The Experiment (Spoiler Alert)
The idea of Jonah being the one who does the morale speech for them was a very good touch. Beyond that, the invention exchange was not especially memorable.
The favorite host segment of this episode has to be Crow as Griba. Their dialog in that one is totally made because of Crow's performance. Beyond that, the host segments are not great. Even their ending to this season wasn't all that great.
At the end, we see what Jonah had been doing this whole season as a plan to get back at the mads. I get the irony of locking Kinga and Max in a theater to watch terrible movies. It wasn't a terrible idea, but was it really worth ending the season on? Something like that seems more fit for the ending of a normal episode. The fact that they are preparing for the episode to be the last episode JUST IN CASE is probably a good idea, but at the same time, it seems like too much of an easy fix.
The ending felt a little hollow. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't deserving the time and dedication that it took in pulling it off. All of those hints and foreshadowing just did too much to hype it up with very little actual payoff. That's just my rant on the ending. The rest of the episode is a different story.
Ator: The Figthing Eagle
Ator wants to marry his sister. An evil warlord takes her as his prisoner for no reason. Ator fights to get her back.
What makes this movie bad?
Yet another stock fantasy movie for MST3K. Honestly, we can never get enough of these. This one is the movie that came before a movie called Cave Dwellers, which was given the riff treatment in episode 1 of season 3. It took them a few decades, but they got around to riffing the first movie.
Obviously, this movie was not made to set any records. It was a cash-in on the popularity of Conan The Barbarian at the time. The scenes were shot in one take, the story was nonsensical from the get-go, and they made some very weird choices. The fact that Ator fell in love with a girl who was supposed to be his sister. That was not a simple side note, that was very much focused on and given the treatment of "It's not blood relation, so it's okay!" Yeah, someone had a fetish that they couldn't outright say, but their writing was waving a large enough red flag.
Then there's the "chosen one" plotline and only he can defeat the villain, blah blah blah blah, he fights and kills things and people die. The end. Nothing special, nothing particularly painful, and this movie is vastly superior to Cave Dwellers. Here's hoping they get the riff rights to Ator 3.
The Riffs
The riffs are beautiful in this episode. Ator is a moron that acts without thinking and pretty much has luck handed to him on a silver platter. What's there not to riff about? His chance encounters are five minute puzzle trials of "how do I defeat this particular villain?" and then it just kind of happens and we move on. Jonah and the bots pick this apart with a fine pair of tweezers. The movie is silly enough to be funny, but riffable enough to be chiseled into gold by the crew of the SOL.
There are so many good gags and way too many targets to pinpoint a single one, it's a riff fest that works at a mile a minute and they keep up that pace all through to the end.
The Episode
A very solid episode. The fact that we have another Ator movie in the bag for MST3K is a reason to celebrate. While the episode could be considered something of a let down, at least it made a decent effort to draw the season to a close. It is an episode that is worth revisiting and is a vast improvement over the season finale of 11. It is a definite win in the MST3K category, now, where's season 13?!