Sunday, April 4, 2010

Fraggle Blog - Beyond the Pond

Episode Vvi, written by Jocelyn Stevenson.

Hah! Doc to Sprocket: "And it's the tree where you...well, it's your favorite tree too."

Hmm...this, to me, is the unfortunate way that many Fraggle Rock episodes begin. Something that we've never heard of before -- in this case, knobblies -- suddenly presents a problem that the entire show will be about trying to solve. Not that I want to condemn the show in the first five minutes -- this could definitely get good. In fact, this whole Red swimming sequence is cool...

The Merggles are kind of fun...but why did they have to be so stupid as to lock up Red in a cage when she's their only hope for help? For the convenience of the plot, methinks.

A fun episode, and neat that there is a whole new race of people introduced so late in the series. I don't really want to rag on this episode too much, but yesterday's River of Life dealt with essentially the same theme, and handled it better. It didn't introduce a whole new group of people, it used what we already know, totally integrated the Doc/Sprocket storyline into the Fraggle one, and spun it all into something great. There need to be all different types of episodes, and this one was fun, but I don't think it was anything like the achievement of River of Life.

Something I suspect is that the many different "storylines" of this show -- Doc/Sprocket, Fraggles, Doozers, Gorgs, Uncle Matt -- made it difficult to write for. The structure kind of took over, and inhibited the writers with the need they felt to try to cover too many bases in each episode. It's possible to pull this off without an apparent strain, and the best episodes do just that. I dunno, it's a delicate balance, and of course the overall structure is one of the things that makes the show so special to begin with. But it must have been a challenging show to write for.

No comments:

Post a Comment