The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Cage

"I thought you were gonna teach us how to be tough fighter guys." "But if you rearrange the letters of 'tough fighter guy,' you get 'tighter of hug guy.' Coincidence? Yes, but a useful one."

Season 6, y'all. We made it. And already, with "The Cage," things are starting to feel amazingly back in-the-groove. Don't get me wrong, "The Cage" isn't the sort of traditional show-stopper to welcome the show's final season - it's not even the first episode so much as the first released - but it's a delightful, low-key affair to remind us that the show is back and is great as it always was.

No, it's not the most creative - you can pretty much predict the ultimate outcome based off of the first minute and a half of the episode (that is, Mr. Corneille is not actually a wrestler and that he's gonna get pummeled), but there's an important distinction, I should think, between the plot of an episode and the meat of it. At the expense of a surprising narrative - which the show clearly wasn't trying to do in favor of a more simplistic one - "The Cage" was full-on-meat.

The most glaringly smart touch is the use of Mr. Corneille, the school's underused, laid-back geography teacher with a sense of suave, as the subject of our underdog wrestler story, and the beauty of it is the sheer incongruity. I don't think there's a better moment than Corneille breaking down "tough fighter guy" as an anagram for "tighter of hug guy" to demonstrate how hilariously bad he fits the character mold he's assigned. He abides by a pacifist philosophy of tiring the other person out while simultaneously not doing anything at all - not only does he not embrace his forced archetype, he couldn't care less about it.

Likewise, the School Nurse gets put to some fun use, too, as the young ingenue rooting for Mr. Corneille from the sidelines, and she embraces the cliche swimmingly. If the plot isn't original, the use of all the characters is most certainly inspired, even if Gumball and Darwin are only really here to commentate (which is their point in the show, more often than not).

In following the beats of an underdog story, too, the episode's second half is marvelously cinematic and mock-emotional. I think my favorite scene in the whole episode is when Mr. Corneille, in an act of frustration at his strength being questioned, punches a hole through a wall. It's a scene played completely straight as Corneille sulks off, betrayed by Gumball and Darwin not believing in him, and that's why it works so well; it subverts expectations by nailing its genre perfectly at the absence of a joke.

Furthermore, that, in and of itself, is the joke - "The Cage" suddenly sets up that false sense that Corneille might actually stand a chance and triumph, but naturally, it gets subverted yet again, with the hole revealed to have been dug by the school's new inmates (in Principal Brown's feeble attempts to keep the school budget in check - a hilarious moment that actually finds multiple uses throughout the episode) and Corneille being instantly smushed into the ground in the climactic fight.

On the note of Gumball and Darwin, as I mentioned before, they exist to commentate, but they also serve to contextualize. Watching them cuddle-fight, for instance, was a hilarious red flag for whatever Mr. Corneille had under his sleeve, and as Corneille's managers (under the winning alias of "The Amphibarbarian"), they find themselves torn between supporting their representative or throwing him under the bus. This, naturally, allows the ending to work even better - once again, their characters build up hope, only for it to come crashing down once Corneille reveals the whole "cage" thing to be a complete bluff - "Lies are only facts that haven't happened," he clarifies - and they get forced to watch the inevitable with the rest of us.

All of this is ignoring all of the jokes that made "The Cage" work, too. Helping to undercut the rest of the narrative, which is played largely straight, a lot of small moments happen here and there to prop the proceedings up and keep things admirably silly.

Perhaps two of the episode's funniest gags were Mr. Corneille's "training" "montage" and Gumball's call with their opponent's coffee-guzzling manager, and they're excellent examples of dragging jokes out as absurdly long as possible. It's a risky gambit that risks contributing to a ton of dead air, but both are executed to perfection. The former works because the music is the main signifier of progress, or the lack thereof, as the singer gets increasingly exhausted through the song to a point where he completely loses it; it's an amazing audio compliment to the visual of Mr. Corneille doing literally nothing at all while Gumball and Darwin look on with increasingly less excitement. The coffee scene, meanwhile, goes for broke by repeatedly faking us out whenever the joke seems to be over, and it's that element of anticipation that works so well.

It's anticipation, I suppose, that makes "The Cage" work best. We know what's happening, but that doesn't make watching its crash and burn any less funny than it is.

Notes and Quotes:
-"Hey Matt, why haven't you written anything about Gumball in the past month?" Hey, take a look at the sidebar. There's your answer.
-"You're an MMMMA fighter?!" "What's that?" "Meaty Men Misunderstanding Martial Arts." "Sounds kind of violent." "Pfft, only according to the so-called 'medical community.'"
-"This is our last resort. We've already cut everything we can from the budget. Look! Those aren't even real fire extinguishers. They're just canisters of dippy string. If a fire starts in this school, things are gonna get very dippy. Also pretty tragic."
-Speaking of never-ending jokes, there's also Gumball repeatedly being pelted in the face by a piece of paper which practically exists for me to be a comedy snob and point out its execution of the Comedy Rule of Three. The ultimate reveal of what it is, too - an ad for full body waxing ("Tell us when to stop... We won't listen!") was appreciably out-of-nowhere.
-I never commented on him, but Joao "The Grave" Diga was a perfectly formidable opponent to screw Mr. Corneille in the fight against; there's no better nightmare for a pacifist than a giant fist that walks on fists with fists on fists on the fingers of his fist.
-Among Mr. Corneille's potential fake wrestler names: The Frog Prince, The Croaker, The Frogspawn, Colonel Jazzhands, The Gentleman Crawler, The Birthday Boy, The Summertime Man, and of course, "Look out, it's Christmas Person!"
-"He looks like one of those before and after ads but before the gym and after a disease!" Nice journalistic integrity you got there, Mike.
-The lighting effects in that final scene in the arena, lit with fluorescent lighting, was absolutely gorgeous and a perfect way to set the mood.
-To be honest, I'm just happy that Mr. Corneille got a starring role; he's been one of my favorite characters since "The Others" and I'm glad to see he was capable of holding up a whole plot.

Final Grade: A-. "The Cage" does everything that it wants to, and it does it perfectly; I've reiterated that so many times that hammering in the point further would somehow grow more tedious than this whole review already is. So I'll add this: what a nice, refreshing change of pace from the latter half of Season 5! I always felt like that general trouble region dealt too much with more abstract concepts without strong plots backing them up - see "The Deal" or "The Best" - so seeing an episode like this one so firmly rooted in its premise was a complete joy, and it felt amazingly smooth and on-track the whole time. Seeing how well the writers were able to handle an episode so silly while still making it as solid as this makes me optimistic that Season 6, fully recharged, has the potential to go out with an indisputable bang, and I can't wait.

For the last Gumball review of "The List," CLICK HERE.