One of the things that I constantly find so charming about the Gremlins animated series is even though it’s locked in hard when it comes to nostalgia concerning the original, 1984 classic, it’s not above chucking in some nostalgia for other eighties movies too. But while we’ve gotten nods to such flicks as Big Trouble In Little China (letting a wizened James Wong screw around with magic is a huge tell), the series’ move to America means that the opportunity to homage has gotten much greater. The last episode already gave us a sizable riff on Ghostbusters, but for this episode the show is about to finally go full Western as we take in ironically named towns, ghostly lawmen and showdowns on main street. Better yet, the expansive cast has also managed to reel in none other than the rumbly larynx of Keith David in a sizable role as we edge ever closer to a showdown with a water God. But is the show starting to miss the big picture as it focuses so intently on unrelated spooky shenanigans?
Sam, Elle, Gizmo and Chang reach their latest stop on their cross country road trip to seek out the water God, Kung Kung and free Ellie’s estranged mother from her watery enchantment and stop for gas in the isolated desert town called Innocence. However, Elle has a visit from Margot while getting water for the group who floats (pun intended) the idea of them both becoming a family again once her spell is lifted which leaves her feeling conflicted. While she’s always yearned for a mother who cared, Margot had let her down repeatedly before she found herself in her current liquidy state and she’s not willing to abandon her good friends Sam and Giz for such a pipe dream just yet.
Meanwhile, in an effort to score some free fuel, Chang is trying to charm the townsfolk by telling them stories about Sam’s slightly exaggerated adventures as the ghost fighting Kid In The Hat, but this promptly backfires when the denizens steal their truck and refuse to give it back until Sam deals with the ghost problems currently afflicting Innocence. It seems that the spirit of the disgruntled lawman, Marshall Bass Reeves, has taken umbrage that the founders of Innocence are all former outlaws who put all their ill gotten gains together to build a new life for themselves in the form of the town. While Reeves can’t actually physically bring any of these one time criminals in, his plan is to strafe Innocence every night with his exploding silver dollars that he flings about the place like the Green Goblin when there’s a sake in pumpkin bombs until the townsfolk turn themselves in.
Meanwhile, while Sam’s family ride the Train Between Worlds to get to their child before he awakens Kung Kung, Grandpa Wing tells Fong and Hon his origin story and how he came to have a near close encounter with Kung Kung himself. But as he spills his secrets, a hidden Noggin listens, hoping to bide his time and strike at the right moment – or at the end of the story, whichever comes first.
While I would suggest that there may be a noticable lack of movement on the main plot front, once again The Wild Batch manages to divert any issues by simply having a great stand alone adventure save the day. By their own admission, trying to find an all encompassing water God by driving across a desert wasn’t really getting Sam, Elle, Gizmo and Chang anywhere when it came to their goal and further more, there’s still no real advancement of Gizmo’s random shifting to evil even though he seemingly does it at least once an episode now. Elsewhere, the question of Chang’s wobbly loyalty is still somewhat up in the air, Grandpa Wing is in full origin story mode and whatever Noggin is cooking up in the bulbous green head of his is still in something of a holding pattern. However, while the certain money is that everyone – be they Gremlin, con artist or boy adventurer – will all converge on Kung Kung hoping that they’ll all score a wish to help them out, the fact that we don’t get that much movement with any of those stories doesn’t seem to be an issue when the episode is this well put together.
We’ll deal with the main chunk of the episode soon enough, but first let’s round up the outlining story points and even though most of it is just various forms of checking in to remind younger (or more forgetful) viewers about what the grander stakes are, the deep dive into Grandpa Wing’s rather salty past proves to be pretty fun. Offering a look at Grandpa’s highly expendable group of adventure buddies who all met horrible ends on the road to finding Kung Kung (giant spider being the nastiest), the tale soon goes even darker when we not only get another reminder how shitty the young Grandpa was to his godly love, Jingwei, but things get pretty dark when an encounter with her ex ends in tragedy and murder. Once again, it’s fairly impressive to me how grim Gremlins can go while still keeping that cheeky sense of humour, even when Grandpa attitude change forces him to kill his last two friends to stop Kung Kung being awakened.
Back in the bulk of the episode, there’s an intriguing sense of role reversal when it’s actually Ellie who figures out a non-violent way to subdue the coin flicking Reeves (who, by the way, was a real person in history who can count being a Marshall, a gunslinger, a farmer, a scout and a runaway slaves among his sizable C.V.), while Sam dissappears further into his Kid In The Hat persona and plays the enthusiastic ghostbuster. This is because Reeves, for all his experience, doesn’t believe that people can change while Elle has taken personal pride by ditching her criminal past and when Sam arrives in full ghost catching mode and attempts to imprison the law upholding spirit in an enchanted flask, Elle talks him out of it.
It’s a simple tale well told, but what puts it over the top is veteran voice over artist and character actor extrodinare, Keith David, who brings his baritone gravel to his lines and describing a feral Gizmo as a miniature chubracabra. The visuals of Reeves lighting up the town with his coins that explode into green smoke adds a cool, spectral sheen and the character even provides a way for the show to finally get fully on the Kung Kung trail by having the Marshall actually clue our heroes in on the Train Between Worlds, which surely means that this second half of the second season is now about to hopefully start it’s plunge towards the finale.
Light on Gremlins and not yet interested in setting up a big finish, Always Ask For A Backstory still manages to deliver a high quality episode purely based on the elements it creates here. Even better, it’s cool to see the show treating its trip through American history with the same intrest that it showed to Chinese legend in the earlier season as it weirdly gives a kids show about little green monsters a sense of legitimacy you wouldn’t normally expect.
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