YMMV / DuckTales (2017) S1 E24 "The Shadow War Part II: The Day of the Ducks!"

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Was Lena's recklessness actually a means of coping with the fact that she wasn't a real person, pretty much had to live on her own for fifteen years, and working for her "aunt"?
  • Does Scrooge actually consider Gyro to be just a work acquaintance or did he just say that to spare him from Magica's wrath?
  • Did Donald's bad luck (which we've previously seen have quite a destructive effect on a magical being) help enable him to break Magica's amulet when it landed on his head? Or was it just his already established very hard head?
• Angst? What Angst?: Webby realizes that Lena is gone forever and gets consoled by the boys. Less than a minute later she happily joins the family for a midnight swim in Scrooge's bin, showing no signs of grief.
  • This is later mitigated in Season 2 when Webby is searching for a way to bring her back, meaning she knew Lena was still alive.
• Ass Pull: How did Magica randomly blasting the No. 1 dime in Dewey's hands free Scrooge? The only hint we get is that Scrooge thanks her for "dispelling" her spells which implies she cast some sort of nullification spell.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Lena's complaining about her family and Beakley asking who raised her becomes this with The Reveal that Lena isn't even a real child or a person, but rather a construct that Magica created as a last resort. It especially becomes harsh when Scrooge isn't able to honor his promise to make Lena part of the Duck family because Magica destroys Lena's corporeal form.
  • Magica promises Scrooge that she will destroy everything and everyone he loves. We find out in Season 3 that he started it by doing the same thing to her, albeit by accident: his fighting Magica inadvertently led to her turning her brother Poe into a nonsapient raven, and he ignored her pleas to save Poe in favor of robbing Magica and then using the townsfolk she transformed into goats as milk money, literally.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • In the pilot, Webby called the triplets her best friends. Now Lena is her best friend, because the boys are her family.
  • The SDCC 2018 promotional images included a picture of Lena next to Webby and a new character. Back then, it was not particularly surprising since Lena was part of the regular cast - but retroactively, it seems like a confirmation that Lena will return in Season 2 to some extent. And she did.
• I Knew It!: Since it matches her fate in the comics, a lot of people predicted Della was trapped on the moon.
• Shocking Moments: Della Duck is still alive.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • After distracting Magica in the beginning so that Dewey and Webby can get close enough to take the dime, Louie and Huey disappear for the remainder of the fight with Magica. Some fans feel like it would have been nice for Louie and Huey to take a swing at Magica or try to take the dime, especially since Huey has the Duck family temper. Alas, they are no where to be seen, even when Magica was about to kill Webby and Dewey before Lena intervened. Mitigated a bit when it became clear that the following two seasons were constructed to focus on Louie and Huey respectively just like this one was for Dewey, giving them their own big moments in the climax.
  • Donald's victory over Shadow!Gizmoduck is relegated to an Offscreen Moment of Awesome.
  • Many characters just gloss over the fact that Lena is a Living Shadow and is apparently destroyed by Magica.
  • In "The Confidential Casefiles of Agent 22", Webby clearly has a bottle of gummiberry juice in her pocket, which could have become handy in the fight against Magica. Yet, the juice is never used or even mentioned in this episode.

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