Season Review: Tigtone Season Two

Overview:

Welcome to another year of chaos in the medieval and fantastical land of Propecia. After a season’s worth of successful quests and proving that he’s the world’s best adventurer, Tigtone has never had more power. This season features a new intergalactic threat that challenges the status quo and holds a resentment against Tigtone, but it’s still largely business as usual for Tigtone and Helpy. The team goes out on more absurdist journeys that test every fiber of their beings as they meet new and unbelievable threats and become stronger as a team. Season two of Tigtone is bigger and bolder in every regard and the stories and creativity within these episodes demonstrate why this isn’t some flash in the pan oddity and it’s a series that Adult Swim should make a long-term investment in.

Our Take:

Some Adult Swim series suffer from obtuse plots or alienating characters, but the biggest obstacle that Tigtone faces is also one of the elements where it gains the most pride. Tigtone’s largest hurdle is that its unusual appearance is literally designed to be abrasive and visually alienating. It’s a show that doesn’t just relish in visual dissonance and the headaches that it causes, but it goes out of its way to conjure this intense effect. As a result, Tigtone is a very acquired taste and even those that are able to make it through an episode sometimes need to watch the series several times for its energy to fully set in. To that end, Tigtone’s second season isn’t any more accessible, but it beautifully evolves the show and pulls off this strange magic trick in an even more impressive manner.

Tigtone is a wild series where it seems like plot really doesn’t matter and “continuity” is a foreign word, but this season actually begins in some big ways. The King-Queen, who was the primary antagonist of the first season is pushed out of the picture as the series gets a lot more Shakespearean in nature. Spacress (Maria Bamford), is a frustrated intergalactic menace who blames Tigtone for splitting the world open and trapping her on Earth. Spaceress’ powers are compromised, so she teams up with Prince Lavender (who also learns that he’s half-wizard) and the two usurp King-Queen’s position and become preoccupied with Tigtone’s extermination.

Despite these major changes, Tigtone remains largely episodic and each episode digs into another tropes of the genre that also finds a way to challenge what Tigtone and Helpy have grown to take for granted about themselves. This season still shows a deep love for fantasy and steam-punk affectations, but it leans even harder into video game logic and stories that pull from RPG mechanics for inspiration. All of this material feels connected to Tigtone’s core concept and is par for the course, but these episodes take even bigger swings like riffs on the magical girl princess genre or Agatha Christie murder mysteries.

These deconstructions of genre are satisfying, but the best moments from the season are when these stories explicitly examine the nature of death, violence, and if Tigtone is able to rise above his natural tendencies. One of the strongest episodes of the season is literally one giant fight that dismantles action genre mainstays like false machismo and aggression. There are many opportunities when Tigtone’s way of being is the main obstacle to his quest. Season one always positions Tigtone as the perfect hero, but this season is all about how he can reach a victory in scenarios where he’s literally the worst person for the job.

Tigtone has always been the Chev Chelios of the fantasy genre and this series is very much the Crank of fairy tales, but this season finds a lot of fresh spins on that angle. Additionally, this season is just as interested in Helpy’s development as a character. He gets to grow, both as an ally for Tigtone, and as an individual. Several episodes see him frustrated with Tigtone’s behavior rather than mindlessly subservient to it. One episode even literally deconstructs Helpy and forces him to confront a creation called Hurty who forces the character to really assess who he is. Both Helpy and Tigtone are stereotypes, but most of the episodes this season actively ask these characters if they really want to be in these roles.

Finally, Tigtone is a series that excels with its story ideas, but this season introduces some truly inspired monsters and antagonists. Brain-Bow and Rain-Bone, the sentient ghost skeleton king castle, and the Sound Monster are all amazing beasts. The Tigtone and Helpy hybrids that are played around with in the season finale are also serious delights and it’s possible that these more twisted looks could remain during the show’s third season (or at least spend an episode where Tigtone is still a head on a stake). Tigtone can sometimes create the vibe that it doesn’t care or that it’s just lazily random, but characters of this nature are proof of the contrary. These are all brilliant examples of nonsense that only get used once before Tigtone moves onto the next dose of madness.

There have been a lot of changes going on at Adult Swim as of late and shows that used to seem like a sure thing are now suddenly have less secure futures. The expensive process that brings Tigtone to life could actually work against the show in this sense, but it’s likely not the first series that’s thought of when it comes to budget cuts. Curiously, during the first season of Tigtone I would have been content if that’s all that existed and it seemed like the series had said pretty much everything that it had to in what’s already a bloated genre for animation. After the diversity and scope of the episodes in season two of Tigtone, I’m not just glad that the series got more room to experiment, but it’s left me even more curious of what a season three would look like. These episodes all deconstruct genre tropes and the characters themselves in a much more thorough way than anything in the first season.

Ten more episodes could continue even further down that route. Tigtone remains a fantasy series, but many episodes from this season embraced other genres to the point that doing something radical like dropping Tigtone into an entirely different world wouldn’t even feel like new ground for the series. It’s already been done. To that end, a hypothetical third season will hopefully play around with these dynamics even more. There’s no need to mess with this formula, but perhaps another member to Tigtone and Helpy’s party could be explored, especially now that Helpy has become more of an independent character rather than just a meek extension of Tigtone. Digging deeper into the everyday individuals of Propecia also wouldn’t hurt.

Season two of Tigtone is an excellent evolution of what’s established in its freshman year. A show like this is primarily interested in outrageous laughs and absurd visuals and while this season heavily delivers in that respect, it also manages to tell some surprisingly deep stories. Tigtone is absolutely not a series that needs to go this extra mile, nor is it the kind of comedy where I imagine the audience expects this level of introspection and self-awareness. However, season two of Tigtone pulls it off and accomplishes these layered stories in a way that puts the laughs first, but still goes deeper. It would have been very easy for the second season of Tigtone to just coast and re-hash some of the louder ideas from season one, which is what makes the compound result of these episodes so satisfying. Out of all of the quests that the series has put Tigtone and Helpy on over the course of two seasons, the biggest treasure that the show has found is its own heart. Here’s to another season of out of control nonsense.