King Arthur and the Knights of Justice S1E3: "The Unbeliever"

Alright, episode 3. Expectations are pretty low at this point, but there might be some other decent bits to wish were in a better show. Or at least exceptionally WTF bits to be funny at. A full turnaround is...unlikely, but I suppose nothing is impossible.


The intro theme is actually kinda cool. Not sure if I mentioned it before. Them guitar riffs.

This episode does open on a more interesting note than the previous ones, showing the consequences of Morgana and Viper's uprising from the "ground level" so to speak. A frightened-looking peasant tiptoeing passed a warlord camp and trying to make his way toward the walls of Camelot in the distance.

A reminder that things are probably pretty shit for commonfolk outside of Camelot's immediate sphere right now.

Or...well...maybe. Actually, thinking about this more (and possibly more than the show itself will, though it may pleasantly surprise me here), how bad ARE Morgana and Viper from a peasant perspective? Their soldiers are all animated stone statues, more or less. I don't think they need food, or have any desire for personal property beyond their equipment. I'm not sure if they enjoy creature comforts. I'm not sure if they'd have reason to bother with the sort of pillaging and rapine you get from human armies.

On the other hand, we see this group of warlords huddled around a campfire, implying that they need or at least prefer to be warm. So there is some resource consumption going on. How much, though?

I mean, maybe Morgana needs a constant supply of blood sacrifices or something to keep them all animated. That would definitely make their presence in the land a dire threat to the peasants. But until that's been established it's really an open question. And I don't know if 90's children's programming would allow something like that even if the writers did want to go there.

Well, anyway. Our bearded friend creeps his way passed the warlords, but not very far passed. Once he leaves the tree line and starts crossing the bit of open steppe surrounding the castle, he gets spotted pretty quickly. And...I'm not sure if the warlords just want to keep the castle as isolated as possible, of if seeing a living thing in their designated battlefield triggers part of their battle programming, or what, but in any case they REALLY go all out trying to catch this guy. Enough to make the chase easily spottable for the knights on the castle walls.

I kinda hope that my second guess is in fact correct. People being afraid of the warlords because, despite their pseudo-human personalities, they are ultimately a bunch of twitchy war robots whose creator was much more concerned with battlefield responsiveness than with avoiding collateral damage. That's an interesting concept. I like that.

There's a bit of an unconventional engagement, as the knights use ranged attacks to repel the pursuers and buy the peasant more breathing room. The warlords aren't using any ranged attacks of their own, though. Either they want to interrogate this guy, or it's creator laziness. Still, that puzzling detail aside, this is a very different sort of fight from the usual both for this show and for cartoons in general, which I appreciate. My only other complaint about this scene is that it drags on slightly longer than it feels like it should have, which is another minor issue.

Eventually, the knights on the walls are able to hold the warlords back until Arthur and a couple others can gear up, get their horses, and ride out to bring the man into safety. It turns out that Morgana was scrying on this unfolding scene the whole time, and she and Viper are both pretty pleased with the outcome.

This was all a setup, then? Seems like it. I guess that explains why the warlords were simultaneously putting so much effort into chasing the guy and so little into actually stopping them. Though in that case Arthur and Co should have probably noticed something was up, even with their inexperience.

The peasant himself could be in on the plot, or he could just be a dupe. We'll see!

Anyway, next scene has the peasant inform the knights that the resistance group he's connected to believes that they've located one of the "keys of truth" that can...erm, the show isn't super clear about what these things do. Either release the real Arthur and Co from imprisonment in the cave, or let them go back home, or both. Anyway, it's in an abandoned church, and part of the reason they think it's the real deal is because there's a fucking dragon guarding the building and incinerating anything that comes too close. Those things don't tend to stand guard over nothing, you know.

For some reason, one of the knights refuses to believe in dragons. Even after all the other shit they've seen. Even after the others point out to him that he has no reason not to believe in them with all the other shit they've seen. Hell, didn't Arthur literally summon a dragon in front of all of them just one episode ago? Well, he'll learn. Maybe. The last dragon he saw apparently wasn't enough.

Guinevere advises Arthur to consult Merlin about how to deal with the dragon, but Arthur shrugs her off because Merlin already told him all about the keys and how to collect them.

Erm. Okay. Did that include instructions on how to fight dragons? Did Merlin know about the dragon when he gave Arthur that information?

