The Great North

Episode Reviews

Jan. 7, 2024—S4, Ep1: “Bad Speecher Adventure”

Ham is scheduled to give a presentation on the subject of “Alaska Wow” for his speech class, trumpeting the glories of the 49^th state. Worse, the speech will be in dreaded “Room 15,” where his brother, Moon, and Moon’s fellow elementary-school students notoriously destroy anyone who dares make a presentation. (Moon promises Ham that he’ll be the one to pick the “last bit of gristle off your bones.”) Desperate for a wow-worthy topic, Ham asks several family members to come up with suggestions. They do—though each bears a curious similarity to a popular movie.

Judy talks about how Bob Ross got his start in Alaska—but in her version (in which she plays “Bob-Judy Ross”), the painter was also in a piloting program known as Snow Gun, and Bob-Judy was constantly killing his navigators because he painted during flights. We see one die in an explosion, and Bob-Judy’s supervisor reminds Bob-Judy that it’s the eighth such navigator killed. Bob-Judy’s ninth partner, Goose, is an actual goose, who dies, too. (We see a cloud of feathers, partly in flame, float by.) Goose’s wife (also a goose) dies from the impact of a champagne bottle cork, leaving behind a honking gosling. (I’m guessing its name is Ryan.)

Bob-Judy’s story is interrupted by Wolf’s narration of Top Gun’s infamous volleyball scene—a scene that somehow finds its way into the other movie-related stories that follow. In each, well-muscled animated men glisten with animated oil as they dive for loose balls, slap each other’s rears and occasionally walk away from the camera, arm-in-arm. In one scene, Wolf tells us they’re wearing leather shorts.

Every Alaska Wow story features a switch of gender for the story’s main character—men becoming women for the sake of the tale. We visit a dystopian world where everyone floats in containers of goo. (The main character of the story makes several references to toilets.) In another story, a 14-year-old girl visits a bar and, while her best friend drinks beer, she consumes a ginger ale. (Beer and champagne are consumed elsewhere, as well.) A couple of “vague but definitely evil bad guys” die in fighter jets. A pony is crushed by a giant flag. Two characters fight. Characters say “d–n” about seven times and use other profanities (“a–,” “b–ch” and “h—“) as well. God’s name is misused twice.

When we’re not in a fictionalized Alaska Wow tale, Moon describes how he and his fellow classmates eagerly dismantle speakers in their class, and he mocks and belittles his family members around the dinner table (suggesting he’s in a vindictive groove). Ham worries he might urinate in his pants during the presentation. Someone describes Moon as “demonic.” Wolf worries that, if he doesn’t learn which side of the plate a fork goes on, he’ll never know what to do if he’s “crowned princess of a small European country.”

Feb. 14, 2021 – S1, E1: “Sexi Moose Adventure”

It’s Judy’s 16^th birthday, and father Beef is excited about celebrating it while fishing aboard the family boat (which is where they spend most days). But Judy has a secret, too: She got a job working at a photo store in the local mall, but she doesn’t know how to tell her father that she doesn’t necessarily want to spend all her time with the family.

Beef is still mourning over the loss of his wife. She’s not dead and all the kids know it, but he pretends that she was eaten by wild animals and keeps her fur bikini and hair extensions as mementos of her. (We see a picture of the woman in said bikini.) When a child almost lets slip that their mom lives in Pennsylvania, another cuts him off and says that she’s in “pen-cil heaven.” (She was a terrible mom, by the way: She named the family dog “Grandma” so that if someone asked where the kids were, she could honestly say that that’s who they were with. She now shoplifts with her lover and blogs about it.)

Judy wonders whether it’d be possible to pretend to have diarrhea every Tuesday and Thursday, so that she could go to her job without hurting her father’s feelings. She and her pretend best friend, Alana Morissette, discuss how a slightly older boy’s tight pants accentuate certain aspects of him. (They also have conversations about “grabbing life’s butt cheeks,” which get more descriptive from there.)

Someone breaks a leg and resigns himself to die in the woods. Beef debates whether his wife’s goodbye letter featured a picture of a middle finger or a penis. A moose invades the Tobin cabin, and some balloons spelling out “sixteen” get tangled up in its antlers (spelling “sexin” and, when the “n” pops, “sexi”.) Someone loses his pants. Ham announces that he’s gay. (The family tells him he’s come out several times in the past and that they all love and support him.) Several bathroom-related gags are made. Character say “a–,” “b–ch,” “crap” and “d–n” and misuse God’s name.

Feb. 14, 2021, Episode Two: “The Feast of Not People Festival”

The Tobin family prepares to initiate Wolf’s wife, Honeybee, into one of the town’s most celebrated shindigs—one commemorating the early settlers’ switch from cannibalism to a more typical Alaskan diet. Wolf will be competing with his father, Beef, in the annual Cadaver Dash (where they must collect people pretending to be dead, like a macabre Easter egg hunt), and Wolf is terrified about letting his father down. Middle son Ham is terrified for an entirely different reason: He’s secretly become the town’s official “Cake Lady,” baking cakes for several celebrations under the guise of someone else. But baking a cake for the Feast of Not People Festival is a grave challenge.

Wolf shows his siblings an anatomically correct chart of how he hopes to remake his body (in a weekend) to be capable of carrying as many fake corpses as possible. (“Do you have to be nude?” one asks, seeing the chart. Wolf reassures them that he drew someone else’s male anatomy.) The day of the race, though, he puts his grabby corpse-carrying gloves on inside out and rips up his hands something awful. (We see animated cuts and hashmarks.) This causes him to wet his pants, which he and Beef make mention of several times for the rest of the episode.

Moon teaches Honeybee how to play a corpse for the Cadaver Dash. Wolf’s eventual cake is of a dead person—a way for the town, he says, to face its fears. (The cake’s filling is runny red Jell-O.) We see a flashback to the original settlers as they dine on fallen neighbors. (The scene is not particularly graphic, with only the narration really making clear what’s happening.) We hear lots of conversation (and several jokes) revolving around cannibalism. Someone talks provocatively about how another person’s cake is so moist as to be almost damp. We hear jokes related to bathroom activities and flatulence. Ham and Judy conduct what Ham later refers to as a “non-sexual role-playing exercise.”

Characters say “d–mit” and misuse God’s name.