Mythic Quest comes full circle with an energizing season 3 finale
As the third season of Apple TV+'s Mythic Quest wraps up, Poppy and Ian finally learn if it’s broke, don’t fix it
TV Reviews Mythic Quest
Mythic Quest is not a show afraid to make a point. Though it paints with a broad brush, this workplace comedy about video games pushes against its form at every turn, creating a show far more nuanced and ambitious than its premise belies. Its sitcom characters might not change, but the viewer’s understanding of them does. With season three, Mythic Quest tested what it means for the characters to stay together and why, after seasons of torment, they still do.
Few shows are as exact when trying to communicate big ideas, even when those ideas are difficult to put into words. Mythic Quest struggled with that problem in season three, circling the same point without totally hitting it. Ian effectively spends 10 episodes trying to put his finger on what makes his relationship with Poppy work and how to fix it. The answer is, of course, there’s nothing to fix.
“It is what it is.”
Ian finally discovers what this season has been dancing around in the episode’s centerpiece. The first half saw Poppy cutting out people who couldn’t do anything for her or support her as needed. Left without a game to promote or a world to build, Ian tried to sell Poppy on their relationship, a collaboration between great thinkers and salespeople. But without her code, he languished. The balance that kept the thing moving was off. “You can’t see it, but you can build it,” Ian tells Poppy. “I can see it, but I can’t build it. It is what it is.” These two are “broken in all the right places,” and for some reason, they fit together.
Following its stellar second season, Mythic Quest entered its third on its heels. The show was mired with COVID-19 setbacks and the sudden departure of F. Murray Abraham. Nevertheless, MQ felt like it had something to prove to its viewers and itself. And to do so, the show challenged its characters by shifting their roles and forcing them to grow. Though working more closely than ever before, Poppy and Ian rarely shared space together, and every time they set foot in the MQ offices, they were asked to leave. Dana got punted to a David role at GrimPop, while Rachel took over for Brad as the HOMI. David was the new Ian, looking to lead the game to even greater heights without the eccentricities of the former CEO slowing them down.
Yet, none of these jobs sat too well. In a recreation of this season’s opening montage, the cold open shows all the characters at another inflection point. Poppy’s on the ground after her pitch went belly-up; Montreal informs David that they’re putting the movie on the back burner because MQ, the game, is hemorrhaging users and it needs another expansion; and finally, Brad is a free man again—though, he has absolutely no idea what that means going forward. For a season finale, everyone’s in the dumps.
So they get back to work. David’s not creative, so he enlists his employees to develop an idea for the expansion (none of his employees are creatives either, he learns. There’s no substitute for a confident Ian). Meanwhile, Rachel gets a massive monetization bonus at the expense of all her principles. As Brad points out, he’s turned her from a socialist into a greedy capitalist clutching a check like a dog to its hump stuffy. Things still aren’t quite right.
Even Brad—who fought the law and won—is lost. He played the game of life on hard mode and worked triple duty as the office janitor, a monetization head, and a diversity and inclusion executive. Yet, none of those jobs fulfilled him. He doesn’t quite see the impact he’s made. For all the evil posturing, Brad revealed himself as a good leader of younger talent. He used his business acumen to lead his pupils to success, actively mentoring women of color like Carol and Rachel to ascend the corporate ladder. That’s certainly more than David did. Jo, too, for all her menace, ended up like a young Brad, except instead of helping women of color get ahead in a male-dominated industry, she taught a pathetic middle-aged white guy to have a backbone. They can’t all be winners.
Jo and Brad’s arc bends toward Dana, who realizes she’s not learning anything at GrimPop. She outgrew her role as a babysitter for Poppy and Ian. She knows the code; she has the vision. Now she needs an assistant drawn to power and a producer to help clear the way for her game.
Weirdly, it all comes back to Buffalo Chicken Pizza. Earlier this season, Ian failed to satisfy even the smallest urges of his partner by building her a smoothie station instead of getting her a slice of pizza from the gas station. But her frustration wasn’t about the pizza: She needed a collaborator that listens to her needs to help her finish the work. She needed sustenance, and he gave her what he would have wanted. They might fill in each other’s gaps, but that doesn’t mean they look the same. He needs to meet her halfway by giving her the support she’s asking for—even if they don’t fit his philosophy. By eating the pizza, he effectively says he’s willing to sacrifice for Poppy and understands her different needs.
That’s probably what makes the last scene feel so rewarding. With MQ in need of an expansion and Playpen in the market for distribution, Ian and Poppy return to David, who’s more prepared than ever to deal with them. By stepping out of their comfort zones, Ian, Poppy, and David realized their roles in the organization better. Like their relationship, the show clicked together nicely in its closing moments. There’s more to a partnership than working side-by-side. Sometimes that means letting your partner know what you’re working on, and other times that means getting someone a slice of pizza. Poppy and Ian do what they do and try to make that collaboration as peaceful as possible because they love each other. With their quiet admission, Poppy and Ian return to “Mythic Quest” more confident than ever, with ranch on their cheeks. It is what it is.
Stray observations:
- So ends another season of Mythic Quest. While this season fell just a little below its predecessor’s, the show’s ambition continues to keep the comedy fresh and its ideas engaging. I cannot wait for whatever the spin-off has in store.
- Sunny alums Michael Naughton and Andrew Friedman crushed as the hopelessly friendly middle-aged testers. “Sober two years, everybody!”
- David Hornsby’s delivery of “And a man trying to reconnect with his adult son” belongs in the Smithsonian. God, he was so great this season. Hornsby-hive, we’ll see you next season.
- I wasn’t always sure what to do with Brad this season, but this episode stuck the landing. Change and growth can be messy, but Brad accidentally helping people improve at work is something that came together in the end.
