#ps 118

Season 5 Episode 23 - The Journal

I’m gonna pitch a movie to you:

A pair of young adventurers fall in love in the jungles of Central America. Before their wedding, the future wife looks directly into the sacred, mystical relic known as the Corazón. Shortly thereafter, they conceive a child whose birth, according to the natives who created the Corazón, silenced the jungle and stopped a volcano. They take the child home to the Pacific Northwest, but leave him with his grandparents just after his first birthday, as they are called away on a humanitarian mission to save the creators of the Corazón, a mission they never return from. Around the time of the child’s 10th birthday, he discovers his father’s journal, which contains a map of his parents’ last trip, and awakens in him not only the desire to find his missing parents, but some even more mystical -- and dangerous.

Rewatching The Journal after all these years was an interesting experience. I treated this episode as an entity all its own, existing only to set up The Jungle Movie. I conceived of these pages before the NYCC trailers came out, and those confirmed there would be some elements of mysticism and destiny in the upcoming movie. Arnold’s “miracle baby” status could be considered mystical, for sure. What other latent powers does he have? And what does this infusion of mysticism and destiny mean for the upcoming Jungle Movie? I sincerely hope that whatever mysticism/destiny comes out of The Jungle Movie is wrapped up in a neat little bow and left in San Lorenzo, so that we can get on to Season 6 (fingers crossed) with an Arnold that’s doing kid things and not magical destiny things. Just my opinion.