- Released: 23 December 2021
- Amount of seasons: 4
- Seasons watched:4
- Rating: 3/5
Synopsis
My Thoughts
I think I have been pretty kind to this series so far. Not too kind, but compared to how much I've seen others tear this one to shreds I'm pretty darn nice to it. I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt sometimes because honestly I kind of feel that part of the not-so-great quality of it probably comes down to how rushed the seasons might be. Seriously, this series released four full seasons (albeit short ones) in the span of a year. That's insane.
But that said, I do like the series. Or, well, aspects of it. Alex's character. Thunder and his quest for the Night Lights. The different realms. But other things...not so much.
This season isn't all that different from the others, but at least some plot progression is really made for the first time, other than just hints at progression which was mostly the case in earlier seasons. Tom unlocks his puzzle box pretty soon and finds the Book of Dragons. The main team finally means Buzzsaw for the first time and he is now a recurring antagonist for them. And Thunder does finally meet his Night Lights family. We'll get to that, by the way.
So, yeah. That's nice. I also did quite like the final two episodes about the Night Lights, just because it was nice to see Thunder finally united with them and it did get pretty exciting which this series hasn't usually been so far.
But I still have quite a few gripes as well. Buzzsaw, as said in earlier posts, is a horribly weak villain. He's not even pathetic in a funny way, he's just pathetic, boring, generic, underwhelming. You name it. Sledkin has potential of being a better villain than him so far, but she's so ridiculously underutilized it's like the series forgets she exists half the time. I'm also not too happy with the fact that Buzzsaw is now probably going to be a recurring, possibly main antagonist towards the Dragon Club.
Another thing: the series is really hinging too much on callbacks to the rest of the Dragons franchise to me. I get it, I get it. They're a part of the same franchise and all. But since they're somewhat trying to make this series a new, separate thing, it's kind of jarring to see the constant callbacks to Hiccup and his time. The callbacks really are very much in-your-face by now as well. In previous seasons it was usually just references to prior moments in the series or hints that Tom might be related to Hiccup. But in this season alone Tom finds the Book of Dragons, a Viking hideout in the Hidden World that has been previously occupied by Hiccup, several drawings of the core Dragons cast, and at one point he even fights off an angry dragon with Hiccup's peg leg for crying out loud. There's subtlety, and there's this.
As for the Night Lights: on the one hand, I'm super happy we got to meet them and that there isn't some "last of his kind" bullshit like they ended up doing with Toothless. I'm also glad they didn't wait until the final season to introduce them and solve the "Thunder wants his family" conflict.
But on the other hand, yeesh. Thunder at least (despite his weird anatomy) does have a semi-pleasing design to look at. Some of these Night Lights (particularly Thunder's mother and younger siblings) are ugly as hell. Unlike with Thunder, most of the other Night Light markings and patterns also don't seem at least semi-grounded and they often just seem like random splotches of black and white. If you've looked at real piebald animals before you'll notice that the spots in that type of phenotype at least still has some logic to it. That's very much not the case for most of the Night Lights here. Not very appealing to look at.
And of course now that we've met the Night Lights there really is no going around the excuse that these things are by all logic probably inbred as hell. There's no way a single occasion of F1 hybrids between a Night Fury and a Light Fury 1300+ years ago resulted in an entire different species. That's just not possible without there either being a lot more Night Furies out there to aid in the creation (which there aren't since they're extinct), or a rampant amount of inbreeding. And I know that this is probably just done from a character design-POV and we're not supposed to think about it, but if you think about it critically for even a moment (and I personally don't like turning off my mind when consuming media) it just doesn't make a lick of sense. Honestly it'd just have made so much more sense if Thunder had been a Light Fury (maybe with one or two more Toothless-like traits to hint at very very distant Night Fury ancestry), since those aren't extinct as far as we know. But I guess the lukewarm audience reception towards the Light Fury female from The Hidden World threw that off the table.
There's also like this one occasion that kind of bothered me where Tom or one of the Dragon Club characters referred to the Night Lights by their name, which just isn't supposed to happen since the team doesn't know the names of most dragon species. They usually just call them stuff like "fire dragon", "ice dragon", etc. The Night Lights get called "lightning dragons" by them, which makes sense, but there's no way they can know they're called Night Lights yet because they cannot read the Book of Dragons. Just a slip-up form the writing team, I think.
Overall not a very good season but I hesitate to call it bad, either. Just mediocre like so far most of the series has been.
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