The entire time I was watching Inanimate Insanity 2 episode 15: Truth or Flare, something was bothering me. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, until I realized:
Truth or Flare is essentially the season 3 finale, You Can't Do This Forever, but done a million times better.
Inanimate Insanity paused its second season to make Inanimate Insanity Invitational. This was a season where the writers made what they wanted to, essentially. That's not a bad idea at all! Another show, Battle for Dream Island, did the same thing and they ended up making my favorite season of the show: Battle for BFB. The problem is that the villains and contestants do not line up with the story Invitational wished to tell. Let's compare the two, shall we?
The Invitational crew were usually if not always happy with each other. There were squabbles between characters like Balloon and Nickel or Test Tube and Cabby, but by the end, everybody had resolved their differences and grew to understand each other much better. Another thing of importance to note is that no matter what the gameshow of Inanimate Insanity demanded from them, no matter how hard the challenge or what they had to do for it, nobody seemed to mind. The only exception to this rule seemed to be Floory, and he was not only apologized to by Bot, but MePhone, the host of Inanimate Insanity, made him co-host as a way of apologizing too. By the finale, everybody had accepted and grown to accept each other.
Thus, enter the season's main villain: Walkie-Talkie, or just Walkie for short. Walkie set herself up to be an amazing villain immediately and for a long time I was truly terrified of her. We first find her on Indefinite Island, the area eliminated contestants are confined to stay in. Walkie acts as if MePhone hired her and immediately gains the contestants' trust. She weasels her way into MePhone's trust too, by offering him a way to keep the game he never wants to die with a rejoin challenge. It's an amazing set-up to a mystery I know I wasn't the only one wondering.
Because, you see, Walkie wasn't just a walkie-talkie with arms and legs slapped on. She was a real, inanimate walkie-talkie with somebody somewhere talking through it. The immediate question that comes to mind when watching her is clear: who is this? Who has the other walkie-talkie, and why does she seem to know everything about MePhone's past, and why is she so determined to destroy everything he's built with Inanimate Insanity?
Countless theories were built around this question long before You Can't Do This Forever was released. The one that I thought made the most sense was she was somebody working for Meeple. The voice that came from her speaker belonged to somebody who had been hired to work against MePhone because he was the only member of Cobs' phone army who had escaped his tyranny. It made sense and the mystery and intrigue made me genuinely scared of her.
They never explained who Walkie was. You Can't Do This Forever made it clear they had no interest in doing so, and later on the directors confirmed they were never going to say. This turns the main villain into less of a woman of mystery and more of a "ok, and?" character. It makes all my fear of her evaporate as I know no answers will emerge. She's literally just a walkie-talkie with nefarious intent and...that's it!
Now, one-note villains can work. Even villains with vague backstories can. Cobs proves the former, and Springy proves the latter. But Walkie was a character who very badly needed something more put in, or else I just wasn't interested in her at all.
And the story Invitational was going for was a hard one to pull off from the start. Their story was one where Walkie gathers an army to overthrow MePhone and tell his contestants the truth: that Inanimate Insanity is a show MePhone never wants to end. He would gladly replace them all with heartless robots mid-season heartbeat to continue and he does not care for a single one of them.
Now, I'd like to address Walkie's motivations here as I'm not really sure what they were? Again, not telling us who she is tells me she's just here because the plot needs her to be. She has no motivation. And as much as everything she says is horrible because of this major error, it makes the way the plot frames her all the worse.
You see, Invitational not only goes out of its way to excuse MePhone from every bad thing he's ever done, it also goes to great lengths to frame his enemies' actions as the worst things anybody could ever do. Walkie has her army, the one she built to free the Invitational contestants throw all said contestants in jail. She then insists the only way to make sure MePhone never bothers the contestants she won't be freeing anytime soon is to kill him painfully.
Now let's go over Truth or Flare, the most recent episode of Inanimate Insanity.
This is the first season 2 episode in the four year hiatus the creators took to make Invitational. Now one important difference between the two seasons is the treatment of the cast. The season 2 contestants are shown to be happy at the start of the season. However, over the slow burn of the season, we watch them spiral into varying stages of anger, depression, and loneliness. Suitcase develops hallucinations from her anxiety. Nobody listens when she tries to talk about them because of the game and she has to simply "walk it off" because Inanimate Insanity requires her full attention. Microphone is forced to do extreme things she herself doesn't consider morally right just to keep herself safe in the game. Marshmallow straight-up leaves, preferring to become a missing persons case than spend another second in a game she can feel killing herself every moment she plays it.
