that Apple is losing over a billion dollars a year on the streaming service, and a backfire of a bluff given it’s turned a Mythic Quest defender like me into a profound skeptic on its ability to keep telling its story. I still want to see it come back, as for all its faults it’s still a show full of funny people on both sides of the camera, but at this point it seems no amount of patching is going to address the bugs.

UPDATE 04.18: If they were trying to force a renewal with their cliffhanger, it was a strategy that didn’t work, as Apple announced that Mythic Quest was cancelled and the season finale turned into a series finale. However, in a surprising move, they added the announcement that “Heaven and Hell” would have a chance to update itself to a proper finale. As someone who was deeply annoyed by the choices made in the first version, I was hopeful it would leave things on a better note and provide some closure to the loose ends provided.

As it stands though, I’m still annoyed but in different ways. The only substantive change made is chopping off the kiss entirely, putting Ian and Poppy right back in their creative groove and swapping workstations. It’s a good move because it removes the icky idea of any kind of romance between Ian and Poppy and allows viewers to retcon the finale as ending the way the series always projected itself to be, a platonic creative partnership. Yet it also shows that the writers were never serious about this as a development for the show, either as a bluff to get renewal or creating a problem they’d have to write themselves out of. And there’s also no potential flash-forwards added to tie up any of the additional narratives: nothing about how Jo managed being the head of Playpen, nothing about Dana and Rachel’s wedding, no birth of Poppy’s child. It’s very underwhelming to watch given how Megan Ganz, David Hornsby, and Rob McElhenney were hyping the end as “goodbye, instead of just game over.”

But for a show that had so many issues with its long-form storytelling in its latter half, it’s an oddly appropriate way for Mythic Quest to wrap up. Too many shows get the axe and end on unintentional cliffhangers, souring their legacy with questions that we’ll never get answers to. And if there’s still some stuff left on the table, it’s all in a neutral enough zone that we can feel all right about where we are. (Or to quote Marge Simpson, “It’s an ending, that’s enough.”) Mythic Quest was never a perfect show, but always one that a lot of things working in its favor, and by correcting its great folly at the last moment it at least allows me to look back on the whole with more fondness than I had a couple of weeks ago.

Stray observations

• It’s a less grievous complaint than the Ian/Poppy developments, but one of the most upsetting developments this season was how they’ve borderline ruined Dana as a character. Coming off so well at the start of the season with her Playpen position of power and her machinations in “The Villain’s Feast,” Mythic Quest completely abandoned her declared war on Yara and made her embittered and self-entitled without the legwork to get her there. “Heaven and Hell” marks her second declaration of being the greatest game developer of her generation, something that Mythic Quest has done a poor job showing any evidence of one way or another, and said with so little self-awareness it’s making Rachel (cowed by her crash-and-burn in front of Congress) seem like the reasonable one in the relationship.

• I did like the detail of Anna’s Playpennies malware flash drive being styled as a gold bar.

• If we do get to season five, can we get a standalone episode on Jacques and Jean-Luc’s family drama? That sounds like a gold mine. (UPDATE: We won’t.)

• Carol’s Netflix/Merlot nights are mostly focused on Korean dramas like Extraordinary Attorney Woo. (“She is misunderstood. As am I.”) Were this a real show I would strongly petition Myles to add it to our regular coverage.1

• No moment has demanded a GIF more than Poppy flapping her wrists together to simulate sex. Ian: “How did you ever conceive?!”

• Brad’s excitement on Elysium’s potential profits: “We’ll be like Catholic priests in a souped-up ice cream truck that can do 200 mph and outrun the cops!” (David: “I wouldn’t say that. In fact, don’t say that.”)

• “It is my greatest desire and my darkest wish. It’s also been my nights and weekends.”

• “Do any of these people speak French?” “They barely speak English.”

• “Are you having the baby? Because I just got the car washed.”

• Poppy on getting off the plane: “So I had to pretend to go into labor so they would turn the fucker around… I am definitely on some sort of a list now.” Ian: “You are on every list!”

• Ian perfectly explains my reviewing process: “I was gonna type something and then figure it out.”

• Thanks everyone for joining me for these reviews! While this season of Mythic Quest ultimately failed to be the rebound I was hoping for, it was a lot of fun to go on this “insightful bummer” of a journey and talk through it with you in the comments. See you in a couple days to talk Side Quest and see if we can end things on a higher note.