Contains Multiple Spoilers For The Show "Mythic Quest"

Following on from yesterday's post, the other show I've been grinding my way through over the last couple of months is Mythic Quest. As I'm sure almost everyone reading this knows, MQ is a sitcom in which the sit is a video game company, specifically a company with one hugely successful game, an MMORPG called - obviously - Mythic Quest.

In fact, it only occurs to me as I type this that I have no idea what the actual game studio is called, or indeed the parent company that owns it, some unspecified conglomerate based in Canada and referred to only as "Montreal". That does seem almost emblematic of the show, which largely coasts by on a lot of vague, hand-wavey gestures to the way the industry works, without ever really bothering to fill in the precise details.

Or that's how it seemed to me. I've never worked for a game company, so I'm in no position to comment on the accuracy, authenticity or realism. I have worked in plenty of offices though and if any of them had operated the way this one does I'm pretty sure there wouldn't just have been walk-outs, there's have been lawsuits. Bullying appears to be not just endemic but fully endorsed at all levels.

But then, by most accounts I've heard over the years, the video-game industry prides itself on not following the same rules that would apply to "regular" businesses. Certainly the various scandals, exposes and lawsuits we've all read about over the last few years would support the kind of image Mythic Quest presents. Indeed, by those standards, it would probably be seen, if not as an exemplary employer, at least better than many.

These were the kinds of thoughts that frequently went through my mind while watching all four seasons but especially so in the third and fourth, which are far less focused and coherent than the much tighter-plotted first two. It's odd to find myself focusing so much on the sit of a sitcom. Usually that's the part that gets a pass on all kinds of unconvincing propositions because it's just a backdrop no-one really cares about.

Here, though, the show being set in an MMORPG development studio was the main reason I started watching the show in the first place so it's harder to ignore all the things that make no sense, of which there are so many! Mythic Quest, the game, is a real enigma for a start. It clearly starts out as a parody of World of Warcraft , an interpretation the constant "cut scenes" that stud almost every episode strongly support. Later on, though, someone obviously decided it would be more fun to parody Roblox instead, so they simply drop a version of that game inside the MMORPG and then that's all we ever hear about..

During the course of the four season run, Mythic Quest receives two expansions and a third that becomes the game-within-a-game instead, although whether they're still calling it an "expansion" by that point is unclear. The first kinda-sorta seems to fit into the MMORPG theme, being made by the entire company and released in a recognizable way, but the other two make absolutely no sense at all. 

For a start, both of them appear to have been devised, designed, coded and created by - at most - three people, one of whom has never done anything of the kind before and one of whom is a Brad McQuaid style visionary who, it later transpires, sits down at the keyboard so infrequently he doesn't even know his own passwords. Weirder still for an MMORPG, it seems the final expansion, Elysium, made in secret by just two people but universally acclaimed as a masterpiece by everyone who plays it, can apparently be played through in a couple of hours. On a spectrum starting at suspension of disbelief and ending at creative license, this checks in somewhere way past the end - taking the piss.

Most of this sort of drift happens in seasons two and three. In the first two seasons it's nowhere near as hard to believe Mythic Quest as a game millions of people play or that it's being maintained and developed by a believable gaming studio. The kinds of issues that arise, like Nazis monopolizing the chat channel, are broadly recognizable from any MMORPG gamer's experience.

It's pretty clear by the end of Season 2 that the writers have taken the MMORPG scenario about as far as they can and probably further than they'd have preferred. And even in the earlier seasons, the best individual episodes are the few where the plot and action moves away from the Mythic Quest studio, either back into the past or out into the world.

And there's the problem. A game company just isn't a very fruitful prospect for a comedy. It's basically "The Office" with a bunch of technology the audience doesn't care about and a load of jobs that have to be explained before anyone can say anything funny about them. And even then, about the only joke seems to be that management don't like, respect or listen to creatives and creatives are passive-aggressive punchbags.  

It's not much to work with. The writers' need to open the whole thing out is plastered all over the later seasons, which may be why very little that happens after the end of Season 2 makes much sense.

All of that is entirely understandable, even forgivable. It happens in most sitcoms although rarely to this degree or this fast. If it didn't, entire runs would be like some kind of never-ending bottle episode (Although that is pretty much how some of the most successful sitcoms have played it...) You have to get out of the situation sometimes to let the thing breathe.

What I find harder to forgive is the wildly inconsistent character development. The show's real strength, as with most sitcoms, is the characterization. Well, that and the jokes, of course. Gotta get those laughs. Mythic Quest has a typical, sprawling sitcom cast, with a core of seven characters (Eight in the first two seasons) and twice as many regulars. 

Most of them have only one notable character trait (Sue is Nice, Jo is a sociopath...) so it's quite hard for their personalities to develop at all. Others, like the two leads, Poppy and Ian, have  ~ maybe ~ two traits on a good day but they do somehow also manage to exhibit at least a modicum of growth over the course of the full run. That's fine for a sitcom. Anything more would make it a dramedy and no-one wants that.

My problem comes not with the ones who stay the same but with the ones who... change. 

Alright, my problem, specifically, is with Dana and Rachel. 

