We start with a poorly acted recreation of the end of 'The Quick and The Fed' performed by binomes on the set of a TV show. This turns out to be a program called 'True Stories of Mainframe' that a very bored and depressed Enzo is watching at Dot's Diner on Mike the TV (who is clearly taking a break from his duties of taking care of Hexadecimal). Dot enters the diner and asks Enzo why he doesn’t play outside instead of watching Mike the TV all day, to which he responds that he has no friends and Bob's currently in a game. He continues to rant about how Dot doesn’t let him go into games anymore after the events of Bad Bob, and that he bets Bob is having a great time in the game.
Meanwhile, in the game we see, that isn’t the case. Bob is frustrated that one of his fellow pilots has set the planet to detonate, and they only have ten seconds to escape before detonation. Luckily, they manage to escape in time, ending the game. Bob enters the Diner with the binome pilots from the game, Captain Quirk and Jean Luc. He rants at them for their reckless actions in the game, and Dot gives him the suggestion of hosting a lecture on games. The conversation then switches back to Enzo, and Bob mentions that Enzo hasn’t got any friends since most the sprites were deleted when Mainframe's Twin City was destroyed. This upsets Dot a little, since the mention of the Twin City reminds her of her father, so Bob tries to console her by saying it wasn’t her father's fault, and the experiment just got out of control. Bob and Dot go over to Enzo in an attempt to cheer him up. This doesn’t go too well, as Enzo blames his father for him not having any friends, claiming that he’d have some friends if his dad hadn’t deleted most the sprites before storming out of the diner.
At the Principle Office, Bob is giving his lecture on games. This scene is a parody of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Arc where Indiana Jones is giving a lecture at his university, complete with a binome in the audience having 'love you' written on their eyelids. As well as catching any new viewers up to speed on how games work, it also serves the purpose of explaining the role of game sprites and their varying types. There’s aggressive types that attack the User, defensive types that block the User in their tracks, chaotic types that attack anything that comes their way, passive types that provide information about the game, and a new type; Artificial Intelligence sprites who have the ability to learn from the User and become better opponents. Following the lecture, Dot and Phong speak to Bob about Enzo's problem. This conversation ends up getting cut short by the announcement of an incoming game, which it turns out is headed for the Diner, where Enzo currently is.
All the patrons rush out of the diner asides from Enzo in spite of Cecil's insistence that he leaves. Bob and Dot head over to the Diner, hoping to find Enzo within the game before he gets into any danger. The Game cube lands and we see that this is an aquatic themed game. Enzo is swimming in the water and ReBoots into a sailor with an eyepatch. He’s also provided with a submarine to pilot. Meanwhile, Bob and Dot ReBoot into merpeople. We hear Bob thinking that Dot looks amazing, but Dot hears this as well since their characters in the game are telepathic. Bob uses Glitch to find details about the game, and they learn the objective is to beat the User to the lost treasure of Atlantis. After learning of their abilities within the game, they head off to find the User.
We then cut to the User, who in this game takes the form of a shark shaped submarine. Peering out from behind a rock is a young mermaid who appears to be around Enzo's age. She takes a starfish out of her hair and uses it as a sort of boomerang to attack the User. This proves somewhat effective as it pierces the hull, but the User then turns round and begins firing out her, knocking her out cold. Just before she can be hit with torpedos, she gets scooped up by Enzo's submarine, which then hides in a small hole within a rock.
Bob and Dot catch up to the User, and Dot takes him out with a pirana mine. This is a short lived victory since it doesn’t end the game. Instead, the User respawns. Bob finds out from Glitch that this is due to the User having multiple lives, 15 to be exact. Cutting back to Enzo, we see him watching over the mermaid he just rescued, hoping that she’s okay. She springs to life soon after, extruding claws from her nails and prepares to attack Enzo. However, she becomes more peaceful and friendly after Enzo remarks how cool the nails are. She tells him that they paralyse, and Enzo tells her that all he got when he ReBooted was an eyepatch. She asks him who he is, and he tells her that he’s a Guardian. She responds by telling him her name, AndrAIa, but before she can tell Enzo what she is, he tells her that he’s never seen her around Mainframe and that she has a nice name. AndrAIa takes herself off to the cockpit of the submarine, telling Enzo that she can hear something and that he should turn around.
Meanwhile, Bob and Dot are slowly taking out the User's multiple lives, but they have quite a few left to take out, and they’re currently on the game's final level. Dot points out that she’s running low on power, meaning that their only chance is to beat the User to the treasure. Bob uses his powers within the game to slice the user's engine, slowing him down. We then see Enzo and AndrAIa having a laugh as he tells her about Bob ReBooting as a damsel in The Quick and The Fed (although, we of course know it was actually him and not Bob who did so), telling AndrAIa that this is the best time he’s ever had. She tells Enzo that she likes him, and he responds by promising to introduce her to Bob and Dot at the Diner once the game ends. Their fun is then cut short once the User appears right ahead of them. The two attack the User with the submarine's weapons, depleting it of another one of its lives.
Bob and Dot end up in a portion of the ocean coloured red, which turns out to be shark infested waters. While they struggle at first, Bob eventually sliced one shark inside, causing the remaining sharks to flee in terror. This then clears the path for the User to reach the treasure. Bob and Dot race after him, however the User's sub sports rocket engines as it reaches Atlantis. He’s stopped from reaching the treasure by Enzo's sub crashing right into his, sending both subs crashing down to the ground. Bob spots Enzo in the window of the sub, also recognising that AndrAIa's a game sprite. This panics Dot, but Bob says there’s no time to help Enzo since they need to finish the game. They head towards the treasure only to be grabbed by giant tentacles just as the User begins heading towards the treasure.
