The Great Escape

Revision as of 20:44, 27 October 2024

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"The Great Escape"
Season	3
No. in season	3
Production company	Hasbro Entertainment Nickelodeon
Airdate	October 25, 2024 (Paramount+) TBA, 2024 (Nickelodeon)
Writer	Jen Bardekoff
Director	Scooter Tidwell
Animation studio	88 Pictures
Watch this episode on Paramount+

The Maltos must navigate a rigged escape room or risk becoming trapped forever.

Synopsis

Twitch finds a puzzle box floating under balloons with her name on them. She grabs it and returns to the farm where she finds the rest of the Malto kids have identical boxes which they're unable to open. Twitch quickly works out the solution and opens her box, prompting the rest of the family to hand over their boxes so she can open them all. The boxes contain invitations to an escape room with an extra challenge to turn up at dusk.

The kids, including a reluctant Thrash, dutifully turn up at what appears to be a disused warehouse with a ticket machine in it. The ticket machine poses a riddle which Twitch quickly solves, resulting in them all being issued with golden tickets. Thrash immediately thinks they should ditch the escape room and sell the tickets, though as Nightshade points out, they're only made of fool's gold. As soon as they use the tickets, the Fairmaestro appears in a smoke burst. Thrash attempts to leave, only to find the entrance has been sealed with multiple locks — as the Fairmaestro announces, they must complete his game to leave or else become the replacement for his lost Cosmic Thunder ride.

The kids find themselves faced with the first challenge, a two-player rhythm action game. Robby and Mo take a crack at it, but the difficulty is escalated when the lit-up squares begin moving up the wall, and Twitch lends a hand by boosting the kids up. The first two keys are revealed, and when Twitch picks them up, Robby and Mo disappear. The next challenge is a test of strength, but every time Jawbreaker hits the target with the hammer, the bell moves up further. Twitch works out the trick and tells Jawbreaker to hit the target gently, allowing him to finally ring the bell. Jawbreaker disappears. Challenge three is to guess the weight shown on the scales Fairmaestro is standing on. Nightshade starts calculating likely values, but once Twitch discovers that it's actually a hologram of Fairmaestro, they realize the weight must be showing as zero. Another key pops up and Nightshade vanishes. In rapid succession, the kids solve fairground games for Hashtag and Thrash and finally Twitch... only for Twitch to find herself alone in front of the exit seal.

Twitch is confused as to where the rest of her family is, but Fairmaestro reveals that since she helped them all with their challenges, they did not legitimately win and have become part of his new ride. The Terrans are locked in alt mode with restraining bolts and attached to a ride while Robby and Mo are trapped in a ticket booth. Twitch evades the Fairmaestro's firing of restraining bolts at her and apologizes to the others for causing them to fail. Nightshade has spotted something in the fine print that will help however — the tickets are null and void if destroyed. Twitch attempts to get the tickets back from the ticket machine, only to be sealed in a huge tank while the tickets are blown around her. Robby meanwhile speeds up the ride the other Terrans are attached to, allowing Jawbreaker to use his tail to free Robby and Mo, who then release the others. Nightshade rapidly comes up with a plan to use create magnets using balloons and static electricity. The group successfully charges up a hammer which Twitch uses to retrieve the tickets so she can shred them in her rotors.

Fairmaestro asks if the kids would like to give the escape room another try, to which Twitch issues a challenge of her own — if Fairmaestro can beat the escape room himself without cheating, she'll volunteer to be his ride. Fairmaestro eagerly dives in, though as Twitch observes, he'll never beat it himself.

Featured characters

(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Quotes

"Escape room? Why go in something you have to escape out of when we're already out of it now?"

—Thrash

Jawbreaker:" Who's the "Fair-Mustard"?"
Mo: "We met him at the school carnival. He's the horrible, rotten, no-good guy who was mean to Cosmos."
Fairmaestro: "That description makes me look terrible. I quite like it."

"Who said I was fair?"
"It's right there in your name."
"That's because I'm the maestro of a f- oh never mind."

—Fairmaestro and Jawbreaker

"What have you done?"
"The question is, what have you done?"

—Twitch and Fairmaestro

Notes

Continuity notes

• The original encounter with the Fairmaestro and the loss of his Cosmic Thunder ride took place in "The Butterfly Effect".

Transformers references

• To motivate Jawbreaker, Twitch tells him that "it takes a strong person to be gentle"—this is a paraphrased bit of advice that was, according to Peter Cullen, given to him by his brother Larry before he auditioned for the role of Optimus Prime.

Real-world references

• The golden tickets and very fine print are likely references to the classic film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
• Aspects of the escape room are shared with British game show The Crystal Maze, which was hosted by Fairmaestro's voice actor Richard Ayoade. For instance, the final challenge for each episode of the show was to catch gold foil tokens being blown inside the Crystal Dome.
• Fairmaestro's scheme involving riddles is very reminiscent of The Riddler in the Batman franchise.
• The first challenge is based on the Konami rhythm game Dance Dance Revolution.
• According to Robbie, said game is easier than the Philippine folk dance tinikling.

Errors

Trivia

• Throughout the entirety of the episode, the Terrans seemingly forget that they have actual weapons they could use to escape... or the fact that they're giant metal robots who could very easily smash their way out of a plywood escape room or an old warehouse. Failing that, there's no reason given why they couldn't try to contact Optimus Prime or Megatron for help, instead of playing along with Fairmaestro's blatantly rigged challenges.
• While his previous episode depicted Fairmaestro as an illusionist-type, this episode plays up his abilities to an absurd degree. Not only can he instantly poof the Terrans from place to place without their knowledge or instantly transform the room they're in into different configurations, he can also summon gigantic carnival rides and circus attractions at will, something closer to outright magic rather than traditional smoke-and-mirrors prestidigitation.
• Twitch seemingly breaks the fourth wall by declaring "Cue the montage!"