What does Arthur mean that there's "no need to bother" going to get Merlin for this. The dude lives in the castle, right? It takes what, five minutes to get ahold of him? Fifteen minutes tops? Assuming he can't just call him on his sword again?

One of the other knights says that he doesn't like Merlin because he's old.

So, despite Guinevere's increasingly distressed pleas, they don't.

I can't decide if this is even dumber than not believing in dragons at this point, or just exactly as dumb.

I know (or at least, I hope) the episode is going to have a lesson to teach, but it could have done that while giving Arthur at least a superficially reasonable-seeming reason for making his mistake. Like, Merlin is off for a few days being busy with wizard stuff and can't be reached, and the knights are restless to go get this done and start making progress toward getting home already. That would have worked.

Well, they do their transformation sequence in what feels like it might actually be subtle slow-motion to fill up a little more screentime, and off they go. This episode is so padded and I'm not even halfway through yet lmao. There's some unfunny comedy involving the squire boys tending their horses (I think this might be even more filler. We'll see if the squires end up being important, but I strongly suspect they won't), some cringe with one of the knights brushing off a prophetic dream that his favorite cheerleader had about them all getting themselves ambushed by a massive warlord army and killed, and they're off.

Assuming her dream really is prophetic, then Morgana's plan is probably a pretty simple one. Let the knights engage the dragon, then bring a nearby warlord force up out of hiding and flank them. If the dragon melts those warlords after the humans between them are down, well, the cost is worth it. And hey, the simpler plans tend to be the better plans.

The one dumbass still thinks dragons existing is dumb. Arthur has to remind him that there are going to be plenty of warlords between them and the site either way, so they need to go out in force and bring lots of firepower even if there isn't a dragon.

As they leave Camelot (or at least, as some of them do? I hope they didn't bring the entire team and leave the castle undefended...), that peasant turns to the camera with a delightfully dorky evil grin.

He is now my favorite character in this show. Easily.

The knights leave. Encounter warlords at the treeline, who put up a show of resistance before allowing themselves to be pushed back and retreating into the surrounding woods. Lame quips are made at the warlords' expense, which often involve knowledge of their individual names that the knights shouldn't yet have. Whatever. After the knights break through, the warlords regroup and congratulate themselves on a convincing performance; the knights don't seem to have suspected a thing.

Also, the wide shots sometimes show a large group of warlords, but whenever there's a close enough look to see details it's always the same 4-5 individuals with distinctive equipment and abilities. I know a lot of western cartoons use this sort of shorthand, using the same few stock characters at every location to represent a faction as a whole, but in this case it might not be that. Morgana could have actually made hundreds of copies of this team of 4-5 constructs. Again, this could be interesting in a better show.

Back at the castle, Guinevere tries to ask Merlin to do something. He tells her that he trusts Arthur's judgement, and that if he didn't think consulting Merlin was necessary then Merlin is inclined to agree.

He also babbles some nonsense about each man needing to face adversity on his own and learn from his own mistakes. Oh my god what a twat.

When Guinevere says that the man who brought the message has vanished, and that she suspects he might have been an enemy agent, Merlin's eyes narrow for a moment...but then he just repeats the same nonsense and keeps playing around making smoke clouds with his alchemy set.

Also, the man who "disappeared" is literally watching this conversation through the door. Either he can turn invisible, or they just have the absolute worst security ever.

Why IS this guy still here, anyway?

He sneaks away into the castle and mumbles to himself about how much more gold he might be able to get out of Morgana if he manages to do some sabotage while he's here. Maybe he'll see if he can break the Round Table or something before he makes his escape. Best character.

Off in the woods, the knights and the squire boy they took with them find the ruined town and...church? It looks more like a watchtower, but I guess it's supposed to be a church...with a dragon standing on the roof just kinda flexing.

Squire boy is scared to advance. Arthur tells him that if he wants to be a knight one day he needs to learn to not be such a goddamned coward, he picked this kid to bring for a reason while leaving the other one to clean the stables while they're gone, don't make him regret that decision. True dat.

The one knight is like "holy shit dragons are real after all." Moron.

Another comments that this thing is "like godzilla with wings," which got a snort from me. This thing appears to be, at the very most, elephant sized. Which is a pretty intimidatingly large creature, don't get me wrong, even before you consider the flight and fire breath and scales, but I mean...godzilla would be twice as tall as the damned tower. There's absolutely no comparison. Honestly, if he'd said King Kong that would have been closer to the mark.