The contestants are not happy in this season, and MePhone's care for them is not even suggested as it is in Invitational. In season 2, MePhone gets angry at Marshmallow for leaving and doesn't give her a second thought once she's gone missing, telling her worried friend Paintbrush it's simply "her loss". He straight up attempts to kill Balloon, Suitcase, Nickel, and Baseball in Mazed and Confused. Any meltdowns or separations in the game would simply mean more drama for MePhone's show, which would mean better ratings for him. So the man not only sees them as cogs in a machine, he also openly encourages all moments that could potentially end in heartbreak.
This makes telling the contestants their host is a monster a much more believable and natural setup for season 2 of the show. Everybody would have no problem believing that, right? Only one problem: the villain of this season is Taco.
Now Taco, much like Walkie-Talkie, is a figure of mystery and intrigue. A few things separate the two, however, one being that we've known Taco since the show started. In season 1, Taco pretended to be a loveable idiot in order to draw sympathy from the audience so she could more easily win. We see this act fall apart in the season 1 finale, Journey Through Memory Lane, however. In this episode, when Taco doesn't win the million-dollar prize she tries to physically wrestle it out of the real winner, OJ's, hands and, throughout season 2, Taco only continues to spiral and get worse and worse. She stalks everybody to know who is with who. She convinces Microphone to help her so she'll have a girl on the inside. Taco's emotional development is very easily tracked and it doesn't take a genius to know who she is. She's a suave, money-hungry villain who's always three steps ahead of everybody else in the room.
Now compare Taco to Walkie-Talkie, a character who you could tell me was secretly the president of Antarctica, and I'd probably believe you.
Walkie comes out of nowhere for no reason. Why? To overthrow MePhone, assumedly. Why does she want to overthrow MePhone? To let the contestants know the truth. Why is it so important to her that they know? I really have no clue. I mean, she throws them in jail as soon as she tells them, so she really, truly, has no motive. That's really not a great look for a villain.
Compare this to Taco's very clear motive: she's just lost Microphone. Mic was her last chance at winning even a little of Inanimate Insanity's prize. She's getting tired of coming up with plot after plot to obtain that prize and it's clear she's getting tired of Inanimate Insanity itself. So she essentially adopts the idea of "if I can't have the prize money, nobody can". Both Walkie and Taco forcibly take control of the competition and tell the contestants MePhone's a monster. But we have different reasons to not want to believe each villain.
In Invitational, the audience and contestants didn't want to believe Walkie because we had both grown too attached to MePhone and he was just such a special guy! In season 2, everybody knows Taco is right, they agree with her, but they don't and won't listen because it's Taco.
Everybody knows Taco by her reputation: they know she will use any tactic she can, break any friendship she needs to, and kill anybody who gets in her way as long as it benefits her personally. They also know she's a gigantic liar! So, no duh, nobody is going to want to listen to somebody like that. And she's asking them the most personal questions possible as a clear act of frustration and pettiness. Her telling them the truth, that the only safe way to win the game is to leave it, does not sound honest because it's not coming from somebody honest at all. To them it might even sound like she wants them to leave for no other reason other than to simply make her feel better about not winning.
Taco is giving them the right way out for the wrong reason.
Walkie gave them that same way out but never gave them a choice to take it as Taco is doing. She simply told them the truth then locked them in jail and treated them horribly because "we can't have anybody stopping our public execution".
Walkie was a confusing character who never made sense thrust into a season that didn't need her at all. They already had Springy as a villain and his redemption in You Can't Do This Forever could have been written fine without her.
The plot of Taco presenting MePhone's problems for the wrong reasons makes a lot more sense, even if the point being repeated was unintentional on the writers' behalf. The entire crew did an amazing job with Truth or Flare and it really should be commended. It's an episode that truly makes me excited for the future of the show. I applaud Adam, Brian, Justin, and the rest of the cast and sincerely hope they continue working their magic. Inanimate Insanity is something special, and a show I truly recommend it to anybody who wants to
Comments
Post a Comment