Are Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers actually a good couple, or do they end up together because he beat up a bunch of people to win her heart? The Scott Pilgrim graphic novels do a much better job justifying Scott and Ramona’s romance than the movie, which doesn’t have the space to develop their romance fully because it prioritizes the fight sequences. The movie pushes Scott and Ramona back together at the last minute, but there’s an uneasiness there that doesn’t inspire much confidence in their long-term future together. That’s a pretty realistic note to end on — it’s easy to have doubts about your partner as you learn more about how they have mistreated people in the past — but it also undercuts their happy ending.
This question of Scott and Ramona’s long-term compatibility is at the core of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, which explores the future of Scott and Ramona’s relationship in “2 Scott 2 Pilgrim.” Fourteen years after defeating the League of Evil Exes, Scott is separated from Ramona, and it’s a split that is ten times more devastating than his breakup with Envy Adams, which essentially destroyed him and put him off dating for a year. Would his life be better if he never ended up with Ramona? There’s only one way to find out.
The last episode was the most grounded episode since the premiere, with no big fight sequence and minimal fantastic elements. The pendulum swings the opposite way with “2 Scott 2 Pilgrim,” which begins with a fight inside a time tunnel. Scott tries to escape the mysterious figure pulling him through time, but he’s outmatched. The visuals here are wonderfully trippy, like the moment when Scott’s head falls out of the tunnel and morphs into something far more abstract, and the sequence establishes that we are entering a spectacular and strange new world for this episode.
When the time tunnel spits the two of them out in the ruins of Torontowood Studios, Scott learns who was responsible: his 37-year-old future self, voiced by the great Will Forte, king of playing pathetic dudes that are still somehow endearing. Scott is immediately impressed that Old Scott made it past 25 and can grow a full beard, and he’s excited to hang out with his old self and see the future. They pass by dilapidated spots from Scott’s past — his apartment with Wallace and the park where he had his first date with Ramona — before arriving at the huge estate where Old Scott now lives with Old Wallace Wells. It’s all very impressive, but Scott quickly learns that his future self is deeply unstable.
The time-travel twist works very well for a property about confronting your past, flipping the script so that Scott is forced to confront his future. There’s also a meta-textual layer here with Bryan Lee O’Malley revisiting a story he finished in 2010, imagining what the future would be if he continued that thread, and then using that to change the overall narrative. He’s engaging with the legacy of his work and approaching it with a more mature outlook, which ends up being less forgiving of Scott’s man-child attitude.
Old Scott takes Scott to a VR chamber where he can discover what happened in this timeline via the red pixelated illustrations of a Virtual Boy (called a Virtual Guy), witnessing the events of the original graphic novels as well as his marriage to Ramona and its eventual collapse. We don’t learn the details of their separation, but there’s never the impression that Old Scott is in the right here. Forte’s voicework makes Old Scott especially childish and pouty, and it’s telling that the people around Scott have the same voice actors as before, while he has a new one. He’s become a different person in this world, one that is more pitiful, manic, and willing to make boneheaded decisions like pulling his younger self out of time so that he doesn’t have to have difficult conversations with his wife.
This episode is overflowing with video-game and anime references, reinforcing that we are back in Scott’s worldview. The future Toronto evokes the dystopian Neo-Tokyo landscape of Akira. The passcode to enter the VR chamber is the input for a Street Fighter dragon punch on a D-pad, and the VR machine is in a sunken area shaped like a classic PlayStation controller. Old Scott’s new band with the Katayanagi Twins is called Pop’n TwinBee, the name of the sixth installment of the TwinBee game series, and the song they perform in their overstimulating music video is “Konya wa Hurricane,” featured in the first episode of the Bubblegum Crisis anime.
With Old Scott clearly unwell, Old Wallace and Scott go to Old Ramona for help. She thought the whole time-travel thing was a joke, but she came up with a backup plan anyway: Go back in time herself and adapt Old Young Neil’s book, Scott and Ramona and Me: My Precious BIG Life as Scott Pilgrim’s Best Pal, as a screenplay that will be turned into a movie that Scott will eventually see. Ramona thinks her plan failed because the movie fell apart and careers were destroyed, but Scott tells her about what he saw when he watched the new timeline through Robot-01’s temporally detached eyes. Old Ramona awakened something new in her past self, inspiring her to look for answers instead of moving on as she did before, and maybe these enlightened past versions of Scott and Ramona can make their relationship work.
Does Ramona’s plan make much sense? Not really, but the episode does some quick lampshading to brush it off. “So you thought Old Me would convince this me that Young You was bad news and he’d send me back home and we’d break up,” Scott says. “And then one day, I’d be at my local cineplex and see a preview for a movie about myself?” Ramona admits that the plan may have been misguided, but the ultimate outcome doesn’t matter if the plan gives us such a satisfying new direction for the story.
Ramona takes Scott back to the past with her Rollerblades made out of an old DeLorean, catching us up to the end of the last episode. Seeing the immaturity of his future self makes Scott act like an adult, and he apologizes to Knives for not breaking up with her once he started dating Ramona. As another acknowledgment that fans were creeped out by Scott and Knives’ romance, Scott tells her, “I probably shouldn’t have been dating you in the first place. Apparently, a 23-year-old dating a high-schooler is frowned upon by society.”
Finally reunited, Scott and Ramona head to her bedroom for a long-awaited make-out. Except that when they try to kiss, a giant force field emerges that prevents their lips from touching. There’s still unfinished business they have to deal with, which they assume means defeating the seven evil exes. Thankfully, they’ll all be gathered together at the premiere of Stephen and Knives’ show, and the episode ends with each of the exes arriving on the red carpet. It’s an exciting setup for the season finale, promising the songs, fights, and relationship drama that are essential to the Scott Pilgrim formula.
Precious Little Thoughts
• Fun anime trivia: The Japanese voice of Old Scott is Fumihiko Tachiki, who voiced the villainous Gendo Ikari in Neon Genesis Evangelion. The connection is even more pleasing because the force field preventing Scott and Ramona from kissing is based off of the AT fields in NGE.
• The “sugar daddy” bird gag from the first episode returns this week, but now the bird is a robot!
• For a second, it seems like the episode is building to the reveal that Old Wallace and Old Scott are married, which doesn’t make sense considering Scott is not divorced yet, but the big reveal is that Old Wallace’s husband works for Nintendo. Scott freaks out, of course.
• Old Scott’s duties of a good husband: Do dishes, walk cats, make spaghettis.
• Detective Pikachu feels like too recent of a video game reference for young Scott to make. I know the series doesn’t take place in a specific year, but it doesn’t feel right to reference anything after 2010.
• The three pictures of young and old Ramona tell us a lot about her character: They start with a cutesy peace-sign pose, get embarrassed that they did a cutesy pose, and then go totally expressionless. Ramona wants to live that kawaii life, but it’s at odds with the nonchalant, cool persona she’s cultivated.
• Huge laugh at Wallace telling a reporter that he should be in Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Musical because he’s a triple threat, then immediately breaking into Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated.” A perfect ’00s Canadian pop-rock reference.
• Scott: “How did you do this?” Old Scott: “It’s so easy. I paid some nerd on the internet.”
• “Do we have to confront our past or something? Because that sounds terrible.”
• “It’s a bop, right? Over a hundred views!”
• “Two Scotts? Yikes. Nobody mention Sonic the Hedgehog.”
• “What if there was somewhere you could find all the exes gathered together at the same time to celebrate musical theater?”
