King Arthur and the Knights of Justice S1E2: "A Knight's Quest"

This review was comissioned by @krinsbez


I reviewed the first episode of this series a long time ago, and didn't like it much. I also saw a couple random episodes on TV as a kid, and I liked those. This could be because kids are dumb, but it could also mean that the series finds its footing later on.

Anyway, the pilot ended with the time-displaced football players stepping into the roles of King Arthur and his knights and successfully repelling the besieging forces from Camelot. Guenevere has already been captured by the one flying baddy who sounds like Riff-Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show and flown off to Castle Morgana, though, so I guess they need to rescue her or something.

Let's see if it improves over the badly rushed and undercooked pilot.


Episode two doesn't wate any time, launching with the Knights' team captain Arthur King leading the others on a rapid mounted pursuit of the retreating warlords. As they ride, there's some much-needed attention to the "knights'" perspectives on their bizarre circumstances. Put simply, most of them don't seem to have accepted that this is real. This has gotten so weird so fast that it's got to be some kind of dream. In fact, a few of them even have a little debate over whether they're all somehow experiencing a shared dream, or if only one of them is real having a crazy dream and imagining the others in. The tone this is delivered in is pretty much just the usual blithe SatAm team snark, but the script itself really feels like it wants to be more than that.

Also, it isn't dwelled on, and it's mostly played pretty lightly, but it's still more human than the pilot had me expecting. And also more philosophical than I thought this show would get even if it's just in passing jest.

At the head of the group, the guy who drives the spear-launching chariot that I thought was the coolest thing ever when I was 11 moves up alongside Arthur to see how he's feeling at this point. Arthur's been pretty much silent through the entire ride, so it seemed like a good idea to check in. And yeah, Arthur's not holding together as well as the others. In part because he hasn't managed to convince himself that this is real.

Also, the guy driving the spearmobile is "Lance." Okay, so he's the second in command. And he drives the thing with a Lot of Lances on it, hardy har har.

...

It's too bad that the other knights whose names get mentioned don't appear to correlate with actual Arthurian characters as best I can tell. And...it sort of doesn't bode well if the only two Knights of the Round Table to have their actual names used in the main cast are Arthur and Lancelot, aka the two who literally everyone knows without needing to do a single minute of research.

They wouldn't even be hard to make football player counterparts for, either. We could have Percy (who has the social skills of a wild dog but uncanny strength and a weird kind of childlike insight), Kay (Arthur's longtime rival turned grudging teammate who he's reluctantly come to see as sort of a brother even though he's still a bit of a douche), Wayne (the fast-talker who used to deal with the team's sponsors and agent, as well as helping Arthur maintain cohesion within the group), etc.

Darn shame, really.

...

Anyway, Lance tries to pep Arthur up by pointing out that they might be doing something really important here. If the timeline that resulted in the world they're familiar with was contingent on King Arthur not losing to this particular bunch of weirdos, then they really do need to give this their best. Also, they're getting to rescue a "really awesome girl."

Lance, how do you know that Guinevere is a really awesome girl. You've had one look at her face in Merlin's crystal ball. She could be a total bitch for all you know.

Anyway, it seems like Lance is also accepting the reality of this weird scenario. And doing a better job dealing with it than Arthur.

Cut to the baddies. One of the warlord soldiers who fled the foiled siege has caught up to Lord Viper and Co, and is trying to tell him that the Knights of the Round Table are back in action. It was only by "riding through the River of Fire" that they were able to escape and bring Viper the bad news. "Riding the River of Fire," eh? Is that some kind of costly/risky transportation magic that the baddies have access to? I hope so, that sounds pretty metal. Anyway, Lord Viper has trouble believing that the Knights of Justice are back, considering that he saw to their mystical imprisonment himself. However, he acknowledges that *someone* must have routed his siege force, and that whoever they are he needs to deal with them before they cause more trouble. So, he sends one or two of his fastest riders to hurry the prisoner on to Castle Morgana while he sets an ambush for the pursuers here in the forest.

