[AYAOTD? Recap with Erin Callahan] S05E08 "The Tale of the Manaha"

RECAP

Stig and Tucker plan a scare for the Midnight Society, which involves Tucker dressed in a gorilla costume. The gang is more annoyed than scared, but Tucker uses the prank as a jumping off point for a story about creatures that lurk in the forest.

Five boys at Camp Towaki are heading off for an overnight trip with junior counselor Lonnie, who’s in full drill sergeant mode. Enthusiastic Jonah lags behind, but has prepared for this trip by reading a wilderness survival guide by Oscar Butts, which includes advice about fear. After Lonnie’s backpack falls off a ledge, he forces Jonah to retrieve it. Jonah finds a cave with images of monsters painted on the walls, as well as a statue of a monster. When he moves the statue, a native Shaman appears and warns Jonah of the Manaha, flesh-eating monsters that roam the forest. Lonnie finds Jonah in the cave and doesn’t believe his story about the Manaha, but takes the statue, thinking it’s a valuable artifact. Later that night, Lonnie is captured by a creature that leaves a massive footprint. The boys try to seek help at the ranger station, but find the place trashed. Strange things start to happen and Jonah finds the Manaha statue in the woods, its eyes now glowing. Quoting Oscar Butts, Jonah explains to his fellow campers that the Manaha can’t hurt them if they don’t believe in them. The Shaman reappears and explains that his people imprisoned him in a cave because his magic became too powerful and he wanted the woods to himself. He then captures Lonnie, the ranger, and one of the campers, stringing them up above piles of kindling. Jonah threatens to use the statue to summon the Manaha and imprisons the Shaman back in his cave. The other campers appear, revealing that Jonah had them pretend to be the Manaha to trick the Shaman.

Tucker runs off before the gang can get revenge for the gorilla-costume prank, but forgets the head of the costume.

REVIEW

T: I’m going to say it – Stig’s growing on me. I couldn’t stand him at first, but last week’s wolf howl bit was funny and I kind of like Tucker having a co-conspirator. I noticed something. Stig is tiny. We usually see him sitting alone or near Tucker, but when he’s talking to the gang in this one, he’s looking up at Kiki, and I don’t think he even reaches Gary’s shoulders. Gives him more of a scrappy, underdog vibe. Still not a fan, but tolerable now.

E: I’ll be honest. As soon as he said “Sike!” after the gorilla-costume prank, he lost me for good. You cannot recover from “Sike!”

T: Tucker’s into cryptozoology. That fits. Too bad he didn’t tell a story about all those monsters he rattles off. I kind of wish he’d gone full-on character acting like Kristen used to and narrate his story as Bigfoot.

E: Holy shit, that would’ve brought a whole new dimension to Tucker. And I feel like almost any one of those monsters would’ve made for a more interesting story. Flesh eating giants of Mandalay? Yes please.

T: I don’t care for the Oscar Butts running gag, but the props department put together a realistic looking book, so kudos there. Unlike “Quicksilver”s plain Ghosts. AYAOTD? has some great humor, but the Butts joke is really juvenile.

E: Kids really do love toilet humor, don’t they? The Butts gag isn’t even clever, but the book certainly is a step up from the generic Ghosts tome.

T: I just can’t with this episode. Lonnie is so irritating. It’s not an army camp, it’s summer camp. Lighten up. And how about we don’t fat shame Eddy?

E: This is precisely the kind of child abuse we not only tolerated onscreen, once upon a time, but actually found funny, isn’t it? If Lonnie were a real camp counselor who tried to pull that BS today, he’d be fired in a heartbeat, thank god.

T: I think the problem is there’s too many characters. Besides the camp owner, ranger, and Shaman, there’s six characters all jammed into this nineteen-minute story. Yes, it’s realistic that the overnight group would have that many boys, but it means no one gets any character development. There’s drill sergeant, fat one, scared one, nerd, main kid, and random other kid.

E: They’re all very thinly-developed stock characters. I’d say the camp thing can’t be done in 20 minutes, but “Watcher’s Woods” pulls it off, doesn’t it? I guess the key there is you whittle the cast down for most of the episode.

T: The Shaman looks really cool. I was so afraid they’d do something super racist with the character, but nothing pinged for me. And we do get native actor Michael Greyeyes playing the role. He might be hard to recognize under the tribal make-up, but he’s been in a lot of stuff, like Blood Quantum, Fear the Walking Dead, True Detective, etc.

E: I have mixed thoughts on this, and I should note that, as two white people, our opinions here are limited by our experiences. The Shaman may not seem like the most egregious stereotype to us, but he probably is, and this is certainly the kind of story that should give any non-Native writer pause. Like, can’t you tell a story about creatures who live in the woods without tying it to Native American lore? Lore which you will almost certainly get wrong unless you hire an army of sensitivity readers? Manaha isn’t even an actual Native word or legend. It’s just Native-coded, which doesn’t sit well with me.

T: I will point out that we just celebrated “Badge” for using vaguely sounding Celtic terms without using actual Celtic mythology. But that wasn’t insensitive to the Irish? Like, I’m not trying to be an ass, I’m interested in the distinction.

