Mythic Quest: Season 4
★★★★ | Co-op

Mythic Quest remains one of my favorite workplace comedies. Or is it a drama? Maybe it's a satire. As always, Mythic Quest remains hard to pin down, because it effortlessly navigates between the genres and refuses easy compartmentalization. Even at its most outlandish, Mythic Quest is honest, which is its greatest strength.
Season 4 sees the gang at the Ubisoft-owned studio return to work as Ian (Rob McElhenney) and Poppy (Charlotte Nicdao) reunite after their tentative partnership separation in Season 3. Revitalized by their realization of how alike they are, Poppy and Ian go wild on a new expansion of Raven's Banquet, even as their player base shows signs of moving on.
Naturally, neither Ian nor Poppy can handle such normality for good, and it's not long before their inner nature starts to fight against it. Poppy struggles with a new relationship and keeping work out of her private life. Ian is jealous of Poppy's newfound happiness. Not because he's attracted to her, but because he's unable to function as an adult without a chaotic force to draw him into another disaster.
Meanwhile, Raven's Banquet becomes a milking machine for David (David Hornsby), who finds that he can just make players create content for him to monetize. Dana (Imani Hakim), who created the Playpen, now the heart of the player-milking scheme, feels cheated out of profits and wants to spin off on her own. Dana's partner, Rachel (Ashly Burch) is as lost as ever in her new position of power within the company, and her misplaced energy drives some of the funniest moments of the season.
It sounds like a lot, but Mythic Quest has always been good about working with the team. Not everyone has to be part of every episode, and the balance between the Poppy/Ian feuds versus the more big-picture off-shoots works wonderfully. There's a constant geography to the studio, so you know where everyone is even when they're apart, and that allows for the series to breathe more freely. We've spent the past three seasons figuring out where everyone fits in this equation, so it's a blast to see what happens when the show messes around with the equation itself.
This season, Mythic Quest leans in on the business side of the satire than before, but the laughs remain surprisingly consistent. There's some truly dark gallows humor about how much money game companies made during COVID, and how the big players want to return to that status quo, even if it means a few deaths here and there.
Equally funny is Dana's insecurity about her age in the design world. She's young, don't get me wrong, but there's always someone younger already at work. Hakim plays the torment for laughs, but she's such a talented performer that the pain feels real as well. It's not a fun feeling to think that you're running out of time, even if's all a manufactured reality by a broken system.
At 10 episodes in length (9 of which were sent for review), Mythic Quest takes a bit of time to get going, but only by an episode or two. The breaks between seasons are a bit long, but it's understandable considering how busy everyone involved is. There's a gluttonous desire to ask for more, despite how good we have it so far. I'd love for Mythic Quest to be like the shows of old, where we got 20 episodes every year, but then it wouldn't be Mythic Quest.
Instead, we get morsels of gold when we get it, and that's enough. It would be silly to complain about it any more than that.