Lord Viper might look like a totally generic medieval-themed SatAm villain, but he's sharper than most of that ilk. I was kind of afraid that his clever stratagem in the pilot's opening would be a one-off and that he'd be just another comically inept cartoon villain after that, but so far he seems to be a pretty decent tactician. I hope this continues, and that the show will actually depict Arthur and Co needing to be smart in turn in order to hold their own.

Guinevere tells Viper that she knew he wouldn't be able to keep her husband off the game board for long. She's...not right, but she's also not exactly wrong either, I guess? Well, anyway, Viper tells her to shut up and has his riders whisk her off while he and the rest of his men prepare for battle.

Back to the Knights. They've been following a trail of weirdly glowing red trees that seem to co-occur with the enemies' path. Maybe this has something to do with the "river of fire." A side effect of using it to warp through forested terrain or whatever. I hope so, that would be pretty interesting.

Anyway, one of the Knights who has a stereotypical nerdy voice babbles a hypotheis about how these trees might be suffering from some kind of chloroplast mutation. Yes, allegedly smart football knight, malformed chlorophyl would absolutely cause the entire tree including its roots and trunk to glow a fiery red, how very scientifically literate of you.

The glowing trees turn out to be magic of a slightly different sort, though; the warlords made them light up in the hope of luring the pursuers right into the ambush, and it works. The forest around the Knights erupts in a rain of pseudo-medieval projectiles. Followed by Lord Viper and his warlords, who close into melee while the knights are still off balance. Unfortunately the animation budget doesn't allow more than two or three combatants to be onscreen at a time, but the choice of shots still manages to get the overall shape of the battle across.

To put it simply, the bad guys win.

The knights don't get completely clowned on, to their credit, but it's clear that the speed of the ambush served to prevent Arthur from having time to devise any tactics. Multiple knights get unhorsed. A couple get disarmed. And, as soon as Arthur seems to be rallying the rest of his team and pushing back against the attackers to the point where Lord Viper feels threatened, the latter switches tactics on him completely. Pulling back from melee, he casts some kind of spell that opens a pit in the ground under a pair of unhorsed knights, sending them plummeting, screaming, down into the darkness. Then, he tells the Knights that they'd better start climbing down after their friends if they're to have any chance of saving their lives, and orders the warlords to retreat and head on to Castle Morgana with him. These obviously aren't the real Knights of Justice, but they're still dangerous enough that he'd rather learn more about them before reengaging.

Heh, damn, Lord Viper really is delivering! As I'm sure you all know by now, I very much appreciate antagonists who make the good guys earn their victories, and in the 80's-90's SatAm landscape such individuals are few and far between.

An added bonus in this case is that at the end of the pilot, we saw the knights beat a warlord force that WASN'T led by Lord Viper pretty easily. That was certainly at least partly because they ran out of time in the episode to show a proper battle, but it ended up working to emphasize how much more dangerous combat gets when Viper is around.

The next scene though...erm...raises some questions.

Apparently, that magic pit teleported the two knights into Morgana's throne room.

On one hand, it makes Viper's trick back there even more clever. Having Arthur and the others waste time climbing down an empty pit to rescue a pair of soldiers who aren't actually there anymore.

On the other hand, if he can teleport unwilling people into Morgana's throne room, why didn't he just do that to Guinevere in the first place and continue laying siege to Camelot with his full force?

This is not a very well thought out powerset.

Anyway, Morgana Le Fey demands to know who these obvious foreigners are and how they came to be wearing the Knights of Justice's signature armor and equipment. They brazenly lie and say that no, really, they're the Knights of the Round Table, which prompts Morgana to have them thrown in the dungeon for a while to see if prolonged imprisonment in the pitch darkness will make them reconsider their story.

Yeah, that went about the way I thought it would, heh. To be fair to those football dudes though, Merlin told them to stick to their story no matter how obviously bullshit it is, and they're giving that their all. It's not like telling her the truth would have been a great idea either, after all.

Back in the forest, the pit remains open for just long enough for Arthur and the others to all get off their horses and start preparing to explore it before it closes up without leaving a trace. Hahahaha what a dick move I love it. Arthur gets anxious again. Well, more like depressed, honestly. He just got two of his friends and teammates probably-killed by decciding to go riding off after the warlords as if he knew what he was doing. Maybe it's best to just stop and accept the fact that they're in over their heads before something even worse happens.

