The brilliance of Mythic Quest’s fourth season is that it knows precisely what it needs to be and does exactly that. It doesn’t try to get too fancy or splashy. Nope. It takes the characters we know and love, the various relationships on the series – romantic, platonic, professional, and other – and uses them to tease out character development, move plot forward, and find interesting new ways to throw the characters together to see just what will come out of those combinations. There’s nothing particularly special about the fourth season of Mythic Quest, but that’s part of what makes it pretty darn great.
After a third season that found Poppy and Ian (Charlotte Nicdao and Rob McElhenney, at the top of their game once again this time out, particularly Nicdao) at odds, season four sees the pair trying to work together once more, to mixed results. Still the most compelling pairing on the series – the chaotic energy between the characters continues to avoid falling into the easy trap of trying to pair the duo romantically – this season is Poppy’s turn to shine as she attempts to cultivate a life away from work and away from her often toxic relationship with Ian. We know the pair do their best work together, but I think everyone in the audience knows that they continue to hinder and pull the other down when one tries to go off on their own. The relationship has some additional boundaries this time out – which Ian immediately attempts to run through the moment he gets a brilliant idea in the middle of the night and just has to tell Poppy – but it’s intriguing to watch both characters try to actually separate their work from their life to very different results for each.
Dana and Rachel (Imani Hakim and Ashly Burch) are still happily together, although their careers aren’t quite flying forward the way they might have hoped. Both are successful, but they can’t seem to shake the desire for more. And both get stand-out episodes this season that set the characters up on very different paths moving forward (Rachel’s, in particular, is absolutely hilarious in the worst possible ways, while still remaining true to the character’s penchant for earnestly making massive missteps). Both Jo and Brad (Jessie Ennis and Danny Pudi, who, for my money, remain the absolutely best duo on the series) continue to hover in Dana and Rachel’s orbit, interjecting chaos – and, occasionally, crucial pieces of information that the women ignore – wherever they go. The comedy is never as biting as when it comes from Jo or Brad, but their digs at the various characters around them (and their continuing belief that their roles in others’ lives are what keeps their charges moving forward) continue with hilarious results this time around as well.
As for the narrative arc of the season, it’s certainly there and each character is sent on their own personal journey, but the character development is far more central to the action this season than just what the latest curveball means for Mythic Quest as a whole. At this stage of the show’s life, that’s a good thing. When you have as clearly crafted, written, and performed characters as the ones here, you don’t need to have a plot that dazzles to hide flaws in story structure or character development. Rather, here, the characters react to the narrative arc by growing and changing – but never too much that they become unrecognizable as the series chugs along. As with past seasons, the professional triangle of Poppy, Ian, and Dave (David Hornsby) is at the heart of the season’s central Mythic Quest plot points, with the creatives chaffing against one another and the game itself while David tries to hold everything together while it crumbles around him. Yes, that’s essentially what happened in each of the past seasons, but this time you get the sense that at least one of those three might really be ready to move on if that’s what is necessary, which serves to heighten the stakes in a really interesting way.
But, if you’ve been on the Mythic Quest road thus far, I believe you’ll really enjoy this latest season. It’s sharp, it’s smart, and it puts the characters first every single time. The cast appears to be having a ball and the writing of the series is still top notch. Season four of Mythic Quest is another great one.
Season four of Mythic Quest premieres on January 29 on AppleTV+. Nine of the season’s ten episodes were provided for review.
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