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The Dragon Prince Season 4 Review

The fourth season of The Dragon Prince is the worst one of the entire show. It’s actually not a bad season as it has its moments of greatness, but it also had way too many questionable choices that did hurt it in the long run.

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“My return to the world is inevitable“

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From this point onward The Dragon Prince was renamed as The Mystery of Aaravos, but my main contention with that move was that we only got the cool titular villain in one big scene and that was pretty much it. That entire scene was incredible and it had genuine danger and high stakes, so it came as a disappointment that the rest of the season could never compete with those first couple of episodes.

The choice to spread this arc to three seasons was a mistake as this first season of this new arc felt very much like just the prelude to the big things to come. It did feel as if they had maybe four episodes of content that they spread out to the nine episode count. That led to a lot of filler and that particularly boring and inconsequential subplot with the Sun Elves that consistently failed to engage me as a viewer. I did not care for that arc nor for any of the characters involved.

But the main characters fared much better with the exception of Rayla and Callum. Both of them were significantly sidelined throughout this season with their romantic issues being forced. That entire time skip was not done well at all. Bait and Zym are just as cute as ever, but I am ready to finally see Zym speaking and grown up. As for Ezran, he’s as endearing as ever, but he’s a terrible king and I found the episodes focusing on his ruling quite annoying.

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The standouts this time around were Claudia and Viren. Soren was also quite interesting and his turn to the good side was very well handled and quite believable, but I continue to find his humor frustratingly juvenile. The gross-out jokes were particularly annoying in this season. Terry was also an odd character as this love interest to Claudia who turned out to be a good guy, but why he is with her we never quite understand.

But yes, Claudia is pretty much the main villain of this season. She is actually worse than her father as she has always supported him in spite of logic or reason while continuing to make some needlessly cruel decisions and actions along the way. She’s a fascinatingly complex character for sure. As for Viren, he has stooped so low in this season, but the show humanized him quite a bit by making him realize his mistakes. In the end, though, he turned to the dark side once again.

Other than those first two episodes, I also liked every scene with that dragon toward the end. He was a great obstacle, funny and threatening at the same time. However, the show throughout this season turned to comedy way too often while discarding the darker and more interesting storytelling elements and world building that have been the staples of the series before. The animation, however, is much improved and more polished now while the score is reliably thrilling.

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