Rapunzel’s Enemy

So we go from perhaps the best written episode in the entire series to the worst episode of season one. It’s not the worst out of the whole show, but it would easily make a bottom five list. 

Summary: During the annual Gopher Festival, Rapunzel is booed by a man in the crowd when she shows her new emblem to the people of Corona. After finding out that the person who booed her is an elderly shopkeeper whom everyone loves, Rapunzel is determined to uncover the reason for Uncle Monty's disapproval of her, even if it means disguising herself. Eventually, she inspires Monty to participate at the Gopher Festival Tournament with her. Meanwhile, Cass is in charge of taking care of the gohper for the tournament and Eugene isn’t helping. 

Tonal Dissonance 

This episode marks one of the bigger recurring problems in the show. The series varies wildly in tone from episode to episode, as if the creators can’t decide what the show should be. Is it a serious action adventure series or a cutesy slice of life sitcom? The problem with making it both is that together they undermined one another. The low stakes comedy clashes with the high drama, either undermining the tension of the story or stealing screen-time from more plot important elements. Watching the series gives you a serious case of mood whiplash. 

Forced Drama

The other problem with such tonal dissonance that the writers must now come up with contrived ways in order to keep up the tension. There’s zero stakes in the set up for this episode nor in most of the fillery slice of life stuff, so gotta throw something in there in the end. Pull a monster out of nowhere or something, idk. But worst of the worst is when the writers dumb down a character and make them do something stupid just to force the action to happen. 

In order to have a climax in this episode the writers decided to make Monty into a complete dumb dumb who places himself in danger for no real reason just so Raps is forced to save him. Even though Monty is shown to be a thoughtful intelligent person before this point. 

This is one of my biggest pet peeves in storytelling. I can forgive a lot, but not characters being made into idiots for the sake of the plot.  

It’s Redundant 

I understand the thought process behind this episode and why the creators chose to put it in. It’s here to highlight Rapunzel’s flaws and the interpersonal conflict that she’ll battle for the whole season, preferably in a low stakes situation so that the audience will be expecting it when that conflict comes and bites the hero in the ass big time later on in the story. 

Only it’s not needed. Rapunzel’s main conflict in season one is her need for validation and how she’ll bend over backwards to get it, hurting both herself and others in doing so. However, we already established the bones of this conflict in the pilot as she struggles with being assertive due to that fear. In order to really put a spotlight on this flaw, we should have gotten an episode concerning someone who is actually close to her, not a complete stranger. And indeed we get that in future episodes anyways so, what was the point of this story?   

Too Many Characters

This show has way too many characters, or more accurately, too much focus on the wrong characters. Monty doesn’t add anything to the show. He’s here for this one episode and then sits around doing nothing for the rest of the series. You could have streamlined his role by combining him with another more plot relevant character, like say Xavier, and the story would have been stronger for it.  

Favoritism in Conflicts

The other recurring problem in the show is presenting conflicts from the view of the main character only. The show actively tries to get you on the hero’s side by deliberately downplaying or outright ignoring the other characters’ grievances. Monty could have had any number of real reasons to dislike Rapunzel, but the show decides to have him be petty, shallow, and rude to her first so that by the time we get to where Rapunzel needs to learn something and admit fault, Monty’s more legitimate issues can therefore be glossed over.  The audience has now been manipulated to already be against Monty and rooting for Rapunzel, supposedly.

Which leads into next problem...

The Lesson Isn’t Learned  

Rapunzel once again doesn’t actually learn anything from this experience. Her not learning anything is the biggest downfall of the show. 

The lesson here is suppose to be “Not everyone will like you but that’s ok”; only Raps in later seasons still can’t let things go. Everyone still has to love her. Anyone one who doesn’t like her is painted the villain. ect. 

But even within the episode itself we have the lesson immediately undermined by having Rapunzel form a ‘friendly rivalry’ with Monty. That’s not the same thing as someone disliking you. If a person doesn’t like you they’ll just ignore or avoid you. If you have to come in contact with someone you don’t like, either through work or whatnot, you then just deal with it and move on. There’s no reason to go out of your way to annoy a person unless you just enjoy annoying that person and we see here that’s something they both enjoy. They do like spending time with one another, so ergo they don’t really hate one another. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, this episode should have been reworked or omitted entirely and turned into an actual story arc episode instead. Either by making Monty more plot relevant or giving the time and focus to a more important character altogether, like say Varian perhaps.