The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Transformation

"I am not oppressing you! I'm just exercising my authority to force you to do something you don't want to do!"

Ever since "The Shell," Penny has proven to be one of the most difficult characters for the show to work with. If anything, she exemplifies the show's greatest issue: its sense of overachieving, ushering forth extravagant episodes without paying attention to how that affects the show further down the line. Penny is perhaps the patron saint of having-the-short-end-of-the-stick, virtually disappearing after arguably one of the show's greatest episodes, occasionally resurfacing but never really enough to justify how the show played its cards. In that sense, "The Transformation" feels a bit like damage control.

At the same time, though... it's been so long. And instead of making me frustrated by, say, the episode's lack of timeliness and how much it epitomizes her under-utilization, I was just relieved to see it work out as well as it did. Sure, there's some issues here and there, but "The Transformation" is a worthy successor to "The Shell," finally offering us something new from Penny after years of relative neglect.

A lot of this is indebted to how the episode presents itself. The idea is that Penny invites Gumball over to her house to settle a dispute with her parents, which quickly reveals itself to be based on her (literal) breaking of the family tradition of wearing a shell. It's a simple idea that, granted, the show should've tackled earlier on, but it's a smart way to examine the consequences that the events of "The Shell" had in relation to her family, especially putting into consideration her father's patent aggressiveness. The rest of her family is enough of a blank canvas that it can readily accommodate for what the episode is trying to discuss; her mother, in turn, takes the side of Patrick, with a two-faced cheeriness hiding her malicious intent, while Polly is, for better or worse, a little girl who, at a lack of understading, would much rather tell tangentially-related stories and draw croco-ducks.

The dynamic of the characters allows the episode to both take a mildly satirical grasp of its message, exploring the consequences of family values and traditions, while giving the show flexibility to be as goofy as it pleases. Gumball, in that regard, is key. While I initially feared that he would dominate over "The Transformation" to a point of pesky obstruction (something he's wont to do), he serves here merely to mediate, or at least make the attempt at mediating. More realistically, he's the audience surrogate, a character that the audience can identify with through the entire conflict.

That's where I appreciate the smartness of "The Transformation" and how it lays itself out. For the most part, Gumball episodes take place over the course of a day, or several days, cutting out inconsequential moments and creating a story arc that spans over a prolonged period of time. "The Transformation," however, is very contained. Aside from the opening scene and some brief moments, the episode plays out over the course of a single night, as if in one take. It enhances the feeling of being trapped to bear witness to this nightmare of a dinner, and as an audience, we're just as in for the ride as Gumball is.

I think that's also, though, what makes the ending such a disappointment. After the family decides to burden Gumball with making the final decision on whether or not Penny was being unreasonable, and after a series of thinly-veiled (if remotely veiled) threats from everybody, Gumball decides that the best way to solve the problem is just... to not solve the problem. Instead, he tells a series of stories serving as metaphors for the events of the episode, but rather than reaching some conclusion, he burrows deeper and deeper into more and more stories once his character gets thrown into the equation and asked to deliver.

I do think that there's certainly a kernel of a smart idea buried in there. It's nice, for instance, that Gumball wasn't just employed as a cure-all (think "The Parents") and that it's ultimately the Fitzgeralds as a family that resolve their differences. The way the sequence is stylized, too, with wonky 3D-animated figures in pastel hues (by guest animator Julian Glander) was a complete treat. The whole exercise, though, just feels laborious. It's a sequence that goes on for far too long, if not in how many stories there were so much as how long each story takes, and as a result, it becomes more and more tiresome as it fails to find an ending. (This is, of course, partially intentional, but the way the joke was executed was prolonged beyond what it even really needs.) Because of how long it takes, too, the resolution feels somewhat rushed; there should've been more space between Gumball's stories and the Fitzgeralds uniting to allow the events to progress more organically, but instead, the outcome feels rushed and rather awkwardly paced.

It's frustrating to see when a strong episode ends on a wobbly note, especially when it attempts to try something new, but ultimately, I don't think it detracts too much. I'm just satisfied to see Penny and he family finally have a moment in the spotlight, and "The Transformation" supplements that demand handsomely.

Notes and Quotes:
-While I'm sure a lot of people are tired of it, and while the scene doesn't exactly mesh with the rest of the episode, I appreciated the scene with Gumball clumsily entering through the backdoor of the Fitzgerald's house. It's been a while since the show's pulled off a nude Gumball joke, y'know? I like the craftsmanship.

-"Do you realize what it's like for us to see you walking around basically naked?" "In my defense: that bear is just wearing a t-shirt, the piece of toast is only wearing shoes and gloves, and that dinosaur is wearing nothing at all. Let's be honest, it's pretty hard to know where the line is in terms of public decency in this town."

-"I have a story. Once upon a time there was a little peanut who found a magical that which was also a puppy who could play the flute the end." The abrupt, no-pause ending to the story made that probably my favorite line out of the entire episode, relevant or not to what was actually happening. 

-"I meant more like professional help." "You mean like a counselor?" "Yeah, or, like, a cage-fighting referee or something."

-When Penny sends Gumball a thumbs-up: "That was the closest I could find to a hand with missing fingers. Just to clarify, it was a threat."

-I'm going to call reserving an episode of television over a specific, inescapable time period as "Teddy Perkins Syndrome." At the very least, Cassuto should get what that means.

FINAL GRADE: A. "The Transformation" is not a perfect episode, and just because it's a pretty great standalone doesn't take it off the hook from reflecting the show's most glaring issues, but I can't hold it accountable for exemplifying something; that's more a critique of the show than episode itself. At the end of the day, this is just a well-crafted episode that, while struggling to find a proper ending, is willing to experiment and explore its characters with real ingenuity. So instead of looking at everything it isn't, or how it falls short of some insurmountable expectation, let's just appreciate it for what it is.

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