Review: THE DRAGON PRINCE Book 4: Earth is a Solid Entry in the Series

Season four of The Dragon Prince is now available to stream on Netflix. This season starts the story arc titled Mystery of Aaravos and is titled Book 4: Earth. The series is created by Aaron Ehasz and Justin Richmond with animation from Bardel Entertainment and Wonderstorm spearheading production. Fans have been clamoring for the season as it’s been roughly three years since season 3 dropped. The entire season is only 9 episodes and three additional seasons are on their way. Below, you can check out my thoughts on the season. Be warned that there will be some spoilers below.

Real quick, before the spoilers, I thought I’d give some very general comments. First, it’s great to see more of the Sunfire Elves. It’s also great to meet Earthblood Elves and another dragon. The season has a lot going on and there were some choices in editing that made it feel way more crazy than I think I would’ve liked. Basically, the team took the approach of following each storyline for at least a few minutes in each episode and then jumping back to each story mode at least one additional time. So basically, each storyline typically has at least two segments per episode (or at least it feels this way). Also, the animation is still something that feels like it needs more refining. It still feels choppy and rigid in a lot of moments which is shocking to me since Netflix was willing to give it a total of 7 seasons. Overall, it’s a solid season that sets us up for this second story arc. Just remember that this is setting up a whole arc and so while season 3 was very fast-paced and action, season 4 is a lot slower and a lot more about establishing stories.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s dive in a bit more. Book 4: Earth of The Dragon Prince starts out with a fair number of changes. Ezran has become taller, Callum is the High Mage, Soren is the leader of the Crownguard, Rayla’s missing, etc. A lot of these changes are warranted as we have had a 2-year time jump. If you’ve read the graphic novel, Through the Moon, than you’ll better understand why we don’t see Rayla at the start of the season. We’ll call this group of characters storyline A. Then, we have Claudia who has just revived Viren from the dead after two years and her boyfriend Terry. These three we’ll call storyline B. Finally, we have Amaya and Janai who make up storyline C at the Sunfire Elf camp.

As I mentioned earlier, each storyline gets some time in each episode. This isn’t bad per se and it’s definitely a personal taste thing. I’m not 100% sold on it though merely because they would start with one storyline, jump to another after 5 minutes or so, jump to the third one, then jump back to the first one and sometimes yet another jump or two. Sometimes it works well such as when Claudia and Ibis are fighting and that overlaps with Ezran giving a speech about violence. Other times it just felt a little more jumbled.

Some of my least favorite things about the season are coming up now. First, the animation. I already mentioned that it felt rigid and choppy still. I could understand that in the first few seasons, but now that it’s been on hiatus and renewed, I was hoping it didn’t look and feel as choppy as before. Some of the movements by characters also felt rigid and blocky with less expression, particularly in fights. I also hated how episode seven, “Beneath the Surface” ends with Soren being captured by Terry and Claudia and then he sees Viren and says “No.” Then, episode eight, “Rex Igneous” opens up on storyline A. What’s worse is that the moment never gets a payoff in the season. We never go back and see the conversation between Soren and Viren that I’m sure followed or anything. I imagine that in the next seasons we’ll get a bit more revealed about what happened in those moments, but I felt cheated from some great character moments.

Now let’s talk about some of my favorite things about Book 4: Earth. I loved the way that they overlaid the fight between Ibis and Claudia with Ezran’s speech about pain and violence. It’s really well done. I also really liked how Viren was handled this season. For the last three seasons, he’s been pretty confident and focused. In this season, he’s a lot more hesitant. He’s brought back to life and told that he only has 30 days to live unless they get Aaravos to help and instead of being gungho about it and immediately going to help Claudia, he learns there’s quite a bit of work to keep his life and he starts rethinking things and considers just making the most of the time he has left. He never takes an active role in keeping his life going and even refuses to take his staff after Claudia grabs it from Storm Spire until the season finale, “Escape from Umber Tor.” Even then, he only grabs it when no one else will. This whole season he’s considered not being an evil jerk and then in the last episode when push comes to shove, he makes a deliberate choice to embrace his dark past once again and become an instrument of evil claiming to be lawful. There are a lot of character moments and character growth through this season and I really appreciate it. Viren just happens to be one of my favorites.

I haven’t even talked about storyline C. I think this storyline is going to be more important later, but the main idea is that Janai and Amaya get engaged, but there’s a lot of turmoil because Janai’s brother Karim is too caught up on tradition and the past for any change to be productive. He even challenges Janai to an illegal duel in an effort to take the throne and fails. It honestly felt very Black Panther to me if Killmonger had lost the first fight against T’Challa.

The Dragon Prince has a good fourth season. It’s slower than season three, but that’s necessary due to the structure of the story. Yes, there are things that I feel could be done better, but none of it ruins the story or makes things super complex or confusing. If you’ve enjoyed the series so far, you’ll love this season and will be looking forward to the future seasons with me and everyone else.