Welcome back to our recap of Frisky Dingo, the Adult Swim series from the creators of Archer for bingers on a TV diet. This week’s episodes bring the season and the short-lived series to a close.
1. Boosh!
Reflecting back on the series, the creators clearly realized that the Xtacles deserved more screen time as the series progressed. Their interchangeable appearances and squabbling dynamic provided a consistently funny platform for fraternal and sophomoric humor that was certainly less explicit than the mayhem that hallmarks these final episodes. By the time season two ends, The Xtacles seem to have emancipated themselves from Crews, Sinn, and Val, leaving their future uncertain but the chances for the formation of an Ant Baby Machete Squad on a slight uptick. Largely unconcerned with the matters of global destruction that drive the plot of the final episodes, the Xtacles ultimately just wanna hang out and have fun. As the story becomes more gruesome and sordid, they serve as a nice respite even if they do have a tendency to turn on one another. What’s a few fatal laser blasts to the head among friends?
2. R.I.P.
Speaking of the Xtacles, just as they are often dispatched with little fanfare, many of the series’s supporting characters meet their demise in equally perfunctory ways in these final episodes. Sinn, Watney, Taqu’il, and Antagone are all dispatched in such offhand ways as to belie their roles in the series. Taqu’il’s death is particularly befuddling as he leaps into Cody 2’s giant maw in a way that will remind you of Drax’s plot to kill a similarly large critter in the opening scenes of Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2. You have to wonder if James Gunn was inspired by the moment. Taqu’il does not have the same success, but the witnesses are equally befuddled by the misguided heroism. The hapless and lovestruck Watney is also given a fitting swan song as the basis for the Xtacles swimming pool low country boil. Antagone’s death at the hands of her ravenous (chitinous? not so much) spawn, is truly shocking, bloody, and frankly, pretty gross. Wendell and Cody 2 make a fitting pair.
3. Crews and Killface, Redux
As I’ve mentioned previously, the dynamic between Crews and Killface not only develops into one of the more satisfying over the course the series, but it also is one of the more genuine. The two have earnestly grown fond of one another, if only because their combination of low and high-level verbal sparring is clearly invigorating for both. There are seemingly endless ways for the two to belittle one another, and Killface has become more adept at fighting back, jettisoning his typical plea for Crews to grow up and replacing it with more pointed barbs. In the final episode, the two even gang up on Simon, who reveals that he feigned coming out of the closet to get his father’s attention. When Killface calls his son Snackie Onassis, it’s clear that Crews’s low brand of humor has rubbed off on the imposing alien, and when the two try to share a ringtone amidst Wendell and Cody 2’s attack on the Annihilatrix, they seem like two old friends, bickering to hide their true affinity for one another from the rest of the world.
4. Subplots, Ahoy
When Crews’s illegitimate daughter appears in episode 12 it serves little purpose other than to give Crews more fodder for his own vanity. She exits as quickly as she enters, and it sticks out like a sore thumb against the already gonzo, series-spanning developments that are more or less ratified in these final episodes. Even Simone, Crews’s former, ahem, assistant, is given another moment to share screen time with our series regulars. There are enough threads in these final episodes to serve as a basis for the continuation of the series, but alas, it was not to be. The cliffhanger for season two is a doozy, and it alone would have provided a great basis for season three if the series had continued.
5. “Funny story.”
By the end of season two, it’s clear that Adam Reed and Matt Thompson assumed they had more time in this world. Frisky Dingo season two would be the duo’s final project together under the aegis of 70/30 Productions. Thompson produced two episodes of a spinoff series featuring the Xtacles, but Adult Swim declined to move ahead with the placeholder series and 70/30 Productions was shuttered. Reed and Thompson along with other series contributors would later go on to form Floyd County Productions, but Frisky Dingo set the template for what could be done in limited-animation style and for the brand of no-holds barred humor that Reed would continue with the long-running and wildly successful Archer series on FX.
That’s it. We hope you enjoyed this walk down Frisky Dingo memory lane. Next week I’ll be shifting gears to talk about another series available on the Hulu streaming platform, Venture Brothers.