Okay! Okay! I admit it! My real problem is with Dana.

Dana's character arc is so disruptive and unbelievable, I found it often derailed the entire show for me. She starts out as a sweet, somewhat shy QA tester, the absolute lowest of the low in terms of respect in the industry generally and the Mythic Quest office in particular. She and her fellow QA, Rachel, have a very sweet and entirely believable, slow-burning, mutual attraction that develops over the first two seasons until they end up in a committed relationship. It's very cute and often very funny.

Then Dana starts to change. First, she tries to make her own game. She's never done anything of the kind before but with incredible persistence and the eventual grudging assistance of super-coder Poppy Li, Dana eventually gets her game finished. And it's predictably terrible. She ends up using Playpen, the game-creation app Poppy knocked up in a few minutes to keep Dana off her back, to make something better and that leads Poppy into dumping her current expansion plan in favor of Playpen.

This comes across like a transparent attempt by whoever makes the decisions to stop writing about MMORPGs and move on to something with a much bigger reach. The It's-not-Roblox-but-yes-it's-Roblox clone ends up eating both Mythic Quest and the show from the inside. 

In one of the least convincing storylines I've seen for a while, Dana uses Playpen to create the most popular and commercially successful game-within-a-game-within-a-game, making Montreal a lot of money. She gets nominated for a major award but she doesn't win. A seventeen year-old girl she once gave an inspirational speech to does. 

Dana' reaction? She storms across the hall and hisses death threats into the stunned girl's face. Even if it was funny it would be funny at the expense of the character but it's not funny. Not at all.

The writers then double down on the new Dana, who I don't believe ever does or says anything pleasant again. By the end of the final season, she's self-identifying as "the finest coder of my generation" and being offered Poppy's job. That's some career move in.. what... two years? But then stuff like that happens to a lot of the cast. They're clearly in some kind of accelerated timeline.

And I'd still probably accept it as par for the course in sitcom-land if it didn't come with that complete and total change of personality. There is just no way the Dana in Season 4 is the same person as the Dana in Season 1. 

Her partner, Rachel, arguably has a similarly swervy character arc but because she's funny (Something Dana is not. Pretty much ever.) and because although she does things the S1 Dana would never have done, she does them while still looking and sounding like the same person and often having the grace to look like she can't believe what she's doing, I didn't have such a problem with it. Also, she can pretty much get away with anything in that narwhal onesie...

I've picked on Dana's arc because it frequently took me out of the show, thanks to just how unbelievable I found it, but most of the characters go through similar unconvincing changes. In one way it's not that unusual for a sitcom but in another it is - these are the kind of things that usually don't start turning up in the script until the dying seasons of a show that's been going for a decade or so. 

And that's the real problem. Mythic Quest runs into the sort of story issues after two seasons it takes most sitcoms at least six or seven to reach. Seasons 3 and 4 are evidence of the writers thrashing around for a theme or a through-line and not finding one. It's absolutely no surprise the show was cancelled after the fourth season. The surprise is that it made it that far.

All of which makes it sound like I didn't enjoy it, which is the opposite of the truth. I enjoyed it a lot, even the later seasons. I liked most of the characters. It was fun spending time with them. The acting was great, the writing was sharp, the jokes landed and the setting had a weird but welcome familiarity. I'd watch it again, although I might skip a couple of episodes here and there.

As I said, the characters are the big attraction. I'd be hard put to name my favorite. I kept changing my mind on that. I disliked Jo intensely when she first appeared but came to like her a lot, particularly for the way she, unlike most her colleagues, never really deviated from that initial persona. She was also probably the character I found the funniest, although Rachel made me laugh a lot, often just with her facial expressions and permanent startled-rabbit act. Brad was rock solid and intentionally hard to pin down, David was like a muppet come to life and Ian and Poppy rode the line between genuinely obnoxious and amusingly arrogant quite brilliantly.

For all the show's many strengths, though, it is hard to deny the very best episodes were the handful of flashbacks and character pieces, where the writers dropped the main plot stopped for a while and gave us a self-contained short story. In most shows, those are the episodes that slightly annoy me as I tap my fingers, waiting for the next installment in the storyline I'm already invested in. In MQ, it was felt more like why can't they do this all the time?

That, I suspect, is what the commissioning editors thought too, because although the show didn't get a fifth series, it did get a spin off, wittily titled Side Quest, which I have yet to watch but which very much looks like four more of those standalone stories. I think I'll watch that next.

And finally, appropriately, that ending. Oh, wait, which ending? There are two. 

I didn't know that when I watched the finale a couple of days ago and found it deeply satisfying. In the version I got, now apparently canon, Ian does exactly the right thing for the first time in his life and Poppy responds in exactly the way I and I imagine most viewers would hope she might, leaving the audience to watch the credits roll with a huge sense of both relief and satisfaction. I wish all shows ended as well.

If I'd seen it on first broadcast, though, it would have been slightly different, with the two allegedly platonic partners sharing a passionate kiss. That went down so well, it seems, they re-shot it and dropped all that yukky kissing stuff.

Except I assumed that was where the pair of them were headed after the credits rolled anyway. So, meh. Works for me, either way.