The legend of the dragon knight continues

It may have come out of nowhere but somehow against all odds, the newest kung fu panda series has returned for a sophomore season. Now of course this was essential to the storyline since the first season finale ended on a cliffhanger but this is a series that really needed to improve its quality if it were to draw in a wider audience. So did it? Well, let’s delve into it & see what we’ve got.

I’ll kick off with the bad stuff. For starters, the main antagonist of the series has always been veruca (& klaus to a lesser extent) so you can imagine the fan’s shock & dismay when it switched from her to zuma in the blink of an eye. I mean I never cared much for veruca anyway (in fact, I found & her downright irritating) but even I have to concur with most of the fans on this. What was the point of investing two season in seeing how her story panned out just to basically write her off with zero closure to her story arc? Especially when she’s being replaced with someone we just met, it’s a huge middle finger to the audience.

There were also zero references to shifu or the furious five; it’s almost like this is set in an alternate universe where none of the people or places from the film trilogy even exist. Yet we did get some of that in season one so it seems as if the writers want to have their cake & eat it too. But that’s just not plausible. Also, just the fact that I took six days to binge this (if you can even call it that) is not the best sign. I mean for reference, when the mcu netflix series dropped, I watched it all in one day (& that’s more than half a day’s worth of content).

As much as I liked to see rukhmini return, I feel like she really didn’t have that much to do towards the end of the season. But she’s always been one of the more entertaining characters so I’m glad to see them keeping her around. Speaking of which, Colin didn’t have much to do either & was pretty much wasted in just ten minutes of screen time. It seemed like they were setting up something for season three but there’s no guarantee we’ll ever get that.

Of course, it’s not all bad. If nothing else, I was really glad to see ping sticking around on a much more regular basis. I’ve said it before & I’ll say it again: James Hong is god’s gift to mankind & we are immensely lucky to still have him. & while I don’t think he added much to the overall quality of the series, I did like the addition of that new character, mastadon. It’s nice to have someone there who’s as stoic as you are. & of course the action scenes are always on point. I just don’t think it’s a series we really need (or even asked for, for that matter).

So is it an improvement over the first? I’d say so but they’ve still got a long way to go to justify their existence. Hopefully, they’ll be able to do that in a potential season three (which again, I think they were setting up but has yet to be confirmed). So that’s about all I had for you today but thank you guys so much for reading. Have a great week & I’ll see you back here next weekend for a brand new episode of whatever. Until then, this is the x factor signing off.