#okay i guess they're doing some international crime fighting together

[quietbluejay]

Vengeful Spirit 4

three very different people

severian: international man of mystery

not that much mystery what's bror's problem though, doesn't seem like it's some kind of sacred knowledge

something about this seems sus

you heard it here first folks the emperor gave birth to all of the primarchs

oh boy more biowarfare crimes rip the megafauna ;-;

oh boy so what is the White Naga "the Illuminator" waiiiiit a sec

wait a sec

Fulgrim, that you?

that's something all right

innnteresting

Raeven somehow manages to snap out of it

owo?

uh that's a take, all right i guess…if it works…?

wild absolutely wild and now back to alivia

the "good guys" screwing themselves over repeatedly with this stuff huh also more parent-child stuff weird how we don't really do anything with the emperor and horus' relationship here time for alivia to tell some stories to her daughters

oh???

owo yeah I'm doing the whole story

(also the kid is definitely written a lot younger than 12) ah yes 40k where there are demons but no angels

oh hey it's the Snow Queen! (not going to post the rest) (but what was up with the Murder reference again)

and now back to Horus

geraddon: khornates are just built like that (gerradon: it's because they're corny) he didn't say that but i felt it appropriate

on another note im shooketh that horus actually gets some pov bits in a series named after him who'da thunk! i bet it you put together all the books that dorn would have the most pov sequences just a vibe lmao

not even daemons enjoy erebus

yeah but they're very good at getting in

owo so horus knows about loken and the guys on the ship uhhhh

y...andere Horus?

yikes

this family is a giant mess no matter who comes out on top it's going to be bad (albard is raeven's older brother. who raeven + his mother and wife tortured for years) welp rip raeven and lyx annnd back to loken who is having a crisis of conscience about fighting his former brethren

oh yeah i forgot the remembrancers did that mural when they were bored loken: i don't want to see that. cover it up, no one wants to see that also severian sevatar sevatarion i'm connecting the dots there's a certain similarity of personality here and also a little tactics cayne: loken i think you have ptsd, you shouldn't be on this mission once again he's right and should say it

loken is not beating the allegations

i'll be honest the whole battle sequence kind of just…goes on there's so much of it

abaddon is having fun which surprises himself there's a whole bunch of cases of regular humans (or even in one case a chaos cultist! okay, one chaos cultist and the rest are blood angels who don't really count as regular humans but basically should for soul purposes) telling daemons where to stuff it setting up something as inevitable and in your blood and then you say no

[kkas-art]

Merry Christmas to @den-liner I was your aceattorneyss secret santa - the prompt was Kay/Franziska I hope I could do them justice

Happy holidays ✨ @aceattorneyss

[fly-pow-bye]

DuckTales 2017 - “Beaks in the Shell!”

Story by: Francisco Angones, Madison Bateman, Colleen Evanson, Christian Magalhaes, Bob Snow

Written by: Ben Siemon

Storyboard by: Sam King, Kathryn Marusik, Stephan Park, Emmy Cicirega

Directed by: Jason Zurek

We go virtual!

The episode begins with GizmoDuck and Huey chasing after Gandra Dee, who just stole a cube that causes shockwaves. While he does end up grabbing the massive short circuit-causing cube before it drops into Duckburg's water, Gandra Dee ends up getting away in the end. He wasn't really too competent in this quest, either, as he got caught in a trap and he had to be told by Huey that he can fly out of them. Huey's like someone who yells at the TV when a plot hole happens. Whether this failure is because GizmoDuck is still not as competent as he wants to be or something else is not too obvious, but anyone who watched the previous major Gandra Dee episode can guess that something would have affected his crime fighting when it comes to Gandra Dee.

Back in Gyro Gearloose's lab, Fenton Crackshell-Cabrera has another project in the works that is a secret from everyone: a new virtual reality cloud space that is both a space for scientific collaboration and a potential romantic destination. Let's just say that it may as well have been that something else, and that something else is hidden from everyone else, including his own M'Ma, about as well as his secret identity. Not that he was going to tell his special someone that they didn't buy it.

We go into the aforementioned virtual reality cloud space, where Gandra Dee is already generating beakers full of green chemicals, the universal sign of science in children's cartoons. They can also kiss under the happy little pixelated trees, because they are still an item despite Gandra Dee's record of blinding children and threatening to short-circuit all of Duckburg. Fenton is almost ready to share this scientific breakthrough to the world, but Dee doesn't want to do that because she thinks people would shut it down because of all the purple glitches. This plot point made me wonder if there was going to be something more than just "oh, Gyro can fix those", like if they were going to be a major part of the plot, or that it was supposed to represent that this romance is not going to last.

