Review: Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, "Spoiler: Zack's in this One" | Season 1, Episode 2

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I’ve long subscribed to the theory that absolute freedom is one of the worst things that can happen to a creative person. Constraints enable creativity—that’s my mantra. Sometimes the constraints are imposed upon you by the medium or available resources (“a musical has just two acts!” as they sing in Something Rotten). Sometimes they are self-imposed, as in Dogme 95 or other manifesto-driven artistic movements. Either way, it is thinking within the box that sparks interesting problem-solving.

When streaming first mounted its challenge to network television, many people touted its freedom from the rigid formats imposed by the broadcast clock. Your story can be as long as it needs to be! No more commercial breaks dictating the act structure! Maybe some of those people have learned by now, as surely the readers of Episodic Medium well know, that the net effect on creativity of this structural freedom was not good. Bloated runtimes, dribbled-out stories, whole eight-episode seasons that should have been 90 minute movies. When there’s no time cap or season calendar forcing you to make hard decisions, many creative people (and executives, let’s be clear) just didn’t make those decisions at all.

I fully expect that “Spoiler: Bert Is Magic” will be one of the best episodes of the series, and just about everything that makes it good comes down to its 21-minute length. Let’s talk about how that works.

The premise is fully understood by the characters by the end of the cold open. I have a special hatred for protagonists who just refuse to get it. Maybe it’s more realistic about how someone would react if dropped into an alternate reality where the rules are different, but I bitterly resent every minute of the genre-standard confused yelling, holding heads in hands, refusing to believe the evidence of their eyes, requiring exposition by natives, etc. Here, in a tidy scene leading on directly from where we ended episode 1, Kyle and Trevor demonstrate uncharacteristic civility, our heroes notice that the comics have changed (titles include Superman and Luthor: Best Buddies and Richie Rich: Effective Altruist), Kripke and Stuart get zapped after arguing, and Bert finds the button on the back of his neck (“That’s not supposed to be there”). Fly in a title sequence, and then we get right to it, and by it, I mean find out what it’s like to live in this “classic authoritarian dystopia with a dollop of mind control surveillance,” as Bert puts it.