[AYAOTD? Recap with Erin Callahan] S06E01 "The Tale of the Zombie Dice"

RECAP

Megan brings a couch to the clearing and Vange goes full-Cleopatra as Quinn and Andy carry her into the Midnight Society circle on a chair. After moving to the storyteller’s chair, she weaves a tale about a game that might be the last one you ever play.

Even after he gets sent to the guidance office for gambling in class, risk-taker Tate gives his best friend Alex a hard time for never taking chances. Later, Alex and his brother head to Click’s Emporium, a basement soda bar and arcade. Tate challenges Alex to several bets, but Alex won’t take any of them, even the ones he knows he can win. After overhearing them, Click, owner of the emporium, challenges Tate to a game -- if Tate wins, he gets free run of the emporium for a year; and if he loses, Click gets Tate’s thumbprint. The following evening, Tate takes Click up on his offer. They play a game of zombie dice and Tate loses. Click asks him to press his thumb on the glowing glass plate at the top of a pedestal. His thumb sticks and he’s then shrunk down to the size of an action figure and placed in a tiny cage to be sold...as a pet! Alex and his brother return to the emporium to look for Tate. After being accosted by Click’s lumbering assistant, Klimbo, Alex finds Tate, tiny and locked up, and demands Click set him free. When Click refuses, Alex challenges him to a game. Alex loses, but agrees to go double or nothing, throwing his brother into the mix to up the ante. Click agrees, and Alex outwits him in a soda drinking challenge. Tate is set free and, finally fed up with his boss, Klimbo shrinks Click and puts him in a cage.

Vange reveals that no one ever played another game in Click’s Emporium, and the Midnight Society head home, leaving Quinn asleep on the couch. 

REVIEW

T: And after Megan complained about the logs last week, she makes the boys bring in furniture. From the “nearby dump.” That’ll get rained on and be way more disgusting than logs… Oh Megan, what are we going to do with you?

E: This seems like such a shortsighted teenage decision, and yet I’m also weirdly proud of her for addressing the problem herself instead of being passive-aggressive and whiny about it? God, my bar for this new crew is so low.

T: So after Tucker’s story last week about games, Vange decides to tell one about… games? I kind of hope every Vange story is a rip-off of whoever went the week before.

E: That could be her thing! I’m going to tell the same story you just told but...better.

T: The triumphant return of Jay Baruchel after the invisible corpse drowned him in “Dead Man’s Float.”

E: He looks so much older than he did in “Dead Man’s Float,” but also so much younger than he did in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. That said, you can see why he’s had a successful career. This isn’t one of my favorite episodes, but he’s charming here as a kid wracked with self-doubt.

T: Tate is both awful and a fun character? I keep flipping back and forth between hating him or not.

E: He’s better than the toxic older brother that we had to suffer through last week. I feel like Tate is that classic trope of a cocky cool-guy who exists mostly to pull our protagonist out of his shell. But he really does care about the protagonist, even when he’s being a dick to him. Basically, he’s the fourteen-year-old gamer version of Vince Vaughn’s character in Swingers. Alex, you’re money. You’re so money and you don’t even know it.

T: I’m not sure if they could hammer home the theme of Alex not taking risks any more. Maybe if Vange had a voice over mid-story – “Alex won’t take risks!”

E: Omg, that would’ve been amazing. Or a mid-episode return to the Midnight Society circle, where Andy is like, “So...wait...you’re saying Alex doesn’t like to take risks?”

T: Cut to Kiki: “What is a leprechaun?” and then one of Frank’s, “Say what?!”

E: Perfection.

T: The arcade setting is a lot of fun.

E: I LOVE the emporium. It’s the kind of nerdy-cool den that  could’ve been in Hackers, but aged down appropriately for a tween audience. I always wanted a cool hangout as a teen, but they rarely seem to exist in real life, right? Like, they exist in fiction because we need a place where kids hang out and hijinks ensue, but how many cool places for teens and tweens exist in actual reality? Also, what is that horrid electric-green soda they’re all drinking? Is that supposed to be Mountain Dew?

T: I feel like teen hang-outs exist in cities. I wondered what that drink was. It’s not too dark or too thick to be fake, so yeah Mountain Dew?

E: Gross.

T: Gamesmaster Mr. Click is like a creepy Tobias Funke. You know I love a good campy villain.

E: Ha! Such a great comparison. He’s absolutely over the top, but in a fun way.

T: For Alex being the main character, we spend a whole lot of time with Tate losing at Zombie Dice.

E: Good point, but I suppose that’s partly because that’s when the game is introduced?

T: Speaking of the titular game here, what are the odds at winning? I never took statistics, but it seems fairly low. You throw two dice three times, so the odds of the zombie coming up just once on one die is pretty high.

E: I guess that puts it in the same league as most casino games. Official petition to have zombie dice added to every Vegas casino!

T: Okay, so they never say it, but Mr. Click’s an alien right? The hidden compartment, the coocoo bananas thumb print shrink machine? He doesn’t feel like “evil sci-fi scientist who invented this stuff.” He feels like “conman who profits off it.” Also, he’s totally the Master from Doctor Who if he was played by David Cross. The Master wears those collarless jackets and has regularly shrunk people to miniature size, and is just as camp.