We later learn that this cloud is also important because they can do dangerous experiments without worry of injury, and, combined with their ability to generate anything they can imagine, this could be a good set-up to an interesting creativity vs. creativity battle. Maybe the purple glitches will come to life as monsters, or maybe FOWL will find out what's going on here and invade it with their own creativity. I mean, who else would have the idea to invade this Gizmotopia?

Fenton: (putting his arms around his one true love) This is going to be...

Mark Beaks: ...the greatest scientific achievement in his-zizz-tory!

Oh, it's Mark Beaks advertising a new Waddle phone update that partially fixes a bug that makes the phones explode into flames. Granted, there's no hint that there's going to be any convergence between these two plots besides Beaks coincidentally finishing Fenton's sentence, with an extra "zizz", but, really, it's inevitable.

Now, Waddle only has one investor, and the investor tells the CEO that he has to come up with an original idea, which he simply can't do as every idea he can come up with, like coffee cups with apps, was already taken. This isn't really the episode's B-plot, and, as said before, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that he's just going to give up and attempt to steal whatever Gyro or his intern are doing. One other thing that's a bit confusing is that nobody seems to recognize Mark Beaks anymore despite being the CEO of a company that apparently still makes phones a lot of people use. It could work as another sign that his company is going down, and that's why he seems so desperate here.

Meanwhile, Huey ends up barging into Fenton's office with a new discovery about Gandra Dee that could lead to her capture, only to see Fenton doing a kissy face while wearing his GizmoDuck helmet. He puts two-and-two together and realizes this must be some sort of virtual reality cloud space. Fenton tries to get him away from that by saying that the GizmoDuck helmet only works on his head, and he just does not have any additional VR headsets for guests. Manny the Headless Horse makes his appearance in this episode with a bunch of VR headsets, apparently hearing that excuse as a request for those, and Huey comes into the world to marvel at all of its wonders, including that very special guest.

Gandra Dee: What...the...f...

Huey: FOWL?!

I see what they did there. Gandra has to generate a weighted blanket to calm Huey down after that revelation. At first, I was going to make some joke about how this is a really bad way for the Duke of Making A Mess to go out, but it makes sense. Stress will be one of the major parts of Huey's part of the plot, and weighted blankets are a good way to relieve that. It's also another reminder that this is a world where ideas can come to life, even if it's just a virtual one. I would question how a virtual weighted blanket would work, but this episode does seem to go with the "one's mind makes it real" scenario.

As Huey keeps asking questions on why Gandra Dee is working with Fenton, we get the little sad backstory on Gandra Dee courtesy of her generating a flashback of her losing a science fair to someone making that one volcano experiment. People just don't understand that she wants to push the boundaries of science with...okay, I'm not sure what that is supposed to be, but it does shoot a dangerous death ray. Because of her experiments need for danger, she can only do experiments on herself, which is why she happens to be a cyborg, and the only people who would fund her work happens to be people like the evil buzzard bent on world domination. She adds an additional comfort to Huey that she already plans to quit FOWL for good after using their resources to make this. After making puppy dog eyes at the little kid like a little kid makes puppy dog eyes at their parents, Huey accepts this for the sake of both science and love.

This leads into our actual B-plot: Huey trying his hardest to keep a secret, and his anxiousness and stress is really getting the best of him even in the beginning. One of the first people he has to confront is none other than Fenton's M'Ma, who, despite Fenton's words to Gandra Dee, did not buy that his project was not some sort of romantic exploit. This leads to an interrogation scene. Crackshell then shows up before M'Ma could actually interrogate him further, and Huey has to try to motion to him what exactly his lies were. It's the usual set up for plots like this, the guy gets caught up in the lie, and he tries desperately to keep the secret a secret. There's not a lot that I haven't seen before, but I can not say this is bad, either.

