Jobu is in the building — and she’s smiling with a smile that is definitely not Joy’s. From the laundromat, she drags Evelyn through a bamboo forest Wuxia standoff, a black-and-white prison corridor, a fully animated crayon universe where a stab wound erupts in candy, and finally a park where piñata versions of both of them hang from a tree until a blindfolded kid ends the minute. The funniest concrete beat: the bamboo branch Jobu tears from a tree transforms through roughly thirty objects — a tiny shark, a Minecraft torch, a novelty lollipop, a number one foam finger, and what appears to be an Oscar — while Evelyn stands there watching the light show reflect off her face.
We go deep on the craft of this sequence: how the crayon animation is drawn fresh on new paper every single frame, why Evelyn accidentally yanks them into the cartoon world (and why that delights Jobu), and how a single bamboo plant just off camera and some well-placed fog turns a California park into a Wuxia film. We also deliver on a promise made in the very first episode of this show: the history of piñatas. Turns out the word derives from an Italian term for a clay pot, they arrived in Spain as a Lent tradition with seven points representing the seven deadly sins, and — here’s the part that sent us into a spiral — they were originally Chinese, brought to Europe by Marco Polo, and made in the shape of New Year’s animals. Evelyn’s clay pot is leaking. Her mind is a piñata. We don’t think the Daniels knew any of this, which makes it so much better.
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