Given this week’s episode title, “The Beagle Birthday Massacre,” I figured this was gonna be a mobster movie riff with the Beagle Boys and all that. Nope. It’s a full-on parody of The Warriors.
At this point in the series, Webby is pretty much the main character. While Scrooge, Dewey, and Louie have had the spotlight in various subplots thus far, Webby’s been there for almost all of those moments. This episode shoves everyone aside to give Webby an adventure that centers largely around her and her strengths.
The nephews kinda ditch her to go on a boating adventure (and we learn Louie has a Ryouga complex when it comes to directions). While hanging back, Webby meats up with an older girl who digs her oddball behavior, talents, and “very specific brain.” The new girl, Lana, is your “cool girl” stereotype, more into breaking the rules and pushing buttons than anything, but yeah, she seems to legitimately appreciate Webby’s quirkiness. So she invites Webby to a “party,” which turns out to be the two of them breaking into the Beagle Boys base to crash Ma Beagle’s birthday party.
Turns out Ma has more than just the OG Boys in her crew. She has a whole slew of themed gangs across Duckburg. The whole scene plays out like the gangs meeting up in The Warriors. There’s all sorts of gangs: a glam rock gang, a circus gang, a 90s XTREME gang, and (my favorite) a French gang called the Deja Vus, who get mentioned in the roll call several times. The kids get noticed, and Ma wants revenge for getting humiliated via a ball pit trap during their last encounter.
The rest of the episode deals with their subsequent escape and trek across town to avoid capture. They do a little bonding, using their respective knacks to elude escape and all that. They eventually hook back up with the nephews, and Lena starts sewing a little bit of dissent in the ranks. She’s cool with Webby, but she doesn’t dig on the way the nephews bicker all the time. At first you figure it’s standard “too cool for family bonds” stuff you’d expect from that archetype, but they’re going somewhere with it. More chasing goes down, and eventually they all get captured. Lena uses that very same dissent to get the various Beagle Boys gangs to turn on each other (they all want the right to be “the ones” to hand over the kids to Ma), everyone gets away, and Ma’s not too happy to have the Boys foul things up again. The end, everyone’s made a new friend, and all that.
Except not. Once everyone gets home and Lena parts ways, she goes off and does some sort of summoning ritual thingie. Turns out the pendant she’s wearing houses the soul of Magica de Spell. Or Lena’s possessed by her. Or maybe she is Magica and doesn’t realize it or some sort of homunculus or something else cool like that. Whatever the deal is, Magica is her “aunt,” and Lena proudly proclaims that she’s “in.” The whole thing was a ruse to get all buddy buddy with the kids so she can infiltrate Scrooge’s place and do all that nasty stuff Magica’s know for. Because, yeah, she’s legit evil from what I remember. She isn’t just a rick jerk like Glomgold or petty criminals like the Beagle Boys. She’s occultic evil shit. Webby’s gonna be super sad/irked/vengeful when she finds out the truth about her new best buddy with whom she, too, can bicker and fight. Or maybe she’ll dig it, since that sort of betrayal will give her a real sense of being screwed over by family. She’s “specific” like that.
SHIN MECHA GUIGNOL 