Unfortunately, Merlin calls Arthur on his sword and browbeats him into going on without any real character development happening.

There's no one more qualified to handle this than them, Merlin reassures him. After all, they're athletes, and athletes are all about solving unconventional problems and staring death and danger in the face. Erm...I...uh...I guess? Or...no, not really? Football is a dangerous sport, but I don't think it really compares to this at all.

Also, he tells them that he chose the twelve of them because he saw in them the potential for greatness. Which is a total lie. He chose them because the He-Man oracle told him to.

You know, I really don't like it that the mysterious cryptic old wizard's decisions need to be made for him by another mysterious cryptic old wizard. How many degrees of separation are we putting between the characters who the story is about and the characters with actual agency?

A fifteen second disingenuous pep talk from Merlin is enough to turn Arthur around entirely. And also, somehow, convinces him that he needs to go on alone and tackle the enemy fortress by himself unsupported. The others ask him why. Arthur explains that it's because this is what he needs to do. Oh, I see. Now it makes sense. Also, apparently Arthur just now realized that he can throw his shield onto the ground and command it to turn into a dragon.

So, on the topic of "shit that would have sure come in handy ten minutes ago."

Did Merlin just magically activate some latent understanding of his shield that the Round Table didn't do on its own? Did that dumb pep speech have a "would you kindly" buried in it or something?

Arthur flies to Castle Morgana alone. Like all his athlete instincts and football captain experiences tell him is the best way to get things done. For a moment I thought he might have actually had some giant brain blast of a plan that really would require him to go alone, but nope! As soon as he lands and starts infiltrating a cave that leads into the spooky castle's foundations, he starts asking Merlin what he should be doing next. And Merlin has to explain basic functions of his equipment to him, like Excalibur's GPS tracker and boulder-moving functions. Arthur figured out his shield dragon all on his own, but apparently he needs a tutorial for these features.

-____-

So, basically, there's no rhyme or reason to anything that anyone is going to do in this sequence. Okay, well, thanks for telling me so up front show, I'd have wasted time paying attention otherwise.

Arthur goes through the spooky caves for a while and makes some dumb quips. Including ones about how this is "just like" Morgana. He's never met her lol. Also, making creepy comments to himself about how he's going to get at the hottest girl in human history at the end of this. Lovely. Then an irresistibly goofy-looking dire bat attacks and he has a big airborne wrestling match with it as it hurtles them deeper through the caves.

Dawwwww, bat. :3

He eventually manages to bring it down and shrink it to off-model humanlike size. He's about to stab it while it's down, but decides that while it did try to kill him, it is a bat, and bats are cute and should not be harmed. Well, at least that's one thing that Arthur has his head on straight about. He leaves the bat alive and unconscious, presumably setting up a thing where it's going to rescue him later in the episode out of gratitude for him not killing it.

Loathe though I am by nature to root against bat friendship, though, I do feel the need to point out that the bat seems to be unconscious. So, if it does ends up repaying his mercy in the usual cliched manner, I'll be forced to wonder how it knew it owed him anything.

He goes on ahead, following the sword' GPS tracker to zero in on his men. Spooky cave turns into spooky first edition DnD vintage stonemasonry. Merlin starts giving him verbal directions on top of the sword GPS to help him around patrols. Apparently Merlin can scry on his location perfectly and knows everything around him as well. He falls down a thing, ends up in the dungeon where Gwen and the knights are in separate cells, and then gets ambushed by wing warlord and wolverine claw warlord.

I'll give the show credit for this fight scene. They seem to have saved the bulk of this ep's animation budget for it, and the way it captures the wolverine dude's claw-cannons, the winged Riff-Raff voiced dude's flight, and Arthur's own swordsmanship simultaneously is earnestly pretty impressive for this kind of show. It looks really smooth. There's clearly nothing wrong with the direction of these fight scenes, and you can tell they were working hard to do the best they could with limited resources.

And, it captures the Z-movie weird fantasy vibe of the time period really well. It has a quaint charm. I like the enemy designs and movesets too. Music is also decent, and well-timed to the action. Short sequence, but much higher quality visually and auditorily than anything else in the show so far.

