Lets talk writing for a moment. Shakespeare (who, historians of the future will find, may not have actually written his plays) used the "play within a play" concept. The ancient Greeks used it. And if Plato is to be believed, there was a far more ancient version of Greece which, for the sake of argument, may have used the device too. So it is old. And it is tricky, to do it right. And yet here we are in one of the closing episodes of -- if you take this series at face value -- a children's cartoon show, and, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, the head writer gives himself a "time out" to have his characters discover that a local playwright has done a play on them, and they trot off to see it. In what quickly became my favourite episode of what may be the best narrative of the last 100 years (better than Matrix, better than Star Wars, better than Citizen Kane) the characters become entranced with the way each of them is presented on stage, and start to argue among themselves about whether the characterization is fair or not. For example TOF discovers her character is played by a buff male body builder and she loves it. Ang discovers that his character is played by a girl (remember that Mary Martin played Peter Pan on Broadway!) and is devastated. However the fact that the viewer can relate to this massively entertaining episode is a tribute to the writing team behind this astonishing show. A show based on metaphysics of an order of magnitude seldom seen or understood in the mundane world. A show where the writers had some 50 or so opportunities to prove that they could not sustain the quality of the early scripts, and not only sustained them, but surpassed them. Astonishing. Just astonishing.
Review of The Ember Island Players