Enzo panics about potentially being nullified, a concept that AndrAIa is unfamiliar with. This is when Enzo realises that she’s a game sprite. This upsets him, as he knows that they can’t be friends due to her leaving with the game. AndrAIa uses her claws to paralyse Enzo, then fires him in a torpedo towards the treasure. As it reaches the treasure, we see a sombre AndrAIa look on as she says 'Goodbye, my friend'. Enzo's torpedo reaches the treasure before the User, in turn ending the game.
Once the game leaves, Bob and Dot rush over to Enzo to check if he’s okay. Enzo tells them that AndrAIa was his friend, and that she helped them win the game. This is when Bob spots something on Enzo's icon. Once he taps it, it grows until AndrAIa materialises in Mainframe. She tells Enzo that she downloaded a backup of herself onto his icon, which let her leave the game since it thought she was Enzo. She seems equally as surprised that she can do this. Bob is confused about this as well, but this fades as he asks Enzo what AndrAIa meant when she referred to him as a Guardian.
This episode probably has the biggest change to the status quo so far by introducing a new character to the show's main cast. Sure, we've previously had characters such as Captain Capacitor, Mouse, and Lens who have been prominent parts of the episodes they've appeared in, but they vanish by the episode's end. With AndrAIa, the episode gives you the impression that she's going to be leaving the show for good at the end of the episode, leaving with the game. However, we soon find our expectations subverted when it turns out that AndrAIa has downloaded a backup of herself onto Enzo's icon, allowing her to enter Mainframe.
Speaking of AndrAIa, she's an interesting character with plenty of room to grow going onwards from this point. While we have met game sprites in previous episodes, they have all been voiceless obstacles with no personality. Here, we get an intelligent game sprite who has a personality. Somewhat like Enzo, she's an idealistic and wide eyed youth with an energetic personality. We also get to see some of her abilities she gets through the game, such as her paralysing nails and her ability to hear things from great distances, abilities that she's sure to make use of later on. Of course, since she's now out of the game, she's out of her element, meaning that her arc going forward is going to be her learning the ways of life outside of the games. From this point, AndrAIa serves two purposes; a friend for Enzo and a means for characters to explain things they would otherwise already know, the latter of which is going to be pretty fundamental going forward.
Another interesting point is that the AndrAIa who left the game isn't the original AndrAIa, she's merely a backup that was downloaded onto Enzo's icon. This means that the original AndrAIa is left by herself in the game, hence why she sadly says goodbye to him just before the game ends. It's an interesting point, but it doesn't end up coming up again in the series, although I don't think this is an idea that really needs exploring too much.
While this episode is largely Enzo centric, it doesn't mean that Bob and Dot don't have anything to do. Both characters are given plenty of action in the game, mainly taking on the User, but they also get to briefly tackle some hungry sharks. They are both met with the challenge of ensuring the User doesn't win, which isn't as easy as usual since the user has multiple lives, meaning that they have to deplete all of these before he can reach the end of the game.
We learn a bit more about the show's backstory in this episode which is a very interesting bombshell. Back in my post on The Tearing, I commented on how there was an in universe reason for why Mainframe is mainly populated by binomes with very few humanoid sprite characters to be seen, and this is it - most of the sprites were killed as the result of an experiment that destroyed Mainframe's twin city, and worst of all, Dot and Enzo's dad is responsible for this. This is a pretty dark backstory that's been added into the show, but it also continues this show's shift towards a larger sense of continuity.
I've kind of joked in my previous entries in this season about some of the things that have been subtly mentioned/occurred in those episodes, but so far this season, there's been some incredibly subtle continuity and foreshadowing within these episodes. I'll get more into this when we get to the end of this season since it's quite cleverly structured, but so far, we've had references to some kind of family tie between Megabyte and Hexadecimal and a place called The Web (which has apparently gone out of control and started invading systems). We also had Enzo building his air kart in High Code which he has built by the time we get to Bad Bob.
In particular, these past three episodes have been about shuffling things around and putting things in place. At the end of Bad Bob, Enzo is forbidden from following Bob into games, which leads into Enzo's depression at the start of the episode since he's now left with nothing to do due to a lack of friends his own age, which is of course the driving force behind this episode which ends with the introduction of a new character. We've also got Hexadecimal being placed into the care of Mike the TV.
What is the purpose of this shuffling around of characters? Well, from this point onwards, the subtle continuity we've had previously is going to be brought to the forefront with most episodes being part of an intricate story arc. Of course, today this is pretty much commonplace, but back in the 90's, this form of storytelling in TV shows was pretty rare to find, especially within kid's shows. It was a pretty bold move for the showrunners to attempt this, but as we'll discover in the coming weeks, it definitely pays off big time for the most part. Now everyone is in place, the story can truly begin...
Next time: Hexadecimal gets turned into a Kaiju monster made of nulls in 'Nullzilla'
Funny how the closing shot of the episode was AndrAIa giving Enzo a sly look. What, did she catch the hole in the story about "(Enzo's) friend Bob" who is clearly much bigger than the two ReBooting into a damsel whose legs didn't even reach the ground? Of course, Enzo DID rescue AndrAIa from the "big bully" User at risk to himself, so no doubt he might as well have been a Guardian even if the notion wouldn't have been official yet, because he, as a kid who was in the damsel position, was certainly going by "to mend and defend."
ReplyDeleteFunny how loyalty can play out. Assuming AndrAIa did know what Enzo was doing, of course.