21 Comments
I feel like this show used to mean something, and this season it’s become just another sitcom.
And now for another sorrowful year without Poppy and Ian in my life. Look, this wasn’t the smoothest season, and it feels like we got here way too soon. It had some highs, but it felt more focused on “get characters from A to C” storytelling. I’ve argued before that Mythic Quest, for all its successes at breaking the traditional sitcom approach to storytelling…would benefit from a traditional sitcom length season to aid its storytelling. A 15–20-episode season would absolutely have helped flesh out the bits we didn’t get, but I know that this is rare on streaming.But anyway, you can’t argue with Poppy and Ian’s chemistry, or the warmth of the rest of the cast. I enjoy them all, and it’s going to be nice to have them in the same room again.
Jessie Ennis really carried this season single handedly. this cast is still great, but everyone else was sleepwalking at one point or another which is pretty understandable given how aimless some of the plotting was (I can’t believe we spent half the season setting up this dumb movie plot just to get it cancelled between episodes, god they had no idea what to do with David and Ian all season lol)anyway it feels like s4 will be a bit more focused after this. David, Ian and Poppy just belong together, and Dana/Brad/Jo is a combination that has a lot of promise. hopefully we can ditch the NFT bullshit and the meandering storytelling and get back to what made this show great originally which was the characters
lmao @ the conclusion of the Ian and Poppy arc making almost the entire season completely pointless. the Dana stuff was promising though
This season felt like it was pretty aimless, until it came full circle in the end. Still, the cast is great and I’m fine with watching them even in a slightly aimless season like this one. I hope Uncle Jack and The Waiter stick around next season.Fun fact – game ideas from the staff is how Horizon Zero Dawn came to be. After releasing several Killzone games, the heads of Guerilla Games asked their employees to prepare pitches on whatever game idea they wanted, and the one that went forward – from one of the art department guys IIRC – was post-apocalyptic world with robot dinosaurs. Since Ashly Birch voices Aloy in these games, I wouldn’t be surprised if the expansion pitches bit was her idea.
So, another season for Charlotte Nicdao to make hearts thump in unsettling ways again?
Am I the only one who thought the Ian/Poppy conflict last ep just kinda came out of nowhere? Their usual back-and-forth banter, and then suddenly he’s dropping f-bombs at her and throwing chairs? There was no sign the whole season that it was coming to this or that anything in their relationship was heading toward a breaking point. Still an enjoyable season, but kinda hoping they can find a way to bring F Murray back into the fold. Surely he’s the kinda guy who would fake his own death for a great story?
It would almost be too on the nose now that we have that romance novelist recently reveal that she faked her suicide
What I find odd is that they never introduced a new head writer.
Poppy didn’t have the emotional intelligence to realize she pushed Ian too far. For all of his big ideas, he needs support from underlings as well, but Poppy was having way too good of a time tearing him down and not realizing how he felt until it was too late.
Weird to read a review of a comedy that doesn’t use the word funny once.
I suspected they would end up back on Mythic Quest because of the title of the show. Which is a shame, because I wanted Grimpop to just end up crowdfunding their game. Showing that the power is in the players. Also, I wish Phil would actually get a win some day. They are treating the art team so incredibly bad that the rest look like they get vacations.
Great episode (well.. they all are) with just the right amount of laughs and sadness and surprises. I don’t want anyone in my life to sprint out to do my bidding like Jo does (“ON it!!!”) but I know people who would…Gosh, I wish these seasons were longer….
Wait, so this show actually gets better with time? I had a trial to Apple+ and couldn’t even get through the first season. Lasso? Yes. Severance? You bet. Mythic Quest? Not at all!
Ashly Burch was low key killing it all season. Her various facial expressions in this episode alone had me laughing. This season (while still good) felt a bit uneven, but it really played more to her strengths than the previous.
I’m not as down on the season as others were, and I think this finale cemented that it worked. Spinning characters in circles is fine, narratively speaking, if they end up in interesting places; for Brad, Dana, and Jo, that’s striking off, whereas I think having Poppy and Ian realize they actually were best off where they started (and hopefully with the growth for David sticking, so it feels like a meaningful difference.) I do agree with others it felt like we were still missing an ep or two, though—I feel like Carol was sorely missing, especially since it’s arguably the one character who probably actually *did* end up turning into a worse person.
The main thing that frustrates me about Mythic Quest is that while it’s a dramedy that leans pretty heavily in the dram- direction at times, it’s still operating largely as a sitcom, in the sense that it’s got this central scenario and ensemble of characters that it’s always going to return to. The end of season 2 teased the idea that this might not be the case, that we might be getting a genuine shakeup of the cast and the setting à la the season 3 finale of Mad Men, but no, they just shuffled Ian and Poppy down a floor for a little while before eventually shuffling them back into Mythic Quest.It’s one of the things I dislike most about series TV, how it can too often feel like the story is sort of “holding its breath,” doing a bunch of seemingly daring stuff that you know won’t end up mattering once the show resets its status quo. The best developments this season were the ones that didn’t end up getting reset, like the further deepening of Poppy and Ian’s relationship, or Dana and Rachel’s new career tracks. But too much of it ended up being characters and situations moving in a circle—which makes it harder to get excited about future developments that could just as easily get reset.
Not the best season of the show, but still strong enough. I missed the feeling that the video-game-ness of it all had any consequence, but the character arcs were on point as the focus so I can’t complain too much.
What happened to Sue? Did I miss something?
Moved back down to the basement, I guess? Think she was filming less because of Home Economics.
I wish the reviews or recaps would talk moreabout the fantastic set design and art direction. There are a lot of Easter eggs for video game/fantasy fans. Who found the displacer beast?