...

This show has a lot of cool moments in it. It almost feels like the production as a whole is determined to be mediocre despite itself.

I wonder if that might be this era and genre of western animation in a nutshell, honestly. Creators with ideas and enthusiasm being forced to hammer them flat into a homogenous, hasty, grey, low-effort, censor-compliant, toy-selling paste.

The most depressing part of this comes when you think about the handful of SatAm shows that actually managed to be decent, and wonder if they happened because of the talent behind them, or just because those ones were lucky enough to have producers willing to make allowances and take risks. How much more talent, possibly even better talent, was just ground away to dust in the content mill?

...

The battle, regrettably short but enjoyable for its presence nonetheless, ends with Arthur heaving the two warlords into the well that happens to be in the dungeon, and then uses his sword beams to cut the cells open. The two bros of his who were stuck here are glad to see him, to say the least. So is Guinevere, who apparently recognizes him as her husband Arthur Pendragon.

Either Arthur King looks exactly like him due to loldestiny, or Merlin did some kind of incredibly disturbing illusion magic that makes the locals see them as the real Knights of the round table.

Arthur responds by giving Gwen a creepy grin.

-____________-

I don't think there's anything to say about this that isn't self-evident. So, I'll just take it into account in my overall assessment of the show and move on for now.

As they start navigating their way back out, we flash to Morgana's throne room, where Lord Viper is being angry at those two warlords for letting the prisoners escape.

I guess they dived to the bottom of that well and swam through a flooded passageway to get back here?

Or are they supposed to have warped through the River of Fire again?

Somehow they went from splashing around in the well in the dungeons to being in Morgana's throne room without the good guys seeing or stopping them. I guess it's possible that they just played dead and waited for Arthur to lead the prisoners away? Maybe? I guess the caves are extensive enough that a few minutes' head start might not mean all that much. On one hand, kinda dumb of Arthur and the others to not confirm the kills. On the other, he did spare the bat earlier, so I can buy that they're not yet ready for lethal violence.

Although...couldn't they still tie them up or something? Isn't that what good guys usually do to bad guys in these kind of shows with these kind of network-enforced content limitations?

Whatever. You can all just decide for yourselves how Riff-Raff and Wolverine got from there to here and how long it took them. I don't care.

On a less perplexing, more interesting, and very "I sure wish I could see the show these creators WANTED to make" note, Lord Viper's rant here includes some surprising exposition. The "warlord" soldiers aren't actually human. They're stone statues, magically animated by Morgana and given pseudo-humanlike personalities that can act on Viper's tactical leadership. This isn't an army of invaders or rebels; it's just a sorceress and a knight with a bunch of combat drones.

Like I said. More interesting than anything in this show has a right to be.

I'm really starting to wonder what a modern remake of this concept, with a proper budget and even just SLIGHTLY less stifling corporate oversight, might have looked like.

As Lord Viper continues manhandling Riff-Raff and berating him for his failure, we get some more information that...hmm. This is either really bad writing, or some very clever indirect storytelling. Probably the former, but it's hard to be sure with this show. Basically, Lord Viper doesn't seem to have known until now that Excalibur is effective against the stone bodies of the warlords. And, when Riff-Raff tries to explain it to him, he's reluctant to believe it over his own assumption that the construct is lying to hide its own inattentiveness.

On one hand, it seems like they should already know what Arthur's sword can do to the warlords, if they've been fighting them for a while.

On the other hand though...what if they HAVEN'T been fighting them for a while? What if luring Arthur and his knights into that cursed cave was actually Viper and Morgana's opening gambit, and they only started with the military conquest of Britain within the couple of weeks since then?

That would be really interesting. The villains being hampered by inexperience just like the heroes are, albeit for very different reasons.

On the other hand, the warlords haven't been fighting as if they don't expect normal weapons to be able to hurt them. They've been blocking attacks, recoiling and withdrawing away from people who aren't Arthur, etc.

