Disenchantment Part 3? Yes, Please!

It's been a rough year. Not only did three animated princess shows end, but it's been over a year since we got new episodes of Disenchantment. We need Matt Groening's dark humor now more than ever, so I am pleased to announce that it will only be a matter of weeks before Princess Tiabeanie makes her return to Netflix. A new trailer was just released, and oh my goodness! There is an incredible amount of footage packed into this two-minute treat of a teaser! Mermaids, world-building, and familiar faces abound as Bean must decide if she wants to form an alliance between the kingdoms of Dreamland and Steamland. Part 3 of Disenchantment will hit Netflix on January 15th, 2021. You can check out the trailer below.

The second season of Disenchantment ended with a surprise re-appearance of Bean's mother, Queen Dagmar, a fascinating villain who was notably absent for most of the season. It looks like the next part will place more focus on her half-hearted attempts to reconcile with Bean as Bean continues to regret her decision to ever bring her wicked mother back to life. I would love to see more dysfunctional mother-daughter moments in the new season, as I felt the previous seasons were lacking in this respect. What sets Bean's relationship with her mother apart is that in other fairy tales, it's usually the stepmother who is evil, while the kind-hearted mother figure is long gone, often due to a tragedy from the princess's childhood. This show does a deconstruction of that trope by giving Bean a stepmother who appears evil at first but turns out not to be so bad after all. Just as any other princess would, Bean jumps at the chance to bring back her deceased mother and is shocked to learn that the loving mother she imagined was very different from the person she brought back, which can act as an allegory for how we remember people who are gone.

Another story arc teased in the trailer is a return to Steamland, the steampunk-inspired kingdom that Bean visited in the last season. Her status as a princess has more relevance to this visit as she is faced with the possibility of an alliance between the two kingdoms that would combine the magic of Dreamland with the science of Steamland. This is such a neat idea that I'm surprised it has never been done before. What sort of fresh disaster will Bean create by trying to blend together magic and technology? We see her royal status come into play more than ever here as her citizens praise her as their queen while she looks over them in a gorgeous royal blue off-the-shoulder gown. Hopefully, this doesn't mean that something happened to King Zog for the crown to be passed down, but this show has brought so many characters back from the dead that it probably wouldn't mean that much anyway. I'm looking forward to a more dramatic storyline that takes more of Bean's relationships and nobility into account instead of a bunch of filler gag episodes.

I was also excited to see hints of a mermaid episode in the preview. It's no secret that I love mermaids, so to see Bean hanging out with them for a full episode would be heavenly. The mermaids appear to help Bean escape her situation as she gleefully follows them through the sea to some sort of desert island where they share cocktails. It would be great to see Bean form some sort of relationship with the blue-haired mermaid so that she could become a recurring character on the show. There's already an elf sidekick, so why not a mermaid too? Speaking of sidekicks, it doesn't look like Bean's inner demon, Luci, has a lot to do in these clips. Maybe they're trying to avoid spoilers, or maybe Luci hit his peak in the Hell arc from the second season. There isn't much more character growth he could get after sacrificing the opportunity to become an all-powerful demon to save his friends.

With the year we've had, we could all use a little more zaniness in our lives. The first two seasons of Disenchantment were mildly disappointing, but I have my hopes up that this will be the best one yet. I'm looking forward to seeing more of Queen Dagmar and watching Bean grow from a lazy drunkard into a mature young queen. I'm also intrigued by all of the new fantasy elements that were teased including the mermaids and the mystical properties of Dreamland that provoked Steamland into forming an alliance. I'm sure there will probably be a few silly filler episodes too, but hopefully not as many. We'll find out when the third part of Disenchantment premieres on January 15th, one month from today, on Netflix.