[Do not read until you’ve finished Disenchantment]
The first episodes of most sitcoms are notoriously not very funny. Parks and Recreation, The Office, Community — these are three all-time classic comedies with three mediocre, at best, series premieres (Leslie Knope, Michael Scott, and Jeff Winger’s track pants are particularly difficult to stomach). Even BoJack Horseman, arguably the funniest current show on television (or Netflix, whatever), had to work through some kinks before getting to the good kinks.
The Simpsons and Futurama, though, were good pretty much from the get-go. “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” holds up remarkably well (minus Barney’s hair), while “Space Pilot 3000” did such a solid job of foreshadowing future events that the show would return to December 31, 1999 in later seasons. There’s a lot of plot-heavy set-up in Matt Groening’s latest animated series, Disenchantment, that keeps the early episodes from matching the highs of his previous work (there’s nothing quite as funny as Futurama‘s “whalers on the moon” gag). But the show begins to finds it footing around episode eight.
In “The Limits of Immortality,” Bean, Elfo, and Luci retrieve the Eternity Pendant from the Lost City of Cremorrah and bring it back to Dreamland, where King Zøg is trying to solve the mystery of immortality. The recipe only calls for two ingredients — the pendant and elf’s blood — but when it’s revealed in “To Thine Own Elf Be True” that Elfo isn’t a “true” elf, he’s booted from the kingdom. Bean and Luci eventually find the happy little elf roaming the forest, and he takes the outsiders to his homeland Elfwood. Little do they know, however, that the banishment was part of the king’s plan to find the magical realm, and during a knight’s siege on Elfwood, poor Elfo is pierced by arrows and killed.
(The word “elf” has lost all meaning.)
I spent most of the rest of “Thine Own Elf” and the season finale “Dreamland Falls” waiting for Elfo to be revived, but the elixir is instead used on Bean’s mother (and Dreamland’s secretly-evil queen) Dagmar. Elfo: still dead! To add insult to fatal injury, his corpse falls into the ocean, where it’s swept away by the current. We don’t know what’s become of Elfo until the final seconds of the season in a scene you may have missed, considering Netflix’s tendency to hype other shows rather than let the one you’re currently watching play out.
Elfo’s lifeless body washes up on a beach, where he’s retrieved by two mysterious figures. There are a lot of mysteries in Disenchantment — why was Luci sent to Bean? Who is Elfo’s mother? Who are Dagmar’s allies? — but the question I most want answered: what the heck does a mermaid want with Elfo?
Take a look at the bottom right of the second screenshot.
In pirate terms, those be scales. Mermaids (who can apparently travel on land) are an established part of Disenchantment lore, but we never saw Mermaid Island in season one. Only Walrus Island, where the the calls of the eponymous inhabitants sound eerily similar to siren songs. Presumably we’ll find out a lot more about mermaids, and whether they can revive Elfo, when Disenchantment returns for season two (or the second-half of season one) likely in 2019.
