A Prophesied One's Work is Never Done. Says so In the Prophecy.

Ash vs Evil Dead Season 3 popped up on Netflix in the last month, so I made a point to watch that. The season came out a year ago, but SPOILERS, I guess.

The addition of the previously unknown teenage daughter, Brandy (played by Arielle Carver-O'Neill) was an interesting choice. I guess by that point Kelly and Pablo are used to Ash's lazy, immature, disgusting ways, so you need someone else to react with fresh eyes. And it made a counterpoint to the awestruck Knights of Sumeria, with all their kneeling and pledging allegiance to the Prophesied One.

I feel like that one Knight, Dalton, was supposed to be a mockery of those brothers from Supernatural. He has the same haircut as one of them. The more scowly one, as opposed to the blonde with the "Leon Kennedy in Resident Evil 4" Memorial Dumb Haircut. I don't watch the show, and I'm not wasting time looking up their names.

Given how much of the season seemed to be spent undoing the rehabilitation to Ash's rep in Elk Grove that the conclusion to Season 2 brought, I wonder if they regretted that move. It makes sense not everyone would just automatically forget about all the years they thought Ash was some deranged serial killer, and it probably made it easier to show Brandy as having a lot of doubts about him. Still, it reminded me of all the times we see the regular citizens in the Marvel Universe turn on the Avengers or Spider-Man at the drop of a hat.

I was mostly just annoyed by the mind games Ruby was using and how that was playing out. Ash would try to do something to prove to Brandy her counselor was actually evil, and it would naturally just push her closer to "Mrs. Prevett". It's all supposed to build to the big moment when Brandy has to decide whether to kill Ash or not, and I was actually surprised at how that played out, but all the build-up felt like annoying filler.

One thing that I was curious about was, Ruby had her weird demon kid with the idea that if she could kill Brandy, then Ash, her son would inherit his power as Prophesied One and protect her from the Dark Ones. The son ended up dying before either of the other two, but they did die. So what happened with the powers? If Ash and his kid were both dead at the same time, did he get the powers back when he came back to life? Brandy technically returned first, so should they have gone to her instead?

Plus, it didn't seem like being Prophesied One did Ash much good when the Dark Ones made the scene. They tossed his ass aside and took the Necronomicon like he was as much trouble as a loose candy bar wrapper.

I liked them going back to Pablo's past with his uncle the brujo, even if in practice it mostly meant Pablo had whatever weird mystical powers were necessary to advance the plot. Although I can't shake the thought Pablo chose the wrong bowl during the test, and he isn't El Brujo Especial. His uncle certainly didn't seem invisible to Deadites.

On the other hand, it felt like they weren't sure what to do with Kelly. She was off somewhere else to start the season, showed up with Dalton, then got killed trying a revenge thing on Ruby, and spent most of the remainder of the season dead. I could see there being some point in there about Kelly needing to get past the reflexive anger and hatred still lingering from her parents' deaths, that drove her to try something stupid like kill Ruby, but then fuck around and talk a lot instead of just doing it. But that never materialized. My favorite exchange of the season came near the end of that fight.

Ruby: Charging in here like this, it wasn't a bad plan.
Kelly: You handing out gold stars now, teach?
Ruby: It was a terrible plan.

The end of the season was oddly paced. They go to the trouble of seemingly getting Pablo and Kelly together. Ash faces down some Kandarian demon with the help of a tank, and then he gets cryogenically preserved for some indeterminate amount of time. I admit I was curious about the alternate end to Army of Darkness (where he sleeps too long and wakes in the future), but it seemed like a strange move to spring here, at the very last moment in the season. Why would the Knights expect Ash to do any better X number of years in the future?

Then again, the Knights didn't have a great track record of knowing what they were up against. Or being able to handle even relatively minor tasks successfully, for that matter. Them putting a bad plan in motion and thinking it's a good plan would not be a surprise.