Let’s talk about a killer episode, and what makes it tick.
I know I try to keep the topics here a bit diversified and I already did a very robust writeup on Helluva Boss circa season 2, but this year’s Halloween edition at the Looking Glass comes to you courtesy of the absolute barnburner of an episode that is season 3’s Return To Loo Loo Land. And happily, its aesthetics make it a fine Halloween writeup.
I’ve been sitting with this episode, parsing out why it hits different – it’s easily in my top five Hellaverse episodes so far, if not top three – and I think we need to break this down piece by hacked and slashed piece.
First, the fact that it takes place in Loo Loo Land, a reprise of an early-days setpiece we haven’t seen since the show was a completely different beast than it was now. That original episode, Loo Loo Land, was a markedly lower-stakes affair than we’ve become used to now that we’re right in the thick of things; it was more about family drama than anything, set in a chintzy, run-down amusement park. While we were there, we met Robofizz, a cybernetic recreation of Blitz’s childhood bestie and circus partner Fizzaroli, and the thing had a hate-on for Blitz but ultimately it ended with Blitz burning down the amusement park.
The show at that point was enduring some necessary growing pains, still caught between two worlds, slowly emerging from the black-humour chrysalis of the old now-defunct pilot to become the more balanced comedy/drama/action/musical show it is now. You can feel that push and pull in early episodes like that, and in a broader sense it’s been fascinating to watch this show slowly pull to its fully realized state in real time.
Now we’re back at Loo Loo Land, except the show has found its feet and its stride in the time since we were last here, and that alone makes this feel like a meaningful setpiece to revisit.
The second thing that makes this whole thing hit is the way the actual Return To Loo Loo Land episode is structured. It’s a classic bait and switch, the first act a silly spectacle of Fizz trying to find his new angle after breaking from Mammon’s control, and ultimately being persuaded to take some time off, so he drives off, picks up Blitz and they go to screw around in the ruins of Loo Loo Land. Early on there’s some foreshadowing that there’s a serial killer on the loose who’s been murdering imps and taking their skin but I’m sure that won’t come up again.
Now, the third aspect that really makes Return To Loo Loo Land hit different in context is the fact that for much of its run so far, Helluva Boss hasn’t had the most noteworthy villain presence, either as one-offs or as arc villains; Striker is an absolute exception that proves the rule, but the cherubs are mostly played for laughs so far (wicked action setpiece at the end of The Full Moon notwithstanding), D.H.O.R.K.S. clearly present a threat but they’re also presented as kind of idiots, and much of the show’s first two seasons are carried by the romance issues and family drama.
The last leg of season 2 brought us the infester demon as a very effective one-off villain, and we’re surely not done with Satan after Mastermind, and Andrealphus and Stella really started pulling their weight as antagonists starting with Mastermind.
But the point I’m making is that Helluva Boss hasn’t had a villain quite like this before now. Something that isn’t just driven for the wrong reasons or corrupt or misunderstood or at cross purposes with the protagonists – something outright evil. Closest that we’ve come so far is the infester demon, but he was nowhere near this.
Robo-Fizarroli is back – there are many, actually – but this is the one who’s been killing and skinning imps, and the one I’ll be referring to as Robofizz going forward.
This guy. Mascot horror is definitely an influence on all this, if Blitz’s quip about “Five Nights At FUCK ME” didn’t spell it out, but I’d actually go bigger, because they sure did; the way Robofizz moves, the way he spirals around on his spindly limbs actually reminds me more of certain bosses from Lies Of P, the Soulslike that reimagines the story of Pinocchio as a dark gothic nightmare. It’s creepy and unsettling in the best way. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if the animators were specifically inspired by Lies Of P in bringing nu-Robofizz to life.
The episode is anchored around the showstopper musical number Ringleader, a dark-carnival villain-song equally musically catchy and visually spellbinding, as well as a blackened foil to Fizz’s season two showstopper Two Minutes Notice.
Fizzaroli has always been a subversion of ‘monster clown tropes’ – he’s a literal demonic monster clown, but in fact he’s just a bean – and carnival/circus imagery has been something of a simmering constant in Helluva Boss, given Blitz’s connection with Fizz and his own circus upbringing.
But if you ever wondered what it would look like if Helluva Boss sat on all that dark carnival/monster clown imagery and then one day unleashed it all and played all the monster clown tropes completely straight, Return To Loo Loo Land overdelivers like a gunshot to the head.
All this actually enriches the original Loo Loo Land episode quite a bit, now that we know this is where that was heading. Robofizz in that episode all of a sudden doesn’t seem so small-fries now that we have our future knowledge squared away.
