by Jeff Alan, Contributing Writer
The hit Apple TV+ show Mythic Quest returns a full two years after its Season Three finale, bringing our lovable gamer devs back to the video game world. Season Four picks up shortly after Season Three’s end when Ian (Rob McElhenney) and Poppy (Charlotte Nicado) agree to come back to Mythic Quest, giving up their own solo venture and bringing it under the MQ umbrella. Ian comes up with a new expansion of the game, a virtual “heaven” that players can only access when they die. Ian’s usual manic and sometimes intrusive behavior starts to cross lines as Poppy hides her new boyfriend from him, keeping her work and personal life separate. At the MQ headquarters, David (David Hornsby) is uninterested in the expansion and wants to focus more on their other property, Playpen, which turns out to be a huge hit, where the creator of the game Dana (Imani Hakim) along with Brad (Danny Pudi) and Rachel (Ashly Burch) want to help her get out of her contact with MQ to start seeing more return on her product.
Season Four focuses on the struggles Ian and Poppy have with keeping their work-life balance and boundaries clearly defined, Rachel and Dana’s relationship reaching new heights as they navigate their blossoming careers, David’s continued struggle to keep MQ afloat and relevant, and the company’s adaption of new technologies like AI.
Mythic Quest continues to delight by bringing more fun antics from the characters we’ve come to know and love. Watching Ian and Poppy work together has always been a fun aspect of this series, and this season takes their dynamic to a new place, as they create AI versions of themselves for the other to work with. And Poppy tries to keep Ian out of her personal life when he gets a bit too reliant on her. The show handles this pairing really well. Though while we have the Ian/Poppy pair, the rest of the characters mix in different ways, like Brad and Dana teaming up a lot throughout this season, David and Jo having a love/hate relationship working together, and Dana and Rachel’s romance continuing to grow — these groupings are always fun to watch.
Something else Mythic Quest does very well is that at least once a season, at least one episode breaks from the main story to give us a small side story or flashback that is a bit more touching and interesting than the main plot of the season. This season, we get a parallel story centering around the return of popular gamer/streamer Pootie_Shoe, as he struggles with growing up and wanting to change his image to reflect that. Another great episode has the main team at MQ invited to a private island to partake in a murder mystery game where the lives of several characters is changed in more ways than one.
I think If I was to give some negative points to the show, while it certainly is entertaining, Mythic Quest doesn’t really do anything to stay relevant. It’s not particularly fresh or riveting with its time, and the character pairings I mentioned before are all pairings we typically get, which can be a little repetitive after a while. But at four seasons in, and especially with this story the show has going, I think it would be hard to start changing it up more, so it seems like they are kind of stuck in this situation. Not that it’s a bad situation to be in, because Mythic Quest is still quite good regardless, but if things were to change, it might not benefit the story much.
At the time of this writing, Apple TV+ has yet to give the series a fifth season. But as a fan of nearly all of the cast members, I want to see it go on, even if it’s for just one more season. The writing is fun, and the stories are good, but I wonder if it will do anything more to change things up, because I fear it may get a bit too repetitive if it continues the way it’s going.
Rating: Liked It
Mythic Quest is currently streaming on Apple TV+
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