YMMV / Maddigan's Quest

• Angst? What Angst?:
  • After Hillfolk, Timon and Eden barely mention their parents' deaths.
  • Maddie also falls for Yves surprisingly fast, considering her husband died at the start of the series.
• Awesome Music: Victoria Kelly's lush score for the series, especially the opening and closing themes, captured the spirit of the Fantasia's journey.
• Complete Monster:
  • The Nennog is the evil, gene-splicing Big Bad of the series and the ruler of the insidious Bad Future. Once a mere human duke who took advantage of a crippling winter to convince the city of Solis to place him in power, the Nennog transforms Solis into a radioactive hellhole answerable only to himself, where citizens die merely for speaking up against him. In the present day, the Nennog possesses an innocent woman to blow up the solar converter that threatens his rule, careless this would take out anyone in the area for miles. The Nennog is also the Evil Uncle to the time-sliding children Timon, Eden and Jewel; having already killed their parents, the Nennog takes a special interest in corrupting Timon to become its would-be heir, mutating him in a process as agonizing mentally as it is physically. In its lowest moment, the Nennog almost convinces a half-mutated Timon to strangle his baby sister to death.
  • "Gramth": The Mayor of Gramth holds a totalitarian dictatorship over the city, wallowing in wealth and power while his constituents suffer in squalor. In order to buff out his mining operations, the Mayor regularly has children snatched off the street and forced into hard labor in the mines. The children are worked to exhaustion and shocked with electricity to keep them in line, and any child found wandering the streets without proper identification are immediately grabbed for enslavement.
  • "Greentown": Missy and Brewer, seemingly the cook and butler, respectively, for the strange community of Greentown, actually run the entire place behind-the-scenes. The two lure in innocents from near and far with the prospect of incredible feasts. The "feasts" are actually worms and dirt; Missy and Brewer are secretly cannibalistic serial killers who enchant their victims with fantastic drugs, then kill them to eat them and leave nothing to waste. Even denying payment over food (since "you can't eat money") the two have murdered dozens, with a room full of the belongings of their previous victims shown to include dolls and stuffed animals.
  • "Off the Map": Blackbeard is a scummy pirate captain who makes his living by kidnapping batches of women and girls. Blackbeard then sells them off to Manland, an island biologically incapable of giving birth to females, so that the women can be forcibly married off and used to repopulate the island. Capturing the Fantasia troupe, Blackbeard plans to sell the men to the Nennog for a terrible fate, while he intends to hand the women over to Manland as his latest "delivery", gleefully informing them of their coming fate as married slaves.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Fans of Power Rangers RPM may notice some amusing parallels and reminders of the season, as follows:
  • The tunnels in the episode "Greentown" are the exact same ones used for Alphabet Soup, a secret government organization dedicated to raising child prodigies like Olivia Tennet's character Dr. K, who causes the near destruction of Earth when she releases a computer supervirus named Venjix because she "just wanted to go outside" after finding out that she and her friends were not allergic to sunlight—the pretense under which they have been kept hidden from the world by their handlers.
  • In the episode "Newton", Garland has to bail out Lilith and Milo Cawthorne's one-shot character Bolek from an underground toxic waste dump. Fast forward to RPM a few years later, and Rose's character Summer ends up rescuing Olivia's and Milo's characters (Dr. K and Ziggy Grover) from a cave in the episode "If Venjix Won".
    • Earlier in that episode, Bolek throws a tomato at Lilith. On RPM, Milo's character Ziggy ends up being the Butt-Monkey to Olivia's Dr. K, the series' Little Miss Snarker mentor figure. It appears that the pair have experience giving each others' characters a difficult time.
  • In the episode "Off The Map", Garland agrees to marry the son of the pirate Sultan to keep the solar converter from the wrong hands. In one episode of RPM, Rose's character Summer agrees to go through with her Arranged Marriage to keep the MacGuffin away from the season's Big Bad Venjix. In both cases, it's thankfully subverted.
• I Am Not Shazam: The girl protagonist isn't Maddigan; she's Garland Maddigan. The circus is called Maddigan's Fantasia and the show itself is called Maddigan's Quest in reference to the quest that the entire circus takes. (In fact, Maddigan's Fantasia is the title of Margaret Mahy's original book, which was changed when the producers got leery about using the word "Fantasia" and risking copyright problems with the Disney film).
• Squick:
  • In the episode Greentown, a heavily drugged Ozul protests blearily that 'that's very exotic, master, but I must warn you- I'm ticklish!' Given the master in question...
  • Also in Solis, when a fully-transformed Timon catches a passing bug with his tongue.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: This is quite possibly the only children's show to have featured mind-altering drugs and cannibalism in the same episode. The series also contains child labour, implied sexual slavery (with slavers refusing to sell a preadolescent girl to the Big Bad to be killed because she'd fetch a higher price as wife material), repeated attempts at infanticide, Body Horror, and an ethical debate on whether or not mercy-killing a corrupted hero (who is quite literally begging for death) is the correct decision. This show manages to make its sister show Power Rangers RPM—a series whose central conceit was based upon the genocide of almost all humanity—look tame by comparison.