After the song doubles as a musical action beat, both Blitz and Fizz are down, and at the mercy of a monster. Back at the apartment, Loona receives a text from “Blitz” that she promptly susses out is far too well composed to actually be from her dad.
At this point, a lot of viewers were pretty confident in how things were going to go. Helluva Boss has done this a few times now, the protagonists are in peril and someone else comes to save them, clocking in with a wicked-cool action scene where this cadre of emotionally compromised imbecilic blorbos get to show they are in fact badasses. It’s entertaining, it works, the show’s leaned on it a few times by now, and just as we’re settling in to watch Loona rip and tear this Arlecchino wannabe a new-
Helluva Boss has a certain idiosyncratic relationship with the main characters getting knocked around. In a lot of cases getting fucked up is brushed off or played for laughs – violence in cartoon logic. But viewers clocked instantly that the vibes were completely different on this one.
We’re well used to Loona crashing in and ruthlessly kicking ass like she’s auditioning for the next Mortal Kombat guest fighter slot, but if we triangle on back to previous episodes, she hasn’t fought anything quite like nu-Robofizz before – adjacent to my point about Robofizz being a darker villain than the protagonists are used to fighting. Andrealphus, the cherubs, men-in-black human demonologists? They want things, other than just to kill.
So she had good reason to be confident from past experience, but he was ready. And we had every reason to think this was going to go the usual way, until Robofizz took the show’s own time-tested conventions and literally impaled them.
My eyes were glued to the screen this whole time, and that’s the transportive power of stories: we knew that Loona wasn’t going to die here, because it was already known that she would have a song in the second half of the season. But here and now, that didn’t matter, because the drama of the moment took command.
Loona is saved by her connection to Fizz and Ozzie, the Sin able to fast-track her to the best treatment in the Pentagram. And as of the next episode Yes/No, we see that she is in fact recovering, but – if I can take this out of the realm of evergreen analysis and to time-stamped speculation – I think the consequences of this moment are going to be felt going forward. I think it’s going to directly impact the relationship between father and daughter, and given how Loona’s already felt squeezed out of I.M.P.’s action and this can only make Blitz more overprotective.
They seem to like ending Helluva episodes on a reflective, or quiet, or melancholy note. Not here. Instead it’s pure darkness: Blitz reactivates Robofizz’s decapitated head, quips, “You ever been someone’s unhealthy coping mechanism before?” before turning on the electricity and beginning the torture. Roll fucking credits.
And right as I was writing this, I was talking with another fan who made me aware that there’s every possibility that Robofizz lured Loona to the carnival by making the fake text from her dad – the one that made her suspicious – intentionally red-flaggy and out of character for Blitz. Remember, this is a serial killer with a special hatred for both Fizz and Blitz: he wasn’t backed into a corner at Loo Loo Land – he was hunting.
All of a sudden, I have a bad feeling about the fact that Blitz chose to leave Robofizz alive. The Hellaverse now has its fucking Joker. And he’s still alive. What was that Medrano said about the events of these episodes having lasting consequences…?
But that is Return To Loo Loo Land. A wicked cool episode in a vacuum, but which only appreciates more when viewed in context with its series. It masters the art of luring us in with silly jokes and a deceptively low-stakes premise; it gives us a darker villain than the series has so far had, who promptly leaves his mark by brutally wounding a protagonist who has mostly evaded that to this point, in a scene that represents quite the tonal gearshift from how the series usually treats grisly violence. It riffs on past conventions the show has leaned on and deftly swerves around them.
Saving up the series’ latent monster-clown aesthetics to unleash them where it would really hit; giving us a peak balance of humour, drama and action all blended with a dose of infernal darkness; Blitz himself embracing his bad self at the end. This episode understands what it is, what it wants to be, and how to get there, and it cuts a bloody course to get there. It’s a new Killing Joke and the punchline lands like Hell.
Helluva Boss season 3, part 1 is available on Prime Video and eventually YouTube and, hopefully, blu-ray at some point. Earlier in the season, I’d started drafting a Halloween article about slasher films through the decades, from Michael to Art, but then I got on a Hellraiser fixation instead and no longer felt inspired to do the previous one, and I started to accept there wouldn’t be a Halloween article this year, only for Spindlehorse to drop Return To Loo Loo Land and fuck, we’re right back to monster clowns. The clickthrough preview of this article on the main site uses lyrics from Ice Nine Kills’ The Laugh Track, a song based on the Joker, which felt appropriate given this episode’s Killing Joke parallels. Trying to decide between that and Ice Nine Kills’ other monster clown songs for that was very difficult. Happy Halloween!