One creative thing they do end up doing is the very next scene where, after Huey "goes to the bathroom", Huey comes in a room with confidence to answer the big question on why Fenton would keep secrets from his own M'Ma. Eventually, he has to bail again after hearing that one of the secrets is that Fenton is GizmoDuck. Why? Because that was actually Louie playing the part of Huey, and somehow, the schemer of the three nephews is the last person in Duckburg to know GizmoDuck's secret identity. He tries to go back only for M'Ma to ask "Huey" about "Louie's Kids", that fake charity he had in The Other Bin, and Louie cracks under pressure and reveals Huey put him up to it. Huey runs to Fenton's house to essentially yell out that he can't take hiding this secret about the GizmoCloud anymore, thinking the only person in there is a still-in-the-GizmoCloud Fenton. He has no reason to believe there's any desperate CEOs hiding in the wastebasket.

We cut back and forth between this plot and the "Gandra Dee not wanting to open the GizmoCloud" plot, and it turns out to be more about her than anything else. We get the lines about how she doesn't want the world to think of her badly, and how he doesn't care what they think about her, and this heartfelt moment doesn't last too long. Mark Beaks may not be a creative man, but he at least knows how to hack into things. Honestly, it seems like this world didn't have that much security to begin with.

Mark Beaks shows up, locking them in a hashtag captcha before Gandra Dee can defeat him with the combined power of a Terry Bogard power wave and a Rolling Stones reference, and he decides he's going to use his new "WaddleCloud" to steal other people's ideas without anyone telling him. Fenton can still use his creativity powers, and he tries to do that to summon the GizmoDuck suit...only for Mark Beak's stealing powers to take it right from him, giving him the power suit and the ability to add Waddle logos to all the buildings in the skybox.

Fenton Crackshell can still use his creativity abilities to sneakily motion his hands to tap Morse code for help. By the way, yes, he is comatose. It's just like Sword Art Online or that one episode of Black Mirror. Also, how lucky that the one person taking a stress rest in the room, Huey, happened to know Morse code. He tries to take the VR headset out of Mark Beak's head, only for it to give him an electric shock, and the computer displays a little Mark Beaks head telling him that, "ah, ah, ah, you didn't say the magic word." I'm not going to give any hate on this episode for lazy references. If anything, this joke is perfectly fitting for Mark Beaks.

All of this convinces Huey that he doesn't need to keep the secret anymore, which pretty much ends the B-plot with him just randomly yelling out to a mail carrier about how Mark Beaks hacked into the GizmoCloud. He then says he's going to find people who can actually help. It's like he's aware what he did made no sense. Before GizmoDuck can use his finger lasers to delete Fenton and Gandra from the program, or whatever that would entail, his world is suddenly invaded by Huey, M'Ma, and Gyro. How did they manage to get in this hostile cloud takeover when it's implied Mark Beaks put Dennis Nedry-levels of security on it? Pineapples. Well, or Gyro helped them. Either way, it's not really explained.

It may seem like I didn't like this episode that much, so I'll say one thing I did like a lot besides the Louie scene: the weekly final fight scene all of that buildup led up to. The people all use their creativity in a pretty cool way here that I won't entirely spoil here. I also like how Mark Beaks' lack of creativity fits into what he does in it; he just combines everyone else's ideas into a super robot form. I was expecting him to fall over due to so many conflicting ideas, but they end up doing something else that was also pretty funny. Funny by Mark Beaks standards, anyway.

It's not much of a spoiler to say that the good guys win, but there is a little bit more to the ending. Namely, there is a major cliffhanger at the end of the episode. While it's a good cliffhanger, It does feel a little disappointing that a character that was built up in this episode essentially becomes a mere damsel in distress. Then again, I felt the same way about Lena in The Other Bin before the big revelation about her in The Shadow War. We'll just have to see what happens.

How does it stack up?

There's some good scenes here and there, like the blanket, the Louie scene, and the final fight scene, but with everything else, I just found it mediocre by DuckTales 2017's high standards. I'd put it below New Gods On The Block, which has a fight scene similar to this one, and I didn't really love that one either. I can see people disagreeing with this one, especially if they were really into Gandra Dee or Mark Beaks, and I'm sure the last minute of the episode is going to lead to somewhere fascinating. I really debated on whether or not this should be the first two Scrooges episode of Season 3, and I originally gave this a 2 just because I didn't think it was as great as everyone else thought it was. However, I then thought about some of the episode I would give a 2, and I think the good scenes in this episode are just too good to give the whole package a two.

Long story short, Three Scrooges.

Next, we meet some friends for life, through thick or thin, with plenty of tales to spin.

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