...wait wait wait actually Lord Viper himself ordered them to withdraw from that battle in the forest when he couldn't win it quickly. If he actually thought the warlords were indestructible, or even if they were only indestructible to weapons besides Excalibur for that matter, he wouldn't have done that. He'd just have withdrawn HIMSELF to safety behind his minions and had them keep going until the Knights were all dead. Or, if he thought Arthur's sword might be a problem, he'd have everyone swarm Arthur and ignore all the other Knights until Excalibur was removed from play.

Okay, yeah, never mind. This is just bad writing born of no one paying attention from one scene to the next. Oh well.

Viper finishes throwing Riff-Raff and Wolverine around in frustration. Either the magic that animates them also makes them much lighter, or Lord Viper has some bigtime strength boosts on him. Well...Riff-Raff can fly, and they can all ride horses, so "magically lightweight" must be it come to think of it. Our focus shifts up to the throne now, where Morgana had been waiting for Lord Viper to finish disciplining her creations.

I really dig her vibe. Just something about the expression and body language, I don't know. Being her just looks like it would probably be fun.

She allows that Excalibur is pretty powerful, yes. But the warlords are animated by HER magic. Are they really trying to tell her that her magic is weaker than some dumb pond lady'? Riff-Raff replies that...they are her loyal servant. I don't think that was what she was asking, but she does seem to accept it as a satisfactory answer, so what do I know. Anyway, she goes over to her scrying crystal and locates the fugitives within the caves so that Viper and the rock bois can go intercept them.

Back to the fugitives! One of the knights with a really dorky fake Italian American accent comments on how bad these catacombs smell. Guinevere informs him that what he's smelling is the stink of evil. Oh cool, he has Speedwagon powers she can help him learn to master. Before she can jam her fingers into his diaphragm to try and unlock any other potential abilities, though, the baddies cut them off.

This fight is a good one, in part because it respects the audience's intelligence more than usual. It doesn't have anyone explicitly say that pushing back against a line of enemies within a relatively narrow, rectangular corridor is much closer to what the Knights are used to. Likewise, it doesn't have any character point out that Viper and Co are more used to raids and skirmishes on open ground like the one we saw them perform much better in earlier this episode. We just SEE the knights use football-adjacent tactics, and the warlords getting boxed in and pushed back.

Well. We see a few little bits of it at a time. This fight doesn't have the budget left for wide shots. But still, it works.

One they've pressed the attackers back behind a particularly narrow choke point, Arthur uses the rock-moving powers that Excalibur apparently has to seal it off. Viper has to take his synths back upstairs to get their horses and try to cut them off again on more favorable terrain. The Knight, meanwhile, make it out of the caves and into a deep ravine, where we learn that all of them can turn their shields into mounts when they have to.

Not sure why they're going with Guido's mountain goat when it seems like Arthur's dragon can do everything it can much faster and more comfortably. Maybe Arthur's shield is still on cooldown. 1/day usage item. Idk.

Guido does some roughhouse-bonding with his goat summon, and they all pile on. Fortunately, it seems able to adjust its size to accomodate a surprisingly large number of passengers, and its goatish climbing abilities are amplified to full on wall-jumping thanks to shield magic.

Once they're up top, Guido turns his goat back into a shield so they can start the long, slow trip back to Camelot on foot. Does Lance (pretty sure the other knight with them is Lance) not have a shield-summons of his own? I guess not. The summons really do seem to have a restrictive time limit on them, if they're not staying on the goat a little longer to put some distance. I guess that makes sense.

Well, Viper knows the castle grounds, and has Morgana's scrying to help him track them, so his...I wa going to say "riders," but it looks like they aren't actually mounted either after all...catch up to them again almost as soon as they've started walking. There's another fight, this one much less favorable to the Knights. The warlords are able to use their superior numbers and open-combat experience to much better effect, and soon start backing the humans back toward the ravine.

I'm still a bit frustrated that the warlords aren't fighting like indestructible rock golems, though.

Anyway. The fight is going against the Knights until a whacky grapple attempt by Lord Viper backfires and ends up with him getting hurled into the ravine.

He manages to catch himself on the cliff face, but without him the warlords seem to be fighting less effectively. The battle has already become a bit more even by the time the rest of the Knights of Justice come riding up the hill in defiance of Arthur's orders to come help out.

This is not really reflecting well at all on Arthur's own leadership, I must say.

