In Time Bandits' season finale, Supreme Being and Pure Evil face off

At long last, we get some quality Pure Evil time. The Bandits take a ride on a giant’s island hat, straight over to PE’s “Fortress of Darkness.” The big fellow is a friendly sort and “[likes] to help people.” Once on land, the gang makes their way through rocks and lava only to be met with a seemingly impregnable rock wall. Impenetrable, that is, until a cave appears and one of the demons emerges. “Oh no. I’ve revealed the secret entrance to the Fortress of Darkness. I do hope nobody follows me in,” he says, loudly. 

Kevin and Saff say an emotional goodbye to the Bandits, who have only promised to accompany them to the entrance of the place, no further. Kevin’s plan? To ask Pure Evil to release their parents. “You know he’s evil, right?” Penelope reminds him, and Widgit adds that “it’s a plan that will 100-perfect fail,” that of all the bad ideas he has been involved in recently, “this is the worst one.” You can always count on Widgit to give it to ya straight. Knowing full well how bad the scheme is, and despite Widgit’s protests, Penelope trusts Kevin to take the map with him to confront PE. “Go with our blessing and the map, Kevin the Bandit,” she says. “And also Saffron.”

But they don’t just walk right in and see the guy. They fall through some kind of hole in the cave, and Kevin wakes up in his own bed at home. His folks walk in and assure him that he was just having a bad dream, but the voices of everyone he has met on his journey through the past echo in his mind as he looks at his various figurines around the room. As his parents continue talking to him, asking more and more questions about this historical dream he has had and how he and his friends navigated to these different places, the Dutch angle comes into play. The ‘rents look straight-up tilted, and fortunately, Kevin knows better than to trust them. For one thing, they have never been interested in history before, but most tellingly, they say that Saffron is the oldest, which is not something that his real parents would know. The demons cosplaying as his parents wiggle back into their true forms, and his familiar bedroom falls away to reveal where he really is: PE’s Fortress of Darkness. 

Now it’s time for Kevin and Saff to save their parents—and the Bandits, too, who were captured by Fianna just outside and brought in after the two kids. (Are there still two of her? We don’t know.) It turns out that PE can’t just take the map from his rivals. It must be gifted to him. As such, he now has to sweeten the deal, to bribe the Bandits to see if anything will entice them enough to hand over the map. For Alto (or “all toe,” as he calls him), he presents a vision of him delivering a monologue from Hamlet on a grand stage to raucous applause.(His singer friend from the Prohibition era is watching, too.) Widgit gets to be a map expert and jar-opener extraordinaire in some kind of military operation. Biddelig gets to experience exactly what they’re already experiencing in that very moment, just advanced by a moment or two so that it sounds like there’s a delay. Penelope’s vision is a cozy cottage scene with Gavin and a couple of kids. He affectionately calls her Firestorm, and they all laugh together.

However, Penelope keenly observes that it can’t actually be possible for her to get what she wants if she’s already participating in what Biddelig wants. And Gavin has already told her that he’s not in love with her, so this would mean Gavin would be participating in this sitcommy family scene with her against his will, and she would hate knowing that. This gets at the grander heart of the episode, too. What are the costs of getting what we want? Whose dreams can exist and whose are rendered impossible by the choices we make? It’s interesting philosophical terrain for a kids’ show to tackle—a pretty applicable one, too, because kids are always wanting stuff. 

On this note, PE and Supreme Being (who shows up in the Fortress, by the way, in a white leather suit, shooting blue lightning from his fingertips) cannot both get what they want. PE’s heart’s desire is to keep the Earth intact, but make it miserable; SB wants to destroy it all and begin again entirely. He has already begun to erase parts of the world, the gang points out (that whole stormy void thing that plonked them into Mansa Musa’s time being a prime example). Choice is tricky, and the stakes can be so supremely high.

Tadhg Murphy in Time Bandits (Photos: Apple TV+)

Kevin makes his choice. He hands PE the lunchbox containing the map, PE sends Mr. and Mrs. Haddock home, and then the evil guy celebrates. “An actual win for me, the bad guy, for once,” he says, laughing and shooting fireworks up in the sky. SB and PE fight just a little bit following this, but everyone else just runs out. Fortunately, as Penelope was arguing with PE about the impossibility of everyone’s opposing dreams coming true at once, the kids switched lunchboxes. PE just ended up with Saff’s filled with drawings of her family.

Kevin gives the map back to Widgit. The map is blank white with a big hole ripped out of the center. Widgit screams. It’s a major flex to end on a cliffhanger like this, for a show on a network that may not have the most robust viewership and plenty of folks who wouldn’t even give it a chance out of their loyalty to the original IP. If this doesn’t get renewed, we’ll be stuck with a blank map, a hole we’ll have to fill in ourselves with our own imaginations, I guess. If it does get renewed, we certainly have a compelling situation to explore with this whole map thing, but there are other loose ends as we finish out this season that leave things on an unsatisfying note. Specifically, what the heck is going on with those other bandits from last episode?! Overall,  I’m not sure an ending like this feels especially earned, and I’d argue that it hurt the viewing experience a bit, despite the excellent jokes and brilliant lessons that were packed in. 

So, will we get another season? I hope so. (Word on the street is they’re already writing season two.) I have liked this show, and my kids will want to know what happened once they get caught up. TB has really ended up being something the whole family could enjoy together, the kids and the adults of the household. In that, it has fulfilled its purpose. Now the question is whether these Bandits get to keep adventuring through time. If they do, we’ll gladly go with them. 

Stray observations

• • I like the character design of the giant who takes them over to the Fortress. The whole being on top of some big guy’s head thing comes from the original film, but this guy has better vibes. He’s a bit like the lion turtle of the Avatar: The Last Airbender franchise crossed with Te Fiti from Moana (which would make sense as Taika Waititi wrote the initial script). 
• • We really get a good look at PE’s costume in this episode, and it is solidly ridiculous. It looks like he’s wearing a black, gothic cathedral. 
• • Another great visual gag in this episode is when Kevin’s mom shares that she helped PE with his decor, then it cuts to a wall in his space covered with framed photos of him and his demons spending time together, “wonderful memories.”
• • The end of the original film is definitely a sort of deus ex machina moment with all of the different historical figures showing up to save the day, and this episode sort of pays homage to that with all of the different times someone shows up suddenly to get Kevin out of a jam.
• • PE tells Kevin, “I imagine you were regularly bullied with your personality,” and Jemaine Clement’s delivery of that line cracked me up.
• • Fianna and Widgit might start dating again? That could be interesting.
• • There are some really lovely things in this episode, despite my bitterness at the cliffhanger ending. Saffron calls out her parents when they aren’t appropriately grateful for the sacrifices Kevin made to travel through time to save them; Penelope has a great monologue about the necessity of creation, even if you can’t control the outcome; and the Haddock parents have a scene recognizing that Kevin would love a certain moment of a show they’re watching. It really did manage to go a whole season being sweet without getting too mushy. I applaud it for that.