Josh Bids Farewell to Matt Groening’s Disenchantment

In a curious confluence of events, at around the same time as Matt Groening’s Futurama miraculously returned from the dead for a new season ten years after it was cancelled (click here for my review), Mr. Groening’s fantasy comedy show on Netflix, Disenchantment, took its final bow with the release of its fifth and final season.  I’ve been a fan of Disenchantment ever since it started, and I’m bummed the series doesn’t seem to have caught on with general audiences.  I’m pleased the show lasted five seasons (impressive in today’s streaming era!) and that Mr. Groening and fellow show-runner Josh Weinstein were given the time to give the series a proper wrap-up in this fifth season.

This fifth and final season was a satisfying end to the show, answering a number of long-standing mysteries, and providing strong closure to the show’s many characters and long-running storylines.  It was, as always, very funny and endearingly sweet.

The show is set in the fantasy world of Dreamland, and centers on Bean (voiced by Abbi Jacobson), the stubborn, hard-drinking princess, and her two close friends, the elf Elfo (Nat Faxon) and the demon Luci (Eric André).  Much of the show has centered on Bean’s conflict with her evil mother Dagmar (Sharon Horgan), a cruel sorcerer who has long attempted to take over the kingdom.  This season brought that conflict into center stage.

I’ve really grown to love all of these characters!!  Bean is a wonderful fantasy heroine, tough and smart but also endearingly flawed and self-destructive.  I’m glad the show brought her romance with the mermaid Mora (Meredith Hagner) to the forefront here in this final season.  (It was an exciting development when the show established Bean as bi-sexual back in the third season, and introduced her romance with Mora.)

As with The Simpsons and Futurama before it, one of the great pleasures of Disenchantment was how the show built up a wonderfully deep bench of silly and lovable supporting characters.  I was pleased that almost every one of the show’s supporting characters got some fun stuff to do this final season.  That includes: King Zøg (voiced by John DiMaggio), the reptilian Queen Oona (Tress MacNeille), the man-boy Prince Derek (also voiced by Tress MacNeille), the scheming three-eyed royal advisor Odval (Maurice LaMarche), the boastful prince-transformed-into-a-pig Merkemer (Matt Berry), the doltish knight Turbish (Rich Fulcher), the wise beyond her years Mop-Girl (Lauren Tom), the good-natured & simple Jerry (David Herman) — who, in one of the show’s most wonderful twists, winds up befriending and hanging out with God (voiced by Phil LaMarr), the elderly & moronic wizard Sorcerio (Billy West), the bear-woman Ursula (Jenny Batten), Satan (Rich Fulcher), the Steamworks scientist Alva Gunderson (Richard Ayoade)… and so many more!!

One thing that’s separated Disenchantment from The Simpsons and Futurama before it is its serialization.  Futurama had some character-arcs and mysteries that wound their way through the show, but it was still very much an episodic series.  Disenchantment, on the other hand, has had strong serialization running through it since the beginning, something that’s gotten even more prominent as the series has continued.  Each episode does have a structure with a beginning, middle, and end, but the episodes run together one into another (which makes this a very easy show to binge!).  I’ve always enjoyed that serialization, and it’s particularly fun here in the final season to see so many storylines come together.  They even brought back some mysteries I’d totally forgotten about, like the question of who shot Elfo with an arrow way back in the penultimate episode of season one.

Overall, I was satisfied by where all of the many characters were left at the end of the series.  I was pleased that many/most of the characters got happy endings, and the various villains (Dagmar, Bad Bean, Alva) were defeated.  I liked seeing Bean and Mora together, as well as happy endings for other couples like Zøg and Ursula, and Elfo and Mop Girl.  The first four seasons all ended with a cliffhanger episode called “Something Falls” — I liked that in this fifth and final season, it was the ninth episode that had that title (in this case, it was “Darkness Falls”), and then the whole series was wrapped up in the extra-length finale “Goodbye Bean”.  I’m glad that finale was given the extra run-time so that there was the space to give all the characters a proper resolution.

I’ll miss this show!  I look forward to someday watching this all from the beginning.  To the many Simpsons fans out there who never found their way to Disenchantment, I recommend giving it a try!

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