The warlords retreat in the face of superior numbers. Wait, why the hell do the Knights have superior numbers? Didn't Arthur just aggro the enemy right in their own home base? Shouldn't there be more than a dozen warlords participating? Even before you remember that they're supposed to be unkillable by weapons that aren't Excalibur?

...actually. If the warlords really do have so few forces at home right now (maybe Viper got overconfident and had most of them out subjugating the British countryside too far away to be recalled quickly), then it seems like this would be a good time for the Knights to try and end the war. Viper's trapped for at least a little while. The warlords onsite have broken in a disorganized retreat. There might still be a few more standing guard within the castle, but not more than a few. If I were Arthur, I'd turn around and head back into the castle to hunt for Morgana at this point.

I mean, granted, they're new at this, and as a proper sorceress on her home turf she's probably going to be harder to deal with than anything they've faced yet. But I mean...they can call Merlin on Arthur's sword, right? They can ask him for advice on how to proceed. As a wizard who defends a castle, he can probably give them some good pointers on how to beat a wizard defending a castle. But no. They don't consult him. They don't even raise the subject of doing anything besides fleeing back to Camelot.

I was hoping Arthur would at least have a moment of introspection where he realizes what a moron he was to try to go this alone, but nope. He just thanks the others for coming, without any acknowledgement of how they had to defy his own orders to do so.

And then hauls Gwen up onto the horse they'd brought for him like this:

-________-

So, they had back. Dumb triumphant music plays as they run away from the battle that could and should have ended the war and gotten them back home before they've even been away for twenty-four hours.

Jump ahead to Camelot at evening. The Knights are doing their football team victory chant of "KNIGHTS! KNIGHTS! KNIGHTS! KNIGHTS!" Yeah, that's not going to tip anyone around the castle off about something being up lol. In fact, as they all sit around the feast table doing their chant and fist-shake, Guinevere and one of her maids or whatever have a conversation about just that.

They attribute it to war-trauma making them all act a little kooky. With Gwen insisting that, despite it all, she knows in her heart that the man she is looking upon is her husband, no matter what seems to have come over him.

-_____________-

The room gets quieter when Merlin enters, but then louder again when it's clear he wants a private chat with Arthur. Mostly to congratulate him on this initial victory, and to remind him that there are many battles still ahead before they can win the war and go home.

I wish he'd have explained a little more about their victory condition. What situation, if not the exact one they blithely rode away from today, would be necessary to launch the final offensive? Why will it take many more battles before they can work themselves into that situation?

Also, he tells Arthur that they need to find some kind of magic key in order to send themselves home. And his phrasing of this makes it sound like it was circumstances beyond Merlin's own control that caused them to be pulled back in time in the first place. Which is a total fucking lie.

He also tells Arthur that he's arranged for some people to meet the team tonight and take part in celebrating the initial victory. Merlin says that he believes the term for this type of person that Arthur would be most used to is "cheerleaders." At that, a squad of attractive women saunter into the feasthall.

I mean...this IS accurate to some folkloric depictions of Merlin. But the way the show is playing it off just...well, it's been pretty consistent about this sort of thing.

Also, the woman leading the group of "cheerleaders" is Guinevere. I have no idea how the hell the show wants that detail to be interpreted.

Guinevere walks over to Arthur again, her nervousness and hesitation visible in her expression. Arthur's own face is easy to read, though it's saying something different.

The Knights resume their football chant, now surrounded by "cheerleaders." Merlin looks comically dumbfounded at this display of 20th century culture, despite him apparently being able to look into the far future and know everything about it at will. End of what's essentially the two-part pilot.


I mean, I think I've said it all? There was some genuine thought and skill that went into some parts of this episode. Just, not enough to change the fundamentally thoughtless and unskilled nature of the work overall.

Granted, I don't think getting rid of corporate and giving the creators more time and money would have helped with whatever the hell this cartoon is doing with the women. That, I'm pretty sure, was all on them. A lot of cartoons from this era were sexist and low-key creepy, but this is something unusual even by those standards and thus difficult to attribute to the production environment.

Well, there's one more episode in queue. I guess I'll see if there's anything worth saying about this one.