E: The collarless shirt cracked me up so hard. And yes, I’m going with aliens, but I’m also totally intrigued by his buyers? Is the one in Australia also an alien? Or are there sick human beings willing to pay big moola for living, action-figure-size teenagers?

T: It’s got to be aliens. All aliens all the time. Because who on Earth would want a strange teenager as a pet? Especially someone like Tate who’d keep calling you “old bud.”

E: Yeah that sounds like a pain in the ass.

T: Is there something deeply wrong about Mr. Click selling children as pets to rich foreigners???

E: Um, fuck yes. You know I’m not a fan of Hostel, but I couldn’t help thinking of Elite Hunting. And, in that case, those poor souls were full-grown twenty-somethings, not young teens. This is some seriously dark content that’s tempered just a bit by the fact that the shrunken version of Tate is kind of cute and funny. But when Mr. Click mentioned that not all the shrunken kids survive the journey to their buyers, I think I audibly gagged.

T: The Tiny Tate effect is relatively simple but very often the green screen wouldn’t look this good.

E: It totally works, especially with all the details in his little cage.

T: The central conceit here is that when you take someone’s thumbprint, you own them? Okay…

E: Yeah, not a big fan of this element. I feel like the shrinking and the way the kids are tricked into it could’ve been much more interesting.

T: Okay, I went back and rewatched earlier. They absolutely do not establish Andre is Alex’s little brother, right? There’s no “even your little brother has more guts than you” expositional line or anything like that. Did you catch his relationship before Alex bets his life away?

E: LOL, really? I totally assumed they were siblings. Do they just have a brotherly vibe?

T: I didn’t think so. First viewing I thought it was just a younger classmate.

E: Weird. Maybe I picked up little brother vibes because I have a little brother?

T: The cup trick solution is fun. It’s nice seeing Jay Baruchel get to play confident at the end.

E: It’s clever and Alex’s confidence is pretty satisfying.

T: Mr. Click getting captured because he mistreated his servant is also a very Master-like comeuppance.

E: Do you think Klimbo was another one of Click’s victims at some point? Maybe a buyer who couldn’t pay his debt?

T: He’s something. I feel like Click and Klimbo have a very rich backstory that we’re not privy to. Especially when Klimbo puts on the glasses and hat and sort of turns into Click.

QUEER OR NOT?

T: Something I found cool – Tucker lays on the couch, then Andy and Quinn fight for the other space on it and Andy wins. Tucker doesn’t really push over, he and Andy both recline on it with Tucker leaning on him. Let’s take a moment to appreciate straight guys (Tucker/Daniel DeSanto) being comfortable with physical contact with their gay buds (Andy/David Deveau).

E: ~*~APPRECIATION~*~

T: Also, Mr. Click isn’t quite as over the top as, say, Sardo, but he’s definitely camp.

E: Absolutely. Perhaps because his emporium reminded me of something from Hackers, it struck me that he’s the kind of camp-meets-tech weirdo who also wouldn’t have been out of place in that movie. And it’s not a great movie, but there’s a refreshing amount of queerness in it for something that came from the ’90s.

TRIVIA, USELESS TRIVIA

T: The unnamed teacher who catches Tate playing Three Card Monte? She’s played by Jane Gilchrist, who we last saw way back in “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” as enslaved Goth acolyte Ms. Crenshaw.

E: Fun!

MODERNIZE ’90s CANADIAN KIDS

T: And this is two weeks in a row that the story doesn’t feel all that outdated. I’d establish Mr. Click as an alien to get some sort of greater threat looming over them, but the gambling throughline works for the most part. The humor’s not laugh out loud funny but there’s a pleasant lightness that’s fun.

E: Agreed, though would it make sense to move the emporium online? I’d hate to lose the rad physical space, but I’m not sure how many kids actually go to arcades now versus playing at home from computers or consoles. That said, you could open up new levels of creep if you moved the games online and posed the question of an IRL meetup. “This guy could be anyone! He could be an alien for all we know!” LOLOLOLOL. Either way, I one-hundred percent vote for Click keeping the shiny, collarless ensemble.

T: Um, Fun World in little ole Laconia is still jamming. Or was pre-COVID.

E: It’s Funspot, but yeah. Fair point.

JUST GIVE IT A NUMERICAL RATING ALREADY

T: This one’s fun. The solution is clever. Acting is solid. Tate’s a little annoying, but not that bad. On the other hand, the story is fairly simple and the writers forgot there’s this word called “nuance.” If it didn’t have Jay Baruchel, would it be somewhat forgettable? I’m going to give it a good but never great 7.5 CAMPFIRES OUT OF 10.

E: There are elements I love here, but it fails to come together for me in a memorable way. It’s just meh, unfortunately. I didn’t love the last episode, but at least its toxic masculinity gave me something to rage about. Once again, I’ll go with an even 7 CAMPFIRES OUT OF 10.