Apple TV+ comedy Mythic Quest takes its annual journey to the past with a stunning episode about the origins of game designers Poppy Li and Ian Grim. We meet the geniuses when they were petulant kids who’d rather dream in nonexistent worlds than pay attention to the one they’re in.
Mythic Quest fans are in for a treat this week. This is a superb episode of this consistently well-played comedy series.
Mythic Quest recap: ‘Sarian’
Season 2, episode 7: In the episode, entitled “Sarian,” the year is 1987 and a young Ian Grim (played by Judah Prehn) is in the principal’s office. He’s been combative with his fellow students, and fanciful in his homework assignments. The principal (the great Robert Picardo) doesn’t know what else to do with Ian.
His mother (Lindsay Kraft) secretly loves that her son is so creative, but she can’t help but know Ian’s in trouble. Plus, if he doesn’t pass his classes, she’ll look bad. And that’s a real problem because she’s fighting a losing custody battle with Ian’s dad (Sam Witwer).
Her own father (Casey Sander) is even more concerned, because he doesn’t want to see his daughter lose what she loves most in the world. Still, she loves Ian too much to discourage him from daydreaming about fantasy worlds. He creates a planet right out of the sci-fi books he loves reading — and names it after both of them: Sarian.
Shockingly, a young Poppy Li loves her some video games
Then the year is 2001, and a young Final Fantasy-obsessed Poppy Li (Isla Rose Hall) is worrying her parents. She’d rather play video games than do her homework, practice for her piano recital or be a social creature like her elder sister. Her mom (Haley Magnus) is concerned, but her dad loves that Poppy’s following her own path.
Eventually, her dad (Dionysio Basco) decides the best way to encourage Poppy to practice piano is to give her a prize — like it’s a boss battle in a video game. Her reward is a bicycle, which she lies and says is a way to see friends. In reality, Poppy rides to the library to play video games, where she stumbles upon a rudimentary game-creating website. Something called “Sarian.”
Back in the ’80s, Ian’s mom tries to encourage Ian’s creative side between her bouts of depression, but when he shows up to school exhibiting the tell-tale signs of parental neglect, the school calls his dad. He comes to pick up Ian against his wishes, and his mom is in too much of a state to put up a fight. Ian’s screams of protest fall on his catatonic mother’s ears.
You know exactly the battles Ian fought with his dad, knowing he had a loving mother, supportive of his creative endeavors, just out of reach. They’re all over the terrible beard he wears when, in 2009, he speaks to a computing class at a California university. A teenaged Poppy Li is in the audience, and she waits till after Ian’s done talking to tell him she loves his game. No, not the famous one. Sarian.
How many moons are we talkin’?
Photo: Apple TV+
For any kid who heard the phrase, “If you put this kind of energy into your studies …” before, this episode of Mythic Quest will resonate tremendously. When I was a child, like the young Ian Grim here, I, too, was an absolute moron when it came to doing assignments. I was drawing hideous little things in the margins of my textbooks and writing short stories all through elementary school.
When I got to high school, a school my parents couldn’t afford and so were given a huge financial aid package to send me there, I realized that being “a pleasure to have in class” was really the only way I was going to get over the hurdle of not knowing geometry and physics. I learned how to become the kind of person my teachers enjoyed sparring with. That helped make up for the fact that, left to my own devices, I couldn’t tell you the cosine of shit.
This didn’t always work. I could be a huge smartass (if you can believe it) but, in general, I made a big show of being invested so I could get to the stuff that mattered to me in my spare time.
A tribute to all those totally creative C students
Thus, this episode spoke enormously to the C student in me — the one who’s still struggling to make his dreams of being a writer and director and artist a financial reality rather than just a spare-time one. It’s easy to know you’re doing the thing that makes the most sense to you, but it’s much less easy to prove it to people while you’re struggling to pay the rent. So … yeah … good episode of TV.
I was heartbroken by the quick vignettes of Ian’s broken childhood. And I was heartened by the glimpse into the life of young Poppy Li. I especially loved the bit where, on her first day on her bike, Poppy tells her popular, socially adept sister to “eat shit” as she rides past her with her middle finger extended. I can also relate to that. (Don’t get me wrong. I love my sister now, but man did we not get along when we were in high school.)
This type of episode is just one of those perfect little things that the Mythic Quest team does so well. It’s less upsetting than the previous two flashback episodes, where we saw the young C.W. Longbottom lie and cheat his way to fame and a previous gaming company dissolve when the central creative team lost sight of their dreams and each other. But it’s no less well-realized.
★★★★★
Watch Mythic Quest on Apple TV+
New episodes of the third season of Mythic Quest arrive on Apple TV+ every Friday.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
