Good-bye, Scott Pilgrim, and good riddance. By removing the central character, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off completely restructures the narrative to make it more ensemble-driven, and it’s a brilliant creative choice. Co-writers Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski recognize the incredible opportunity they have reuniting the star-studded cast of 2010’s Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, so they change the story to give these actors new ways to interact with each other and bring different dimensions to their characters.
O’Malley didn’t write the film, and the plot diverges heavily from the comics in the back half because the screenplay was written after the third graphic novel published. (The writers of the movie, Edgar Wright and Michael Bacall, are executive producers on the TV series.) Ramona’s character is hurt the most by this, and the film struggles to flesh her out and reinforce why Scott is fighting so hard for her. Ultimately, Knives feels like the better romantic match for Scott despite the film dedicating a lot of attention to their age and maturity gap.
Ramona has historically been a challenging character for O’Malley, who was dealing with growing anti-Ramona sentiment from fans during the first four books. There’s a deliberate effort to make her more empathetic in the fifth volume, and it gives the graphic novels a deeper emotional throughline than the film. With the TV show, O’Malley gets to recenter the narrative on Ramona, and removing Scott sends her in a new direction that forces her to confront her two biggest flaws: a lack of accountability and her impulse to run away when relationships get too intense.
Ramona and Scott had one great night together, and then her ex-boyfriend turned him into loose change. She may not have delivered the killing blow, but she feels responsible and guilty for what happened to him, emotions she doesn’t really show when it comes to the exes she dated for longer periods. She has to attend Scott’s funeral knowing her role in his fate, and she gets publicly lambasted for it by the grieving Knives. This is a much more compelling and empathetic position to put Ramona in, giving her stronger motivation when she ends up in a position to make things right.
Scott’s funeral ends up being a showcase for Ellen Wong’s Knives. I’m a huge fan of Wong’s performance in the movie, and she makes Knives an even more extreme fangirl in the animation medium, meeting the exaggeration of the visuals in her voice work. Knives has the most chibi facial expressions of all the characters in this episode, and Wong’s performance dramatically jumps between heightened emotional states: profound sadness over Scott’s death, vengeful anger toward Ramona, and starstruck adoration for Envy Adams, Scott’s pop-star ex who shows up to make his funeral all about her.
Music is essential to the Scott Pilgrim concept, and the songwriters of Anamanaguchi are already deeply familiar with this world, having composed the music for Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Game. They know how to keep a video-game sound at the forefront of the score, and they’re collaborating with a composer who understands the cinematic side: Joseph Trapanese, who worked with Daft Punk on the absolute banger score for Tron: Legacy.
Anamanaguchi and Trapanese do a great job of staying in the same general soundscape of the movie with the new Sex Bob-Omb songs in the first episode, which start with the raw aggression of a punk garage band, then shift into a more chill, shoegaze-inspired sound when the band plays the Rockit. The arrival of Envy Adams in this episode takes us into synth-pop territory with her cover of Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You” at the funeral, and we get more movie connections with the return of Emily Haines and Metric, whose “Black Sheep” appeared in the film.
Getting rid of Scott gives this series the “anything can happen” vibe that was such a big part of the original story’s hook. The original upends audience expectations by going full fantasy action after primarily operating in the slice-of-life genre, and the series upends the expectations of those who know the shift is coming. We are in new territory with a new set of references, and incorporating one of the most obvious funeral songs but giving it a Scott Pilgrim twist makes for an especially satisfying and very funny musical sequence. I could see this version of “I Will Remember You” charting if it became a TikTok meme, and Metric’s reimagining captures the blend of heartbreak and release that makes sad dance songs like “Dancing on My Own” so powerful.
The driving second chorus of “I Will Remember You” plays during a montage revealing the rest of Ramona’s evil exes, who each receive a mysterious letter inviting them to the secret lair of Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman), the big-bad leader of the league. Instead of introducing Ramona’s evil exes one by one as they separately take on Scott, the show assembles them all together to show how these huge personalities clash with each other when the one person uniting them has been eliminated.