As they enter the ruined town, a warlord army emerges from the woods behind them and starts pushing them forward, sandwiching them against the dragon. The dragon doesn't seem to be attacking, so that might have been a miscalculation on Morgana's part, but the warlords at least are laying on some pretty massive suppressive fire while their melee guys advance in force.

Somehow, Arthur decides that they need to hide inside the church with the dragon on top of it.

-______-

Why? There are other buildings.

So, they run into the church/tower/whatever and bar the door behind them. The WOODEN door. Yeah. It lasts about thirty seconds against the warlords' axes and rams. Notably, the warlords don't seem hesitant about getting close to the dragon either.

There's one nice shot, though. The "camera" looking in through a tower window as the knights and squire run up the spiral staircase passed it.

Again. They're few and far between, but there are enough cool and inventive visual things like this that feel genuinely effortful spread throughout the show, and it just...once again, I wish this talent had somewhere to actually go.

They reach the top, and the one dude is really smug when the dragon turns out to be an illusion.

Dude, you still saw a dragon last episode.

Also, are magic holograms really any less unbelievable than...meh, whatever.

As the illusion dragon dissipates, it is replaced by another phantasm. Morgana calls them on the sky to make fun of them for being dumb and walking into her trap.

There was a missed opportunity for some comedy here. Arthur could have turned to the others and gone "um...who the heck was that lady?" and then the only two knights who have actually seen Morgana in person so far would have to explain it to him and the others. Ah well.

Anyway. They're stuck on this rooftop, holding a chokepoint at the stairwell, with an overwhelming warlord force pressing in and upward.

...

Hey, I have a question.

If there wasn't actually a dragon, what was the point of luring the knights to this location?

This ruined town offers, at best, only slightly less cover and slightly more enclosure than any given patch of forest. They couldn't have known the knights would retreat into the damned tower (and even if they did, how is that better than chasing them into any other confined area? Hell, wouldn't it have been better to pick an ambush site without any such cover at all?).

If the only "trick" here was an overwhelmingly large number of warlord soldiers, why didn't they just do this in the woods? What was the point of letting the knights fight there way passed a small number of warlords before confronting them with a large number of warlords, when they could have just had the large number of warlords there to begin with?

I was hoping that the real trap was going to be that the warlords had the tower undermined and ready to collapse with the knights inside of it. But no. This entire thing was fucking pointless.

...

To get down from the tower, the knights use this one guy's ability to conjure building materials, and the annoying smart guy's knowledge, and start building a glider.

Guess we're just forgetting all about that dragon-summoning power from beginning to end, then.

Back at the castle, Best Character tries to set the (apparently completely unguarded) round table on fire with a torch, but gets spotted by the other squire boy who was sweeping a nearby floor and happened to smell the smoke from the torch.

That table is pretty clearly made of stone. And even if it wasn't, trying to set solid hardwood furniture on fire with a fucking torch is...well, it's doable, but you're going to have to stand there for quite a while.

They scuffle. Merlin hears the scuffle and chases the guy out of the castle. Yay, other squire boy is a hero even though they left him behind.

Back in the woods, the knights flee the warlords, but then get caught by Lord Viper and some others. They fight until they start getting overwhelmed, and then one of them uses his shield-summons to conjure a giant bird to fly them away. Right passed the tower that they needed to build a glider to escape from two minutes ago.

The bird flies them all the way to Camelot.

Everyone apologizes for being dumb, the squires get headpats, and Sir Whatever goes on a date with the prophetic cheerleader. The end.


I'm sorry. I can't even try to make this shit entertaining. Anything promising about the two-part pilot (and there was only a limited amount of that to begin with) has been promptly lost.

Very rare bits of visual artistry or wasted conceptual potential aside, this is just such a generic, banal, unremarkable, lukewarm flavor of bad. Not even WTF mindblowing bad. Just the processed tears of frustrated artists, congealed and shrinkwrapped through the most low-effort and low-cost assembly line imaginable, and then marketed to a child audience who the executives hold in utter contempt.

Okay, the way the women besides Morgana get treated is actually WTF mindblowing bad. In a way that's shocking even by the standards of this show's time and place. But it's not shocking in a way that gives me anything to analyze or anything; just wears its self-explanatory disgustingness on its sleeve, no analysis required or merited.

Once again, it really is becoming clear to me why anime took the western child and teen viewership by storm in the 1990's. With rare exceptions, all it had to compete with was garbage like this.