Week 3 Summaries
Episodes 5 and 6 Summaries:
Episode 5 (“Peachmingo in Love”) continues with the series’ darker themes of rejection, conflict, and the mixture of loathing and attraction that define the vegetaminal’s existences. Peachmingo is the most beautiful thing around: she knows it, Dogtato-kun knows it, she knows it, Hedgetato-chan knows it, she knows it, everyone knows it. She only likes beautiful things. Period. So when Dogato-kun and Hedgetato tell her that they’re going to play in the Chocolate Pond, Peachmingo practically explodes: how could they even MENTION that filthy place to her? But as she takes a walk, she finds herself by the pond’s shores nonetheless, and there she meets Lotus Eater, who at first seems very ugly but turns out, like the Beanbirds, to have a beautiful flower (“because he lives in the mud”). Peachmingo is agonized by her dilemma: she is smitten with the somewhat oblivious Lotus-Eater, but she could never approach the mud in which he lives! Dogtato-kun and Hedgetato-chan consult with Eggplooch and come up with a perfect plan: they tell Peachmingo that if she comes down to the pond on a moonlit night, she’ll see something really beautiful. Conscripting a Beanbird, the conspiritors hide in the bushes and use its lovely flower to lure Peachmingo closer and closer to the mud… but just as she’s almost there, the clumsy Dogtato-kun ruins everything and the matchmakers tumble en masse into the chocolate mud. Peachmingo is horrified, and the episode ends with Croconion’s declaration that “love is bitter” and the vision of Peachmingo, standing alone by the pond in which Lotus-Eater lives. What a sad tale of unfulfillment…
Episode 6 (“Hooray for Being Straight!”) is a tiny bit weird. “Straight, straight, this is straight”—the speaker is Slitheroot, a sort of snake-root thing that never bends. When Dogtato-kun asks him why he is straight, Slitheroot invites him to visit his home, Straight Land, to find out. Eggplooch, Croconion, the Cherrodents, Cucumbird, some Beanbirds, and a watermellon-turtle-thing all think this sounds like a great idea, and the group marches to straight land singing a song about how straight they’re walking. The entrance to Straight Land is a hole in a fence. A very small hole. A very small hole that causes everyone passing through it to become thin, round, and straight. But they fit right in: everyone in Straight Land, including King Gobou, looks like that. The King gives a speech to an admiring crowd about how great it is to be straight, and everyone begins a chant: “Straight! Straight! Fun and straight! Straight is great!” and etc. Upon their return to the world of things that are not straight, the new and improved group runs into Hedgetato. Although she understands that being straight has definite, concrete advantages (which somehow are never quite explicitly stated), she concludes by complaining that it’s no longer possible to tell anyone apart. Which obviously says volumes about the Lucretian notion of the Clinamen, but that I will leave that for the viewer to ponder alone…