Review: Taskmaster, "Cube is Good" | Series 21, Episode 1

Welcome back to our coverage of Taskmaster, which returns for a 21st series on YouTube here in the U.S. and features "so famous" Kumail Nanjiani. As always, this first review is free, but subsequent reviews are exclusively for paid subscribers. To keep reading and join the conversation, click below.

It’s time for Taskmaster series 21, and we’ve got five new contestants: Amy Gledhill, Armando Iannucci, Joanna Page, Joel Dommett, and Kumail Nanjiani. I am obviously already rooting for Nanjiani, but I’m pretty excited about this entire cohort. And I have very high expectations for creative swearing from Iannucci (watch The Thick of It if you haven’t).

I love the first couple episodes of a new Taskmaster season, when it’s anybody’s game — even if there’s a couple familiar personas already, like Iannucci playing the part of the grumpy old man. I hesitate to call Joanna Page’s absolute giddiness a persona, because it seems both authentic and essential to who she is as a human being, but I can’t wait for it to annoy and/or delight the shit out of Little Alex Horne (and probably Iannucci, her teammate).

Prize task

• Our first prize task is the thing most likely to deter people from your premises, and this is one of the strongest starts to any new Taskmaster season. We’ve got not one but two utterly creepy life-sized… dolls?, several signs, and a dried-up umbilical cord.
• Gledhill’s Mrs. Clatterbottom, a terrifying and perfectly named creature that will surely frighten thieves off for generations, deservedly wins all five points.

• I wonder if Nanjiani’s Department of Homeland Security sign would have hit harder in the States; his quip that the sign was fake because he is “trying to stay away from where the real signs are” was solid.

The first task

• The real first task is simple enough: Find a worm. I had a bad feeling every time the camera cut to Patatas the cat plushie, a feeling that paid off when Nanjiani pulled a worm out of her butt.
• One never knows how Davies will respond to “lateral thinking” like Iannucci claiming to be a bookworm; I’m glad he accepted it, but I was also a little disappointed there wasn’t more pushback on whether mealworms are real worms.
• A very enthusiastic and eager Dommett handily wins this task by racing to the kitchen and procuring a gummy worm in a mere 21.8 seconds.

It’s a bold decision to kick off the season with a prank task, with the beleaguered Joel Dommett being told to hide a Greg Davies-stamped egg on his person, and I hope it’s a sign that this season won’t be business as usual. One has to imagine that by the time he got to the studio, Dommett had a Pavlovian response to LAH’s egg timer air horn (?), and I hope at some point we get to see the making of the egg-shaped shell that protects the actual egg (which I also have some questions about). I also hope he does not keep it in his pants during all the studio episodes. You’re wearing a jacket, my man! Use the inner pockets!

The second task

• The first team task pairs Nanjiani, Dommett, and Gledhill for our team of three, and Iannucci and Page for our team of two. Dommett and Gledhill giggling over their American teammate, “He’s so famous,” was made funnier in the studio when Davies accused them of acting like a couple of Take That fans — an early ’90s boy band that never made much of an impression Stateside. [Editor's note: You can watch a whole documentary about them on Netflix, now, though!]
• Iannucci thinking for a moment that they might have to form an acrostic with the food offerings: “EBOLA!”

The task itself involved making offerings of plastic foods to a giant Greg Davies statue. The team of three eventually figures out something about syllables and word lengths, offering Davies’ likeness foods in order of shortest word to longest. The team of two … doesn’t exactly figure this out, but they get there in the end. I did wonder if there was something more to it, or if there were multiple correct ways.

The third task

• This task was fun mostly because of the cannon itself, and everybody exclaiming WHOA and WOW when they shot their first T-shirts. It would have been even more fun if there’d been more opportunity for lateral thinking, but at least several of the contestants realized that they didn’t have to stay behind a line. I also enjoyed the ease with which Page caught the golden T-shirt with one hand.
• Gledhill, on trying to get a wet T-shirt over an already highly T-shirted LAH: “It’s like putting a condom on a sausage.”

The third task is to put the most T-shirts on Little Alex Horne. There’s a typically convoluted set of rules involving a T-shirt cannon, colored circles and bulls’-eyes, a golden T-shirt, and a bucket of water.

The final task

• My notes for this task say, “Find four oranges. If you find an apple, you miss your next go … so many more rules.” Fortunately it lands, and it’s a lot of fun, with the contestants swearing at rubber ducks named Debbie and cheering each other on as they looked for the oranges.
• I want to know how long this lasted in the studio — because it seemed like quite a long time, but you could hear the crowd yelling and getting into it, so one imagines that it was just as riveting as it was in the final cut.
• Page wins, and it’s a moment of glory, with everybody (nearly) matching her joy. She also wins the first episode of the season with 22 points; Nanjiani comes in last.

Stray observations

• I’m thrilled to be back here doing mini recaps of Taskmaster for the third season. This week got a little hairy for me, but going forward, you can look for these reviews on Fridays.
• I really love the mix of energy in this season’s cohort. I legitimately thought Dommett was going to start crying when LAH and Davies threatened him with zero points for taking care of an egg for six months. Page’s excited babbling in the very first prize task prompted Davies to say that he’s “going to have to come up with some rules” for her, which I hope he delivers on, if only to see her bulldoze over them. Nanjiani’s dry humor is going to be a helluva match for LAH’s, as evidenced by Nanjiani’s “Oh, then who’s your favorite Laker?” quip.
• Based on this episode, who do you want to win?