Nat Twunny

(Note Well: I've got zero issues with the choices of romantic pairing, at all. This is not about that, and this review will not accuse anything of "wokeness," whatever that even means from those folks' mouths.) The series so far is just so poorly written. Top-to-bottom. On the surface, the dialogue is, tonally speaking, all over the place. Important revelations, ancient spells, and emotional confessions are delivered with all the gravity of a helium balloon... and even that is undercut by the unnecessary sarcastic quips and manufactured drama. But deeper than that, in the storytelling itself, we're four episodes deep, and there is *no* consistent sense of stakes or urgency. Is this a race against time to save Airk, continents away in peril? Is it imperative that "Dove" train and build her atrophied powers? Is Boorman's sidequest even a thing that matters? The series has no answers for any of those. Characters engage in nonsensical, time-wasting scenes that don't even *accidentally* move the plot forward... and then, at the end, some character pulls a Deus Ex Magika to resolve the episode's framing "crisis." Character actions seem largely unmotivated by the plot. In fact, many of them run tangent to it. "We have to complete this ritual! Don't break your concentration - I need you! But wait, now I'm mad and will send you away in the middle, because I am Very Smart." or "The lich is a crafty manipulator... so I will totally ignore how conveniently your possession vanished and how weird you're acting, and follow you blindly exactly where a lich would want me to go." Or even "This quest balances the fate of this world on the head of a pin - whom shall we send? Some, like, kids, a dude from my dungeon, a single member of my guard (who surely won't instantly die) and hopefully they also find this Willow guy from years back. Yeah, that'll be fine, probably?" I can forgive a wonky story if the characters have authenticity and depth, but they don't. I can forgive shallow characters if they are at least engaging with an interesting, motivated storyline, but they aren't. I can forgive tonal shifts if the characters at least stay consistent to the One Personality Trait each is allotted, but nope. And, to cap it all off, each episode ends with a neck-snappingly jarring needle drop of some inexplicable modern song, just to make sure to slurp up any sense of gravity or wonder the ending may have accidentally left you with. It's bad, and that makes me sad, because we'll never get another chance to come back to this world. This is their shot, and they're blowing it.