Review: Bee & Puppycat “Birthday/Game”

You took too long! Now your fanbase’s gone!

Spoilers Below

That’s what happened. B’CHOW!

Bee pushes a button on a reflective surface, revealed to be a box that starts playing a song by her dad, wishing her a happy birthday, congratulating her for moving forward, and wishing he could be there. Puppycat walks in and asks in his autotuned Vocaloid voice what her contraption is. She explains it’s a “Dad Box”, something her dad made for her so she wouldn’t be lonely, through which she can say anything into, and it will repeat in her dad’s voice…which makes the previously happy song kinda sad now that it seems she had to sing it herself. But at least it comes with candy, so that helps.

The rest of Bee’s birthday plans include sleeping until she gets a headache which apparently isn’t much of a break from her usually routine…except for one thing she and her dad always did; visiting Glitch Gorge, and arcade, which has sadly become abandoned and rundown. Luckily, a punch and kiss to the generator gets everything up and running again, including some games that Bee’s dad made himself. So the two start getting into it, with games about kissing hamsters, babysitting, and filling up workspace water coolers, all while new temp job letters begin to flood the place. Interestingly, Bee, who would jump at the chance for more temp work for extra cash or space in previous episodes, ignores the letters to focus more on the old games, finding her focus on one that her dad made when she was sick, but then moved when she stopped going outside. Tragically, they’ve run out of game money to play it, so Bee decides to head home, but Puppycat suggests taking a job to get more money in order to play it, which Bee declines before getting more musical prodding.

As the two descend into the sparkly void to get their assignment, Bee saves the photograph of her and her father from drifting away, gazing poignantly at it. She almost feels bad for having this much fun. They arrive in the realm of Temp Bot, who gives them their jobs for the episode. Temp Bot’s deal is that she is voiced by a different voice actress every episode, who all play the character differently. This time she’s being played by the great Ellen McClain, known for voicing the vital testing apparatus known as Glados from the Portal games. While previous Temp Bot voices went with a more cheerful, laid back, or sassy tone, this one is just pure and cold Glados, who responds to Bee’s sudden sulking with a video game type job!

They enter a cloud-filled world called…Cloudworld, landing in front of a character select screen. Bee is given three options: the first being her regular self and the second being a male version which looks like a younger version of her dad. We never see the third option, but I imagine it’s DLC. She picks the male character, and is then voiced for most of the duration by the same voice as her dad (or at least the same voice of the singer from the beginning). And it turns out Puppycat’s been here before and can get them done in no time, but Bee wants to go into this blind. As the game starts, they are treated to a cutscene explaining the setting: The people of Cloudworld lived peacefully…yadda, yadda, yadda, AND THEN A HERO ARRIVED TO SAVE THEM! Bee gets to pick her character name and naturally picks the most dignified choice: “I Gotta Fart” and Puppycat gets “Barf!” I guess it’s better than Asshat.

This brings them to the conflict for the game: A giant blue eye gazes down at the villagers, mercilessly judging them for not having enough to tip 15%, or not using their blinker that one time. And so it is Fart and Barf’s task to destroy it…if they ever get around to it. Bee instead decides to take up one of the many easier side quests. Low stakes, tiny rewards that add up, helps build confidence. But the point of the side quest is, by definition, that it is supplementary to the main quest, the real objective. Although I’m not one to talk as I still haven’t beaten Skyrim five years later because of how much shit was going on around me. Though that doesn’t much matter to Bee, as she spends the day only doing those, even as the giant eye grows larger and scares more villagers. By the time she’s done, Bee’s character is completely decked out in awesome upgrades, looking like a Rule 63 Cardcaptor Sakura…but when the topic of finally beating the eye comes up, she falls back on more sides, saying she wants to make sure there’s no way she’ll fail. But that’s what Puppycat is here for. They’re a team, he says, and together they won’t fail. That, and he already maxxed out his character last time. So, possibly against Bee’s wishes, they fly into the eye and finish the game in one strike.

And yet, as they soar, Bee mentally talks to her father, saying that even though she’s an adult, she hasn’t really had a good birthday since he’s been gone…till today. She sleeps to not think about it, and even if she’s having fun now, she misses him. Back in the arcade, with coin in hand, the duo finally gets to play the game: a starlit dance playing out as we fade to black.

While this was definitely not worth the two-year wait, it definitely reminded me of many of the elements I loved about the pilot. Namely, an endearing, humanized Bee for a protagonist, a snarky and level headed Puppycat for a co-star, the surreal and exciting worlds and jobs, and the great chemistry and teamwork between our two leads, as well as including qualities from the first episode that I appreciated, like character growth and a connection in themes to the job and the emotional hurdle a given character is having trouble with. Last time it was Deckard and him putting his dreams on hold for Bee, while this time it’s about Bee trying to move past her father’s absence.

In a broad sense, this episode was about putting off a task that one fears they might fail at, the greatest example being Bee taking on the easy side quests she knows she can win at instead of beating the giant eye, but also a smaller example at the end, where creatures playing the game have to leave it so one can meet the other’s parents. It could be that the pink creature was putting off meeting the parents with the game because they might screw up on the first impression. But in another, more layered sense, this is about moving on. Bee reveres her birthday as a special day, but mainly for the time she used to spend with her dad, or dad BOX now. Though now that he’s gone, she sleeps in all day to not think about how much she misses him and is even a bit frustrated that she’s finding ways to have fun without him because it spoils the memories she had. Beating the giant eye however easy it might be, would just confirm that she can move on without him, and she’s scared to do that alone. But as long as she has Puppycat, it looks like she won’t have to worry about that. And this may or may not be intentional, but as Bee FALLS in to see Temp Bot, she becomes more fixed on regret for having fun without her dad, but at the end, she RISES with Puppycat to metaphorically beat the thing making her regret that. Great visuals! Simply put, this episode is sweet, sad, and thoughtful in all the ways you want, and if they had left on this, I imagine there’d be a whole lot more good will in the show during the wait.