- @Marty Yeah, I kinda stopped short of suggesting that the Winx "rigged" the chef contest...
- Ep 10 is more or less filler on the WOW front as Loralei's attempts to find sand sculpture building talent in Santa Monica are no good, and we have quite some padding with the girls imagining a day on the beach with Bloom, and it feels like a Coke commercial (I think I even actually saw a YT video that edited the sequence to look like one)
- In reality though, Bloom and Roxy (swoon) are in Gardenia on the trail of this Jim guy, who a) steals the watch from Evans and Gomez, and b) turns out to be the guy the Winx were chasing at the start of episode 1. Note to Rainbow/Netflix: Throwing in a single D-word into the dialog does
not automatically make the spinoff more mature...
- Meanwhile, some guy one would probably call Evil Smee (just based on his striped shirt and hat) hypnotizes Ace into giving the remaining Winx a special parasurfing race task, that ends up pitting them against zombie pirates (
again?)
- Again, another Loralei-related plot contrivance leaves the Winx girls' fairy heroics off camera
And surely Queen lady couldn't have known that there'd just be five Winx at Santa Monica...
- As Loralei was telling Ace about the Winx fairies, I almost expected her to (try to) MMS him pictures/video instead of having her be laughed off and fired
At least we're rid of that annoyance...
- Evans/Gomez were planning to take the watch to Switzerland (insert Gomez making a comment about going on a ski trip
)... and as it happens, everyone has to go there anyway, because it's broken and has to be fixed by a watchmaker who lives there... and coincidentally (not so much as it turns out), that's also where the next talent is... Presenting Sylka the snowboarder...
- In Switzerland, Jim is wearing a jacket with a hook on it, hint hint... Also, drama on a ski lift, and the older viewers will probably have flashbacks to S2...
- What's with the Bloom confessional asides? Did the writer mistake the thumbnail pitch as an animated reality show with the Winx? Best explanation I can think of... (And I don't think we need a confessional to know that Bloom doesn't want to blow her cover...)
- It's not very common to see Western cartoons play the "Know When to Fold Them" card (tm TVTropes... and pun not intended), and even the main series sorta backed off from going full-on with it twice before... (Timmy in 2x10, Tressa in 3x06)
- Jim tells Bloom that the watchmaker has an apprentice, but since literally the next moment they're attacked and eventually taken to the World of Dreams, Bloom never gets to find out more... But the other girls happen to find out that Sylka's uncle is a watchmaker,
what a twist This opens a can of worms, though, on how Dreamix is supposed to work: Dreamix led the Winx to Vicenzo even though he wasn't targeted, and led them to Sylka, even though it turned out she wasn't quite ready to make her snowboarding dreams come true...
- Main series music alert: While Ace is telling Stella to bring the finalists to WOW, the Stella Couture Boutique jingle (plus the music leading up to it) is playing in the BG
- Tecna's no good with non-digital technology... HUH. Technology isn't always digital you know...
- Stella: "I've always hated grandfather clocks... Now I hate them even more"
- Evans/Gomez hang a lampshade over how absurd the plot is so far... and that's not even including the fact the fairies are undercover as TV talent scouts!
- Pretty awesome scene of Flora talking to the nature spirit... and I'd just seen
Moana the previous day before binging the last few episodes, so the scene of the nature spirit appearing in order to allow the Winx to escape the Queen's labyrinth was a bit of deja vu for me (Doesn't help that her line begins,
"You are welcome" )
- Queen is using Anna
belle's voice and Yu's fighting skill, plus Bloom's fire power, to take on the Winx, and I can imagine needing Sylka's watch-fixing skills to fix broken teleportation watches... but what she hoped to achieve with the other skills she kidnapped is beyond me...
- Queen used bell. It's super effective!
Meanwhile, does the Shaman look a little bit like the late Duman to you?
- After Bloom knocks the Queen (and her bell) with a single fireblast, everything falls apart really quickly for the Queen (even though she'd held her own up to this point), especially when the kidnapped talent starts falling from the tree without any apparent explanation...
- Random falling kidnapped talent: "My hair!"
- The Winx are back with all the finalists, including the ones who were never kidnapped... and technonerd Naoki, even though he was never pitched to the show
And just like that, Bloom gets rehired by WOW...
- Back to the Queen's tree with Jim and Evil Smee, and we're finally told in the final scene of "S1" what we've already known since 6 months ago: The queen is Tinkerbell, and plus we also find out that a) that really
is Smee, and b) Bloom has been teaming up with Captain Hook this whole time... as if the name Jim and using a hook to free Bloom from the tree haven't already given it away, which leaves behind so many questions for "S2", like why would the main antagonist of the Peter Pan story have been trying to protect Annabelle from Tink, how did Tink make Jim young again, and where's Peter Pan in all of this anyway? (I think we still know more about Queen Tink from
that synopsis than we do from the actual show...)
- Overall, I'd put it at S4 level... which is appropriate considering that S4 also a) has an Earth setting, b) gives decent screentime to Roxy, and c) has the villain being defeated in such a quick and anticlimactic matter (and WOW still had the courtesy to wait for the back half of the episode)