The show rapidly makes the world of this story feel so much bigger than both the comic and the movie thanks to changes like this, and there’s huge narrative value in seeing the evil exes as a group with its own petty infighting. What exactly is the point of the League of Evil Exes beyond sabotaging Ramona’s love life? Are they fighting Scott with the hopes of reclaiming Ramona’s heart? What do they get if they actually beat him? These are questions that the original story doesn’t need to answer, and they become ammunition for Matthew Patel against his new target: Gideon.
Matthew is the person who sent the invitations, gathering the exes to witness his power play for control of the league and Gideon’s vast empire. Satya Bhabha gives one of the film’s most over-the-top performances as Matthew, who has the task of transitioning viewers into a new genre and tone, and he dials up the venomous fury for his cartoon performance. The exes were all going to fight Scott so Gideon could get the girl in the end, and that doesn’t sit right with Matthew. He took care of Scott but was rejected by Ramona, so now he will get the reward he thinks he is owed.
Matthew versus Gideon ends up being the first big fight of the series, and it goes hard over its nearly four-minute length. We once again start in 2-D fighter mode, and we stay there for a bit, watching the two of them launch a flurry of hand-to-hand attacks, each one accompanied by a comic-book-style sound effect. The actual sound effects in this sequence are amazing, chock-full of callouts to classic video game sounds while also matching the increasing scale and spectacle of the fight.
After the first blows, Matthew summons his hipster-demon chicks, knocks Gideon through the roof and onto a basketball court, and slam dunks a fireball into his spine. Gideon escapes and arms himself with two samurai swords that make him almost unstoppable until Matthew manifests two mystical arms and a trident from his back. Science SARU delivers impeccably smooth action that goes far beyond what we’ve seen in the comics and film, building to a huge finale with Matthew and Gideon fighting in the rain while the score swells with the sound of an orchestra and choir.
Matthew ultimately gains the upper hand(s), and while dangling from the edge of a rooftop, Gideon is forced to sign away his empire, league, lair, home, and underwear. Matthew gets the shortest shrift of all the evil exes because he doesn’t show up until the end of the first graphic novel, whereas the others are more prominent throughout their chapters, so the role reversal in this episode is even more unexpected. Scott was alive, and now he’s dead. Matthew was the first defeated, and now he’s in charge of the entire league. O’Malley and Grabinski take huge swings with the changes for this series, and they are pulling them off while maintaining the wit and charm of the original material.
The League of Evil Exes has a new leader, and Gideon is destitute, but there’s one last twist at the end of this episode. In bed after the funeral, Ramona ends up back in the subspace highway of Scott’s dreams, and she can hear him calling for her. You didn’t really think Scott Pilgrim was really dead, did you? His name is in the title! Hopefully he doesn’t come back too quickly, though, because I want to spend as much time in this alternate timeline as possible.
Precious Little Thoughts
• At the start of this episode, we get our first Ramona hair change, swapping the colors so blue is on top and pink is on the bottom. It’s a quiet sequence that helps to orient the viewer in Ramona’s perspective, giving us a glimpse into an activity that always happened off the page.
• One of my favorite visual touches of this episode is a shot of Envy walking down the church aisle with the look of a top-down 2-D RPG video game. There are so many fun ways to incorporate video-game imagery in animation!
• It’s nice to see the Katayanagi Twins’ Robot-01 on the show, given that he didn’t make it into the movie.
• My favorite fan exclamation to Envy Adams: “Step on my corpse!”
• “Maybe you should stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to.” You can feel Chris Evans’s smile behind his gruff delivery of this line. I bet he’s even more excited to step into Lucas Lee’s shoes after becoming a genuine action superstar.
• “My nickname in school was ‘Fearless’! I wore ‘No Fear’ shirts every day!” Pushing Gideon into more pathetic territory will be a good move for Schwartzman’s performance.
