The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Wish

"I can't believe I've been guilt-tripped by a neck pillow. I mean, who am I? Mr... actually no, that's never happened to anyone before."

So... this was an interesting one, wasn't it? Usually, when an episode struggles, it's because it feels unrealized, but it's not that "The Wish" didn't put in the most sincere effort it could into everything it was trying to do. It's just that, well, having Principal Brown struggle to profess his love to a neck pillow is a step too far, and the episode feels all the more bizarre because of it in generally unproductive ways.

I mean, I'm always down for Gumball going balls-to-the-wall with the most insane idea it can think of; that's one of the show's greatest qualities, and it's helped create some of the greatest entries into the show's massive, diverse catalog of knock-out episodes. What "The Wish" does, though, is confound the logic that the show tries to use by churning out an adventure where every character just feels miles off from how they should be as some strange compromise for the narrative to work. And here's the thing: "The Wish" does sort of work in its own absurd way, but at what cost?

Well, at the cost of Gumball and Darwin legitimately believing that a gnome key chain transformed Miss Simian into a neck pillow. Throughout the past two seasons, we've seen plenty of instances of the series dumbing down Gumball and Darwin for the sake of making an idea work, and it's an annoyingly recurrent issue, but "The Wish" finds them at perhaps their most illogical yet, all while they deliver the same snarky wisecracking as one would hope. It's like a strange in-between of them at their best and them at their worst, but the fact that they're at the top of their game line-wise just makes their incompetency in evaluating the situation (Miss Simian left, leaving a neck pillow behind, which they quickly surmise is actually her) even more confusing.

Principal Brown, though, has always floated around in a strange mental place in the show, so his acceptance of Miss Simian being transformed into a neck pillow reads as yes, stupid, but at least in the deepest realms of his characterization. If anything, based on the first two minutes of "The Wish," I was praying that the episode would be a solo piece for him without the Watterson boys interfering as usual—they really are the weakest links in this foray—because he really carries the episode with his fragile inanity, whether in his extended struggles to deduce what object Miss Simian was apparently turned into or his extended struggles to say "I love you" to the the neck pillow. Basically, if there's one character who gets remotely close to making "The Wish" satisfying, it's Brown.

Once that weird concept of reality is established, though, "The Wish" is theoretically great, peppered with all of the sort of weird beats that the best Gumball episodes have. The sequence of Miss Simian trying to give a tear-jerking monologue on her way out of town, all while holding up a line of other similarly melodramatic basket cases, is a perfect little beat in the episode, for instance, even if she's given very little screentime to show her own narrative unfolding. Likewise, Gumball, Darwin, and Brown's journey to retrieve the neck pillow, culminating in a drag race with a psychologically-questionable greaser, was the perfect amount of absurdity to really drive the point home: "The Wish" is ridiculous, and it's going all out.

It's a shame, then, that "The Wish" is just too iffy in its own premise to allow itself to really come together. 

Notes and Quotes:

-"Oh man, online dating is so complicated. Women are so hard to read these days. Like, what does this mean? 'Your payment has been declined.'" "You do realize that's a pizza delivery app, right?"
-The idea of Gumball and Darwin yelling "Hey" to try to catch the truck driver's attention, only for him to respond with a happy, sociable "Hey!" was the sort of dumb joke that I will literally always get behind.
-"Heh, heh, I coulda kept the car, but there's nothing quite like a good neck pillow! Then again, I coulda sold the car to buy loads of neck pillows. I coulda bought thousands! Ah, my mother was right, I never think things through!"
-"Winner gets the girl!" "The girl is a cushion!" "I'll take what I can get!"
-If nothing else, I think we can all agree that the neck pillow was beautifully rendered, and I'd argue the best looking neck pillow in animation history.

FINAL GRADE: B-. While "The Wish" arguably has issues that cut far deeper than my grade would suggest, there's something about "The Wish" that I still kind of appreciate; in an alternate universe, and one where the rules of the show were tweaked a little more differently, this could be a truly great episode. As it stands, though, this episode took some strange risks that never pan out as they should, leaving the episode feeling like an ambitious misstep, but a weirdly respectable one.

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

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