4 out of 5

Directed by: Dave Willis, Matt Maiellaro

A strong return-to-form for Aqua Teen after the stretched-thin humor of the previous season / volume.

While this set is missing the infamous (and never aired) Boston episode, ‘Robots Everywhere’ is a great way to kick things off, and reseats us in peak dumb/smart/unpredictable humor for the show, bouncing between laugh-out-loud nonsense and visual ridiculousness and cutting one-liners. The first few episodes are also fun for sticking with the semi-linear plot of landlord Markula – this makes me miss how the bumpers used to imply a kind of storytelling in ATHF, even if it wasn’t ever actually present in the show proper. Still, this is probably best kept as an “occasional” element, as the show was never built on ongoing stories, and we’ve seen how it’s tough for the movies (as much as I enjoy parts of them) to keep that up.

The latter half of the season is still strong, though we do start to get what feel like repeated gags (Bible Fruit feeling like a spin on abusive side characters we’ve seen before, though still funny); an episode that feels like classic Adult Swim lampshading-the-corner-cutting, as the Teens go invisible for the whole episode; and some lazier humor, such as the concluding Chick Magnet’s trolling through amusing but boring stereotypes.

The episodes are stuffed to the gills as usual, however, your mileage may vary: having all the cut scenes from the video game is super cool, but is it very watchable, I dunno, and the “Carl’s Pissed” superbowl bits are very repetitive.