Recap: SON OF ZORN is the Defender of Teen Love

Season 1, episode 2: “Defender of Teen Love”
Written by Eli Jorne
Directed by Eric Appel

[All photos courtesy Fox Broadcasting Co.]

Edie (Cheryl Hines) has asked Zorn (voiced by Jason Sudeikis) to move his old boxes of junk out of the garage so Craig (Tim Medows) can hang his bicycles. While he is cleaning the boxes out, he finds the Stone of Sight, an artifact giving the holder the power to see whatever and whomever they want.

Alan (Johnny Pemberton) is embarrassed in front of Nancy (Ellen Wong) by Zorn, so Zorn offers to help Alan by using the Stone to find out what Nancy likes.

Meanwhile, at the office, Linda (Artemis Pebdani), Zorn’s boss, tells Zorn that he needs to make a sale or he will be fired.

Edie, tired of Zorn not getting his crap out of the garage, takes it to his apartment for him.

Later, Alan visits his dad in his apartment and Zorn tells him that he’s been using the stone to look in on Nancy so they know what Nancy likes.

Zorn tries to move all his boxes back to Edie’s, but she catches him. When he admits to using the Stone, Edie locks it up in the safe. Edie then moves all of Zorn’s stuff to the curb.

Zorn then tries to get intel on Nancy the old fashioned way, by spying on her from a parked car. This does not go over well as not only does he see that Nancy has a boyfriend, but Nancy’s dad doesn’t like the intrusion.

Zorn goes to see Alan to give him some more advice, but Alan busts Zorn’s chops for spying on Nancy like that…and that he already used the Stone of Sight and saw that Nancy has a boyfriend.

Zorn and Alan both agree that they need to let it go.

Zorn destroys the Stone.

The good news is Zorn gets a sale — from Craig, of all people, much to Edie’s dismay.

We then close out this episode with Zorn using the now taped-up Stone of Sight to spy on Craig and Edie. But after seeing Craig using the sale to score points with Edie, Zorn again crushes the Stone.

Analysis:

Okay,  Fox, why did you decide to call this episode “The Season Premiere”? That makes no sense. Instead of re-showing the pilot (which they showed two weeks ago as “A Special Preview”), which sets up the show, you just plop unsuspecting viewers into the world of Zorn with an episode where Zorn is already established in Orange County and already has a job selling soap dispensers, and an apartment. Do you want this show to fall flat on its face? Luckily, you folks have me to give you a recap, huh?

In this episode, we get to see Zorn try to be a parent to Alan…heavy on the “try” part. Zorn knows nothing of parenting. At first he just embarrasses Alan in front of Nancy and then he overcompensates by using an object Evil would love to get its hands on, the Stone of Sight (Think the Eye of Thundera from Thundercats) At first using the Stone works great; Alan is scoring points with Nancy, until he learns the truth that Nancy already has a boyfriend. Poor Alan, he’s in the friend zone. In the end, Alan learns that he should just try to get over Nancy and move on. Now if Zorn would just learn to get over Edie, he’d probably be better off, too, but warlords don’t often learn lessons like that.

I’m kind of curious to know just what Zorn did in Zypheria? Was he the King or just a warrior? I can just imagine that the evil that he faced there will come looking for him, probably someone analogous to Skeletor.

Again, bravo animators and special effects teams on Son of Zorn. They do a good job marrying the real and animated together. Nerdist has a great look at how they do this here.

Ratings wise, Son of Zorn lost half the audience (from around 6 million down to around 3 million) it received from the first episode two weeks ago, the most likely cause of this drop being the NFL game that ran opposite it. However, it looks like most of the people who watched the lead-in episode of The Simpsons watched Son of Zorn as well.

Next week: War in the workplace.

Son of Zorn airs Sunday at 8:30/7:30 Central on Fox. It can also be found on Amazon Prime Instant Video, Hulu and Fox.com. For more information, visit the official website.