**This article contains spoilers for the season finale of Mentopolis**
As with so many other seasons of Dimension 20, there’s something intensely and inherently charming about Mentopolis‘ tongue-in-cheek, patently ridiculous approach to storytelling. The nineteenth season of the tabletop actual play series comes to a close tonight with its sixth and final episode, a rollicking two-hour finale to a season that’s exceeded even the standard threshold for (already wonderfully silly) shenanigans on the TTRPG comedy series. But as frequently as the cast acknowledges the pure insanity of the ongoings in Mentopolis on the Adventuring Party talkback series, there’s also an undeniably powerful emotional core to the season that’s just as crucial to the magic of Mentopolis. Through the power of puns, urban politics, and a healthy dose of tropes(!), Mentopolis is a ruminative, cathartic story of self-worth and the power of knowing your own mind.
GM’d by Brennan Lee Mulligan and starring Hank Green, Siobhan Thompson, Mike Trapp, Danielle Redford, Freddie Wong, and Alex Song-Xia, Mentopolis follows an unlikely band of “prefrontal PIs”—neurological constructs who work in conjunction to keep the city of Mentopolis moving, and in doing so guiding the actions/inner life of Elias Hodge, whose mind is the setting for the entire season. Hodge, a brilliant but meek scientist working at Gobstopper Industries, is unknowingly coerced into building his corporate overlords a mind-control gun, but (thanks to the interference of his Impulse construct, Siobhan Thompson’s Imelda Pulse) who finds the nerve to steal the schematics. Imelda’s impulsive decision to swipe the files sets off a chain of events that threatens both Elias Hodge’s life in the real world, and the stability of the city of Mentopolis, whose inner workings and power players are dictated by Elias’ mental and emotional state.
The short version is it’s a moody, atmospheric, art-deco noir-infused murder-mystery take on Pixar’s Inside Out, where ideas are personified as archetypes of the genre: a femme fatale, an innocent street urchin, a hard-boiled detective, and a bruiser with a heart of gold, to name a few. On the surface level, the immediate fun of setting an actual play tabletop in a highly stylized city where every person represents a specific facet or construct of the human mind is the capacity for endless puns: virtually every character the prefrontal PIs encounter has some sort of abbreviation of their name that indicates their function in Elias’ mind, and invokes plenty of hearty groan-laughs from the audience.
Imelda Pulse is “mpulse” Conrad Schintz is “conscience”, Anastasia Tension is “attention”, and so on—although plenty of names stretch the confines of a pun or are just flat-out jokes: a surly old Russian woman named “Ivana Popov” represents Hodge’s “fight” response (as in fight or flight), while Wong’s character is simply named Dan Fucks—I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about what part of the mind he correlates with. Dimension 20 is, of course, a show built around the appeal of watching improv comedians play tabletop, and savoring the ridiculous antics they get up to, but it’s difficult to emphasize the degree to which the sheer volume of puns (coming from both Mulligan and the players) gives the season a kinetic energy.
Though each player is an improv genius in their own right, even his fellow cast members have been rightfully in awe of Mike Trapp’s consistent ability to deliver the perfect, ridiculous one-liner at just the right moment as the slightly-inept but clever-when-it-counts gumshoe detective Hunch Curio. Then there’s Thompson’s filthy rich and willfully unhinged Imelda Pulse and her eagerness to take the knee-jerk option in any situation, regardless of immediate consequences. Toss in Radford’s dangerously charming Anastasia Tension, the brash and unapologetically horny Dan Fucks, and Hank Green’s hulking heavy “The Fix” who regularly runs enemies screaming with the power of scientific facts, and this livewire gaggle of characters is one of the most unpredictable and entertaining casts to hit the dome.
At the heart of it all, though, is Alex Song-Xia’s Conrad Schintz, a child street orphan who represents Elias Hodge’s conscience, which has been neglected and left unacknowledged for years. It’s eventually revealed that Hodge once attempted to stand up for his sister, who’d had her ice skates stolen by a bully. The bully instead attacks Elias with the ice skates, scarring his face and causing him to repress his conscience as a form of misguided self-preservation. As the city of Mentopolis chugged along in the coming years, Conrad spent that time on the streets trying to call attention to problems in Elias’ life that needed fixing by way of reshuffling newspapers so that certain stories would be of immediate importance—a fruitless effort until one of the reordered papers lands in the hands of Imelda Pulse.
It may have been Imelda’s snap decision to steal the papers that started Elias down the path to redemption, but even that action was rooted in Conrad’s influence—the simple but steadfast effort to make his presence known finally paying off. Over the course of the season, we watch as Conrad slowly begins to regain self-confidence thanks to the support of the prefrontal PIs—translating to Elias developing a sturdier backbone and solid sense of right and wrong in the real world. Though he’s hardly a natural hero (or even a particularly elegant one, thanks to tabletop comedic hijinks and the influence of the players) the recentering and support of conscience as a key construct in Elias’ mind ends up turning him into the kind of man who’s once again willing to stand up for what’s right and defend the little guy, even if that means putting himself in danger in the process.
Though it’s an inherent byproduct of setting your characters in a world that is another person’s mind, it’s still incredible to see the dual narratives of Mentopolis operate in beautiful harmony: Elias’s journey in the real world and the interpersonal relationships of the prefrontal PIs are facets of the same larger story, while simultaneously functioning as engrossing narratives independent of each other. But they’re not independent of each other, and that’s the beauty of it: when The Fix attempts to intimidate the Mentopolis District Attorney with menacing facts about breathing, the pressure in Elias Hodge’s mind decreases—the concept representative of his hyperfixations is focusing on breathing, so Elias remembers to breathe in the real world. When the constructs visit a boxing ring, the representation of self-doubt is a hulking, massive brawler (Elias is exercising that particularly muscle plenty) while his sense of dominance is shrimpy and neglected.
Every character, every interaction is not just a byproduct of how Elias’ mind functions, but also the mechanical cause behind Elias’ actions—a simple but brilliant concept that gives both the players and Mulligan a boundless trove of dynamics to cook up for comedy or plots’ sake. Whether it’s sweet, cherubic orphans that represent neglected interests or the fiery embodiment of passion stuck behind a desk filing evidence, the world of Mentopolis is a rich, complex tapestry that finds new depth and meaning in even the most seemingly inconsequential of characters. Between Mulligan’s endless capacity for finding the heartfelt in the utterly silly and the cast’s joyful unpredictability, Mentopolis is a short but oh-so-sweet side quest that proves just as heartfelt as it is silly.
(featured image: Dropout)
Published: Sep 14, 2023 05:42 pm