It’s incredible that Scott Pilgrim is absent for over half of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. But like so many other franchises, the titular character has never been the main draw of Scott Pilgrim. I don’t think the property would have reached the same level of success without its expansive supporting cast, offering a wide range of personalities for readers to connect with and for up-and-coming actors to play. Take Scott out and you end up with a lot more time to explore those other characters and their relationships, which is why I appreciate Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski keeping Scott off the table for so long.
Julie Powers and Gordon Goose (né Gideon Graves) are a new pairing for the TV series, and they both gain new dimensions by being together. Gordon undergoes the greatest transformation, no longer consumed by his resentment toward Ramona and desperate for a friend. “Whodidit” opens with a scene from a brightly colored shoujo anime, showing a pink-haired girl running into her boy crush, who shoves a piece of fruit in her mouth and calls her fat. This is the fantasy world that Gordon Goose escapes to while he wastes away on Julie’s couch, surrounded by empty beverage containers and snack bags. He’s turned into a lonely slob, so when he gets a phone call from Lucas Lee asking for forgiveness, Gordon jumps at the opportunity to reconnect with his former leaguemate.
Vampire Weekend’s “A Punk” underscores Gordon and Lucas’ epically destructive playdate, a song choice that imbues the sequence with sunny cheer. They play video games and Twister, have a paintball war, smack a piñata, balance sporting equipment on their fingers, and slide down the stairs on a rug. They build a half-pipe in Julie’s living room. Even though most of these activities end with Gordon being injured, he’s still having an amazing time. The fun ends when Julie comes home and sees them sitting on the couch watching anime in the middle of her ruined home.
Aubrey Plaza can play a lot more than just a foulmouthed hater, and she gets to complicate Julie’s character in “Whodidit.” You can tell that Gordon brings out a different side of Julie, because she doesn’t swear once when she tells Ramona about their past together in North Bay, Ontario, a location she shamefully murmurs under her breath. We see a flashback to “fearless” teenage Gordon approaching the most popular girl in school with a 12-point business plan for why she should date him and his public humiliation when she shuts him down. Everyone laughs at him except for Julie, and she reverts to that sympathetic person when he returns to her life, more miserable than ever.
Unfortunately, that sympathy diminishes the longer Gordon sits on her couch doing something. Gordon was power-hungry and vengeful when he showed up at her doorstep, and ambition is hot. Julie is excited by Ramona’s suggestion that Gordon is secretly plotting something, because that would spice up their relationship. Her patience already wearing thin, Julie melts down when she sees what Gordon and Lucas have done to her house, triggering the episode’s requisite fight. Except it doesn’t happen. As I mentioned in the last recap, fights have become less and less essential to this show’s storytelling as it continues, and that’s especially true in this episode. I would love to see Julie completely trounce Gideon and Lucas, but before she can land her first hit, Ramona steps in and insists that they all act like adults for once.
Ramona tells Gordon to stop being a loser and treat Julie better than he treated her, and it’s a powerful moment for Ramona, who struggled to resist Gideon Graves’s hold on her in the past. After settling things with her other exes, Ramona doesn’t have to run from people anymore because she has the confidence to confront them. It’s healthier to tell people how you truly feel and give them the opportunity to respond, whether with words or actions. It turns out that for Gordon, treating Julie better means revealing that this entire time he’s been hatching an elaborate plan that would turn Matthew Patel to dust. Her response: “That’s hot.”
While Ramona is off with Julie and Gordon, Knives and Stephen are working on Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Musical, which is officially in development, with Matthew Patel as producer and lead star. I love that the TV series is imagining even more ways to adapt the Scott Pilgrim story, and this theater project allows the creators to keep music at the forefront in a different way. The big song that Knives and Stephen are trying to crack in this episode revolves around bread and the things that it does to you. Fans of Scott Pilgrim know exactly where this is going, and after a few tries, they land on the classic “bread makes you fat” line.
Knives continues to swing between emotional extremes in this episode, expressing bubbly excitement when she’s working on the musical and crushing disappointment when she hears that Ramona has been looking for Scott this entire time while Knives has moved on with her life. Ellen Wong’s voicework emphasizes Knives’s youth compared to the adults around her, especially when interacting with Ramona. Knives can barely get her words out when she calls Ramona out for dating two people simultaneously, just like Scott did with them. More than anyone else, Knives is actually sad about losing Scott, and that feeling only gets stronger as she realizes that maybe Scott and Ramona are the right people for each other.
After removing Gideon and Julie from the suspects list and remembering that Robot-01 was at the Rockit on the night of Scott’s disappearance, Ramona believes she’s solved the case. She shares her findings with Stephen, Knives, Kim, and Neil, who have discovered their own strange piece of evidence by investigating the file for Neil’s screenplay. Ramona pins the blame on twins Ken and Kyle Katayanagi, the T.A.s for her Robotics 101 class. She was their female fixation that semester, and they were players who wouldn’t leave her alone, so she played them right back by dating them simultaneously. They kidnapped Scott Pilgrim using Robot-01 to create the most powerful vegan portal of all time, a deeply silly phrase Mary Elizabeth Winstead delivers with grave intensity.
But what about the date on the document file, which says that it was written 14 years in the future? How does that play into the Katayanagis’ plot? Ramona gets most of the plot right, but she pins the wrong masterminds. Luckily, someone shows up at her door to set her straight: Scott Pilgrim, who finally returns to his own TV show. He tells the group that he was responsible for the entire thing, prompting confused looks and another fainting spell for Knives. We had the luxury of five glorious episodes of TV without Scott Pilgrim, and as the season heads into its last two episodes, the focus looks to be shifting back to him. It was bound to happen eventually, and it’s definitely a “distance makes the heart grow fonder” situation. Welcome back, Scott Pilgrim. I missed your goofy little face.
Precious Little Thoughts
• Ramona’s exes want to be her new boyfriend, so it’s fitting that they keep on playing the part of Scott Pilgrim in the film and musical versions of his life.
• I highly approve of this show incorporating musical theater as a new reference source. This episode gives us an extended Stephen Sondheim reference with Matthew Patel performing “Agony” from Into the Woods, a duet, in his one-man show, splitting his costume down the middle to indicate his dual roles.
• Knives and Stephen give Matthew a hand-drawn document detailing reasons why he should be the leading man, including “liked by producer,” “smooth stage rehearsals,” and “very popular!”
• We get a quick moment of Stacey Pilgrim gossiping to Wallace on the phone, but I want more! Stacey might be the most sidelined character of the cast on the TV show, which is a bummer, because Anna Kendrick is such a great fit for the role.
• “Do they even like each other? Because sometimes it feels like they hate each other.”
• “Oh no! We’re out of chips. Jules, we need chips!”
• “From one creative to another, just know we’re making every effort to treat the material with respect.”
• “I can’t even afford a first-class flight back to L.A. And the only work I can get is voicing an animated series.”
• Neil: “This is my favorite part of every ‘whodidit.’ The part when you find out who did it.” Kim: “It’s ‘whodunnit.’’ Neil: “If anything, it’d be ‘Who’s done it?’ I would know. I used to be a writer.”
