Dragons Riders of Berk Reviews: Episode 5 - In Dragons We Trust

Now before I get to my review, I'm going to talk about the new official trailer for How To Train Your Dragon 2 that was released yesterday. Holy tripping balls, June cannot come soon enough dammit! This trailer was awesome! We got to see the new glorious animation, we got a ton of new dragons, the plot looks awesome, and we get a few moments of Hiccup and Toothless goofing around. Those lovable rapscallions, they haven't changed a bit. It's an awesome, epic trailer that has me more excited than ever. But don't take my word for it.

Here's the trailer if you haven't seen it yet.

Amaziiiiiiiiiiiing!!! Though pretty big spoiler you Marketing asshats! Oh well, the rest of it is sick, and I'm more hyped than ever for the sequel. And remember kiddie's, If I miss it in theatres, someone's going to pay.

But as awesome as the new trailer is, that is not what I'm here to talk about, I just wanted to share my thoughts on it. I'm reviewing the TV series and I'm only on the fifth episode. And there's still six months left to waste and 35 episodes to go, so let's get to it.

So after a nice opening shot of Berk, we see Hiccup randomly falling out of the sky. Before he crashes into the water and dies a horrible death, Toothless catches him. The narration tells us that in life, you need to know who you can trust, and who you can't. A sentiment I can relate to. 

Hiccup flies over to Fishlegs and tells him to jump off his Dragon. Fishlegs doesn't want to, but Hiccup tells him that it's a trust exercise and that he needs to trust his dragon to catch him. Fishlegs would rather do his trusting on the ground, another sentiment I can relate to. And besides, this seems like a pretty risky exercise. What if the dragon doesn't catch you in time? What if it doesn't even know you jumped off?

Like so.

Astrid and Toothless tell Hookfang that Snotlout jumped off. Hookfang flies as fast as he can too retrieve Snotlout. He catches just in time, but not before they crash into a house. And that house belongs to a certain Cantankerous old man.

Snotlout and Hookfang get the hell out of dodge as Mildew cries out "You'll pay for this!", and something tells Hiccup that they'll be hearing about this. 

And indeed he does. Stoick shows Hiccup a piece of roofing. Hiccup jokes about it, but after seeing that his dad is in no mood for goofing around, tells Stoick that it was an accident and Mildew is probably blowing it way out of proportion. Stoick says that a dragon and a large obnoxious boy crashed through his roof, twice. So it's worse than he's saying it is. 

Stoick goes on saying of all the houses in Berk, it had to be Mildew's. Since he hates dragons more than anyone, he thinks he'll use it against them. Stoick goes on to say that whatever the dragons do will reflect on Hiccup, and whatever Hiccup does reflects on him. Hey, it's not all about you Stoick. Hiccup is in luck though, as all he has to do is fix Mildew's roof. Hiccup feels he caught a lucky break. But come on, Mildew is just one old man. What could he possibly do to have the dragons severely punished?

Ohhhhh............

Now if any of you are about to yell "You're spoiling it, you dick!", I think it's pretty obvious that it's Mildew. I mean, who else could it be? 

Anyway, so Hiccup and the teens have to leave their parents' boots outside to air out. A "mysterious" figure steals the boots. In the morning, the town wakes up to find their boots missing. Mildew points out a set of footprints and leads the village to the arena where a Zippleback is sleeping beside a pile of torn boots.

Mildew tries to rile up the town against the dragons once again, and it works at first. Until Gobber points out they're being a bunch of pansies and tells them to man up! He'll have their boots fixed as good as new. The town accepts this, except for Mildew of course. He wants consequences for the dragons. Stoick's just like "Mildew, they just took our boots. It's not that big a deal. Get over yourself!". Ha! If you want the dragons gone, it's gonna take more than that Mildew. And I don't think you got the gall for it.

..................... I underestimated you Mildew

The teens, hoping to stop dragons from getting blamed for anything else, start night patrols under the name Dragon United Monitoring Brigade, DUMB for short. After some hilarious exchanges between Gobber and Snotlout about the sash with DUMB written on it, and the twins scaring Fishlegs (it was mostly Hookfang though) Hiccup thinks the dragons are safe for the night. 

Only to wake up in the morning to the Great Hall becoming the scratch pad of what is "assumedly" a Monstrous Nightmare. Snotlout says that Hookfang might have, maybe, sort of, wandered off for a few hours. 

Just as they're discussing this, Mildew comes in talking about his three weddings and they're three funerals. He seems to get an orgasm from mentioning the funerals.  Hiccup finds it fishy that a dragon would do this for no reason. But Stoick doesn't want to take the risk, and he tells Hiccup to cage the Dragons. Mildew is not impressed, he wants no less than for the dragons to be gone. But Stoick doesn't think it's gotten that bad yet. Mildew's going to have to do a lot better than that if he wants them gone. Now I know he's surprised me twice now, but he can't have the nerve to do something worse than desecrating their Great Hall. Can he?

OH YOU WHORE!!!!

As the teens are about to cage their dragons, Hiccup thinks he has an explanation for what happened with the boots and the Great Hall. He goes off to tell his father, leaving Toothless outside. Big mistake. Toothless gets lead into the armoury by an "unknown person", and as he enters a barrel of, something explosive, explodes making it look like Toothless destroyed the armoury and leaving the town utterly defenceless. And there's a pesky witness that confirms he saw Toothless do it. 

With this, Mildew finally convinces Stoick to banish the dragons. Which again, how do you banish dragons? What's stopping them from coming back? And what will they do if they do come back? I guess they'll revert to the good old days.

So the teens go to Dragon Island to drop them off there. They all have their tearful goodbye's. Which aren't all that sad because, again, how do you stop them from coming back? Toothless, who can't go back even if he had a mind too, and Hiccup saying goodbye however, is pretty sad. 

:'(

But I think it's mostly because the piano solo from the movie plays over it. The piano is the saddest instrument, I swear to god, you could play it over anything and it would be overly emotional!

With heavy hearts, Hiccup and the group depart. But Hiccup suspects that Mildew staged the boots, the Great Hall, the whole damn deal. Astrid says that's a pretty big accusation and asks how Hiccup's going to prove it. 

By sneaking into Mildew's house and finding evidence of course! Which he does find. He finds fake dragon claws and limbs used to fabricate the incidents. However Mildew enters just as Hiccup is about to make off with the evidence. Hiccup manages to hide in time, but Mildew, like any smart criminal, disposes of the evidence by throwing them in the ocean. Hiccup is now determined to prove the Dragon's innocence and Mildew's guilt.

Will he succeed? Find out in Part 2.

Summary

Although this was kind of a repeat of the first episode, and it again brings up how they're supposed to successfully banish the dragons, it was still a good episode. There's some great comedy as usual, Mildew is turning out to be a bigger threat than I anticipated since I thought he was just going to be a babbling old man that's relatively harmless, and there was of course that emotional moment at the end, even if the scenario was a bit forced.

So another great episode, and makes up for the last two episodes, which were lackluster. And next week, we get introduced to our main villain of the series. How fun!

8/10