Review: Stuart Fails To Save the Universe, "Spoiler: Bert Is Magic" | Season 1, Episode 3
Multiple premises stuffed into a one-premise sack
After extolling the virtues of the 21-minute runtime last week, I am now forced to confront the possibility than an episode can be too short.
“Spoiler: Bert Is Magic” goes by so fast that I almost got whiplash. In 18 minutes we get more special effects than in the entire season so far, two major cameos (each getting their big scene), and four different interior sets by my count. The pacing doesn’t feel frantic, exactly—it’s just compressed, as if interludes or callbacks that might have given us a chance to breathe have been cut out. The two big guest stars don’t seem to belong to the same script idea, as if the creative team had two different “supernatural stuff” concepts that they decided to simultaneously smush together and cut down by two-thirds.
Let’s enumerate all the comic conceits here:
1. Demon Alexa, who is a sort of Ferengi-looking imp in a tracksuit (?) and Jersey accent (??). If this is a riff on Sopranos-style mobsters, there’s no other evidence. Instead, Alexa just asks about their shopping lists while guiding them to the next story point.
