Spoilers ahead for “Mythic Quest,” Season 4, Episode 8
“Mythic Quest” may be a consistently strong comedy, but there is one aspect of the Apple TV+ original that has always stood out in this crowded TV landscape: its standalone episodes. Every season has one, an installment that is often set decades before the main timeline and stands as a major tonal departure. But even for a show that loves to challenge and reinvent itself, Season 4’s deep dive into Pootie Shoe is surprising.
“We love that character,” series co-creator and executive producer Megan Ganz told TheWrap. “It just felt like a natural moment to bring him in.”
“[Megan Ganz] really has been wanting to make an episode focused on Pootie that was less comedically driven and more about the relationship between father and son that is clearly fractured and quite complicated,” series co-creator, executive producer and star Rob McElhenney told TheWrap. “We felt like, if we were going to do entire season that revolved around breaking down the psyche of Ian, that story would be incomplete if you were not able to explore the story and psyche of his son.”
Brendan, aka Pootie Shoe (Elisha Henig), was first introduced in Season 1 as a mega popular streamer who obsessively played the game “Mythic Quest.” But, unbeknownst to his estranged father, Brendan was also the Masked Man, a figure that becomes one of the main sources of tension in that first season. The last time viewers saw Brendan, his dad had just defeated him in his favorite video game that was live-streamed to millions. So yeah, it’s safe to say that Ian’s relationship with Brendan is strained.
“Rebrand” certainly dives into those complicated father-son dynamics. “Poppy [Charlotte Nicdao] is pregnant. She is having a baby. Ian is dealing with losing his partner and the ‘baby’ they have created together,” Ganz explained. “It seemed like the right time for [Ian] to go digging into his own relationship with his child and be thinking about what he has done, what he sacrificed with their relationship, in order to focus on the game.”
Brendan has always been one of the more ridiculous characters in this universe. He often appears during a livestream, excitedly yelling about kills and rating video game expansions using buttholes. But “Rebrand” pushes past the silly exterior that earned Brendan fame and fortune, offering a surprisingly empathetic exploration into the cost of being a young influencer. The episode starts when Brendan wakes up on his 17th birthday desperate to grow up. He’s sick of his young audience, wants to drop both the “Shoe” from his name and is ready to be emancipated from his mother.
The genesis for what would become “Rebrand” actually happened partially because of Henig, who was a child back in Season, recently turned 18. “We thought, that’s a really interesting moment for that character, who has been a kid streamer to be 18 and still streaming to a younger audience,” Ganz said. “How do these streamers make this crossover from their younger audiences into what their adult selves are? We looked at like some real world examples of streamers that are kind of doing that.”
The only barricade in Brendan’s path to true freedom is a contract worth $10 million that requires him to be the same streamer he has always been. Inspired by his own defeat at the hands of his father, Brendan decides to challenge another influencer to a fight. Only this time, the diminutive Brendan is not sparing virtually but in a cage match against a fellow streamer nearly double his size.
“We wrote that well before the Tyson vs. Jake Paul fight,” McElhenney said. “It was really about what people are willing to do to continue to create spectacle around what it is that they are trying to sell.”
The series makes a point of taking Brendan’s journey as seriously as it does any other character’s. That is not to say that “Rebrand” sugarcoats its protagonist. Brendan is a spoiled, entitled brat, and the episode highlights that in full, showing him grumbling to his mom for not taking him to the Lamborghini dealership. But it also takes care to highlight that Brendan is as hardworking and determined as his father.
It was important to McElhenney that the episode did not contain any sort of generational “judgement” about Brendan’s livestreaming empire. The Pootie Shoe channel is treated with the same degree of creative respect as “Dark, Quiet Death,” the in-universe horror game that was highlighted in Season 1.
“I talk to so many people — certainly Gen X, but even millennials or even Gen Zers — who will still sometimes lament or talk about what the next generation of people are doing in terms of content creation. It feels like I’m always warning the Millennials to just ease up on Gen Z because, trust me, there will be another generation that comes along,” McElhenney said. “Whoever this next generation is — I don’t even know what they are called — it’s everybody’s birthright. It’s your time to take over the culture and take over popular culture. So I always keep a keen ear to creators and see what they are trying to do to express themselves.”
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