I’m sure you’ve noticed, but we now have about 10,000 dedicated streaming services. Everyone wants in on that, including Apple, though they’ve done a pretty piss poor of promoting their Apple TV+. There has already been some solid entries on the young service, with the most recent being Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet.
The show stars Rob McElhenney of It’s Always Sunny fame as a game Director and Creator, along with a cast of solid supporting actors including the young Charlotte Nicdao, who steals the show as an energetic game designer. It follows the inner workings of a video-game developer working on a World of Warcraft-esque multiplayer title called Mythic Quest upon the release of its major expansion, Raven’s Banquet.
It’s actually a good show that touches on a lot of key subjects in the game industry today such as unionization, crunch/overtime, the lack of credit in video games as well as Nazis, lots and lots of Nazis. But one episode manages to stand above the rest, one in the middle of the freshman season, A Dark Quiet Death.
The episode is mostly standalone, with only a brief indirect connection to the main story. It is all about the chance meeting between a dark, brooding aspiring artist nicknamed Beans (Cristin Milioti) and a video game producer named Mac (Jake Johnson) in an electronics store. The two begin both a partnership and romance as they begin to pitch an unconventional video game, a survival horror title called A Dark Quiet Death where there’s no winning as you battle personifications of depression. It’s all about the futile struggle of life that all eventually leads to one place no matter what you do or how hard you fight.
After endless pitches to publishers, they finally find someone to fund their product of love. A Dark Quiet Death becomes an unexpected hit, which leads the two to start a studio that grows as the publisher demands sequels.
As those follow-ups come, the core concept that Beans came up with for the hit game becomes more diluted as management hopes to create a more commercial product. Eventually, merchandise and action-infused and family friendly adaptations come, further transforming A Dark Quiet Death into a franchise into something else entirely. While Beans finds the process heartbreaking as her passion project turns into a series she doesn’t recognize, Doc is more open to the changes and begin actively pushing them.
The episode juxtaposes the deterioration of Beans and Doc’s marriage against the deterioration of the game’s continued commercialization. As their publisher chips slowly away at what makes A Dark Quiet Death special, so too does Beans’ passion gets chiseled away by her husband’s pleas for more and more compromise. It all eventually ends in a video game store with a much different outcome than it begins.
The whole thing is anchored by the performances of Jake Johnson and Cristin Milioti. Milioti finds the dark humor and quirkiness of Beans in an endearing role, and Johnson shines as a man who wants to find a middle ground between his art and making a lot of money. Johnson, especially, is impressive and shows that he’s got some real acting chops in his character’s rise and inevitable fall.
It’s hard to recommend Mythic Quest based on this episode, since the tone of it is quite different than the rest of the first season. It does, however, segue into a sort of prequel into the main show’s plot so it’s easy to watch all on its own before the others. I can’t think of any single episode in recent memory that in roughly thirty minutes manages to capture so much about love, the struggle between art and corporate media, and the regrets we make in work and love.
Mythic Quest has been renewed for a second season, and while I doubt we’ll get something quite like this episode again, if nothing else I’m glad I got to experience Dark Quiet Death, and it’s more than worth going out of your way to watch.