E: That’s a fair point, but I think the distinction lies in persisting structures of power and oppression. The Irish have certainly been oppressed at certain points in history, but Irish citizens and Americans with Irish ancestry now benefit from a tremendous amount of white privilege, thus any messy cultural appropriation has a different impact. That’s obviously not the case for Native Americans. Also, I feel like the content here brushes up against the line of harmful stereotypes, particularly when the Shaman strings up the ranger and the two campers. I’m not sure there’s anything in “Badge” that comes that close to perpetuating a harmful stereotype. Willy is a hero!

T: Lonnie immediately plunders the cave. This is representational of cultural appropriation? Or am I giving the episode too much credit.

E: Oh interesting. I didn’t pick up on that though you have a point — there is an air of colonialism around Lonnie that the episode doesn’t seem to look favorably on. Hard to say how intentional that is.

T: The theme of this episode is “conquer fear” but it should be “cultural appropriation is bad.”

E: Aaaaaaaaa-men.

T: I do like the bit with Andy laughing at Jonah and trying to share that moment with Lonnie, who shoots him down. That’s one of the rare intentional jokes in here that lands for me.

E: It’s very ’90s humor but in a way that sorta works.

T: The Bigfoot footprint disappearing is a nice effect. Same when Jonah realizes the ranger station isn’t really ransacked.

E: Yes! The visuals are solid and this plays nicely into the “what’s real and what’s not” themes of the episode.

T: Jonah makes his own Manaha to flip the script on the Shaman? Okay, thematically it makes sense. But why does the Shaman believe the made up creatures he invented are real? He questions it for a second at least.

E: I’ll be honest. I get the overall themes of this ep, but I’m not sure the plot makes sense to me. I suppose it’s a giant mindfuck for a tween audience, but does it actually work? Who or what exactly was the Shaman hunting when his people imprisoned him? What is he going to do with the prisoners he’s strung up, besides burn them? I just have so many questions.

T: He doesn’t say he was hunting, he says the others thought he wanted the forest for himself. It’s very vague and not cliched evil. Like, the Shaman was imprisoned for practicing dark magic, and once he’s freed, he tries several times to trick the campers into leaving before he resorts to violence. I think this helps veer it away from being offensive -- he just wants to be left alone.

E: Are you sure? I like your interpretation, but he literally says, “Now that you have released me, the forest is my hunting ground once again. I warned you to leave, but now it is too late.” He says all this riiiiiiight before he puts a torch to the kindling below Eddy’s feet. It leaves his motivations pretty muddled.

QUEER OR NOT?

T: Not specifically, but Jonah’s whole character arc is that he’s a “runt,”  i.e. not manly enough, so no one thinks he can be any good doing tough guy camping activities. It’s a little like the opposite of “Lonely Ghost” that didn’t feature any male characters. Here, we’re on the flipside, examining alpha male toxicity without a single female presence.

E: The alpha male toxicity is abundant in this one. Lonnie is basically a watered-down version of John Wayne from the Stanford Prison Experiment. And I do find it refreshing that Jonah doesn’t use violence to defeat the Shaman.

TRIVIA, USELESS TRIVIA

T: Eddy’s played by David Deveau, who will go on to do twenty-six more episodes of the series, when he joins the Midnight Society for seasons six and seven.

E: Oh snap!

T: Lonnie is played by A.J. Buckley. This was one of his first roles, and he does a lot of TV, like eight years on CSI: NY and now SEAL Team.

E: Network crime dramas seem like the right place for him.

T: This clarifies a plot hole from “Ghastly Grinner,” as the famous comic pops up here and is described as volume six. It always bothered me that the Grinner was supposed to be this iconic character but only appears in one unfinished comic book? This establishes Uncas was working on volume six, issue one.

E: As someone who doesn’t know anything about comic books, I don’t really know what you’re talking about but yay!!

MODERNIZE ’90s CANADIAN KIDS

T: There are some good thematic ideas here that are so muddled. First: either separate the main characters so we focus on two instead of six, or turn it into a feature length. There’s enough material for that. Second: lose the fat shaming and juvenile humor. Third: have the camp owner also be Native and tighten the theme that white people shouldn’t plunder Native artifacts.

E: If you’re going to keep the Native rep, you really need to do your homework and not make this generic, Native-coded imagery and lore. But I like the idea of making the camp owner Native as well and teaching these campers a lesson about colonialism and cultural appropriation. You could also use that as a platform to address the unfortunate existence of all these American summer camps run by and for white people with appropriated Native names (like Camp Towaki) and ceremonies. Though that’s a whole other cultural minefield. Yeesh.

JUST GIVE IT A NUMERICAL RATING ALREADY

T: This whole episode feels like missteps and missed opportunities. Some ideas are just too big for nineteen minutes. This might be a tad harsh, but I’m going with 5.9 CAMPFIRES OUT OF 10.

E: Oof, though I’m not a big fan either. The episode gets points for some solid effects and creepy imagery, but the lore is a mess and it’s hard for me to look past the stereotypes. I’m not sure I’ve ever done this but I’m going with 5 CAMPFIRES OUT OF 10.

T: Damn, you went there. Because you semi-asked, I looked back at my Excel chart for our grades (because of course I log all that). This is not your lowest score. You also gave “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and “Long Ago Locket” 5’s, but “Locker 22” received a 4. Looking back at it, we were pretty harsh to “Nightly Neighbors” and “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and they’re much better than the episodes we later rated 5 to 6.

E: Poor “Nightly Neighbors.” You deserved better.