The Knights of Guinevere pilot was released last September on the GLITCH YouTube channel; in the year since, it has accumulated 24 million views and 1.8 million likes. The second episode, coming just over a year after the pilot’s premiere, has amassed half as many views and likes in only two weeks. Safe to say, the series plans to deliver on the promise and hype the pilot has been building since we were first introduced to Guinevere, Andi, Frankie, and Park Planet.
We pick up exactly where we left off, with Andi and Frankie and a now slightly more conscious Guinevere Android (Gwen), attempting to avoid the Park Police while they continue to repair Gwen’s body and mind. We ramp up the body horror in this episode, with multiple instances of bones being reset, guts being stabbed, and the absolutely skin-crawling android diagnostic tools that snake themselves under Gwen’s synthetic skin. Spoilers: those will be used in a surprising and not-so-fun way later this episode!
Knights of Guinevere sets itself apart in a very specific way. It falls into the subgenre of corporate dystopia; think Alien, Judge Dredd, the BuyNLarge company from Wall-E. These pieces of fiction are often painfully bleak in their depiction of class divides and the struggles of the working class, hitting too close to reality in all ways except for the flying cars and laser guns. What Knights of Guinevere does differently is not presenting this setting, these struggles, or this corrupted system; it is the perhaps delusional hope of the protagonists that they could be some kind of heroes, if not for everyone, at least for themselves.
Andi, despite being generally despised by the people she grew up with for taking a higher-paying job as a park engineer, refuses to take anyone’s disrespect lying down-even when she knows, fundamentally, that it would be safer and wiser to hold her tongue. Frankie simply believes, almost childishly, that things will work out, with the caveat that she also is willing to punch or hack her way out of most of the trouble she causes.
Frankie establishes in the pilot that she wants to become an engineer for the park because she believes that helping create an experience similar to the one she and Andi shared with a Guinevere android as children is meaningful, a positive contribution to the world. Andi simply wants to take the job that is most likely to keep her from getting sick and dying young stuck on the bottom rung of society. Gwen, although we don’t get a completely coherent picture of her motivations, seems to want her freedom more than anything else. They’re all able to identify the obstacles, the fundamentals of the system that are in place to prevent them from achieving their goals, but none of them are willing to take it quietly. They are all fighters. Even just for the next five minutes.
Perception is another interesting element that is being played with in this series. In the pilot, we saw Frankie hallucinating/having conversations with several of her mechanical toys, as well as seeing Gwen in her princess form instead of her “scrap” state. In the second episode, we see a lot of Gwen’s perspective as she overlays scenes from the past with Orville and Olivia Park as well as elements from her old movies on top of present reality. I think we may eventually see some of this with Andi as well, as she has a brief moment of dissociation in one scene that is accompanied by the outline of a fish swimming across her vision, but it’s possible we’ll only get hints until much later in the series, with Andi acting as more of an anchor to Frankie and Gwen’s fantastic sensibilities.
One way that the animators really aide in the audience’s understanding of these perception shifts is the shift of “drawing rates” from one scene to the other, “animating on the 2s” for reality, but “on the 1s” for action and for the scenes meant to have a more Disney princess feel to them.
A more humorous aspects of this episode is that we discover Gwen can only speak in pre-recorded lines from her old movies as well as some set lines for interactions with park guests. This makes it even creepier when, at the climax of the episode, while hallucinating a face from her past, she cobbles together words from different lines to haltingly, menacingly growl: “You. Should. Be. Dead.”
Many people commented on the parallels of Park Planet and Guinevere’s Princess appearance and mannerisms with Disney stereotypes after the pilot episode. Especially considering show creator Dana Terrace’s previous experience with the company, taking the entire series as a critique of Disney or the entertainment industry at large is a popular interpretation. However, I believe that focusing too much on that aspect will detract from the story being told.
This is a story where details are important. Offhand remarks in the pilot find connections in the second episodes: reappearing characters you thought were one-offs, phone calls from the same customer, references to the same event. More than the “lore” of Park or all the ways the show could be calling out a corporation, I want to see how all these small details fit together to tell the story of Andi and Frankie and why their connection with Gwen is so strong. We’ll just have to hang on until Episode 3, scheduled for release in late January 2027.
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