Stuart Fails to Save the Universe Season 1

Stuart Fails to Save the Universe

SPOILERS TOTAL. You've been warned.

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101: Spoiler: Gary Dies 2026 July 23
(First watched 2026-07-26) It seemed kind of strange how this show could reasonably be connected to... significantly less out-there shows, but it seems this setup is in such a way that if everything goes back to normal pretty much everything here could be wiped from existence and memory, so people could continue on with their normal sitcom lives without dealing with the knowledge of this.

Those uhh jerry-rigged grenades seemed surprisingly effective.

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102: Spoiler: Zack's in This One 2026 July 30
(First watched 2026-08-13) This show is filled with more Big Bang Theory cameos than I was expecting. As a multiverse show it totally makes enough in-universe (in-multiverse?) sense that many of the same people would be around, but that's usually easier said than hired for live action. Extra weirdness for Christine Baranski playing an alternate universe version of herself, rather than the character she portrayed on The Big Bang Theory: Leonard's mother.

This show has always seemed a similar concept to Sliders. I like how this even shares the way early Sliders episodes would end with a taste of what the next week's universe would be like.

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103: Spoiler: Bert is Magic 2026 August 6
(First watched 2026-08-14) What a weird show. In general, I mean. Every show has its own vibe, and even for characters that began on a standard sitcom, they are now put in... much weirder situations where their behavior can reach new bounds that would've been beyond the pale on a standard sitcom. They're traveling with a version of Kripke that was a warlord and in this episode left Bert to be burnt at the stake, while Bert straight up killed the local version of Wil Wheaton and wasn't bothered by it.

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104: Spoiler: Stuart Makes a Wallet 2026 August 13
(First watched 2026-08-16) It's a good thing this show is a bit of fast-paced fun, because nothing ever gets resolved. Who was keeping them trapped in an unreal world and then let them go so easily? Who knows, off to the next universe!

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105: Spoiler: Bert Gets Married 2026 August 20
(First watched 2026-08-21)

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106: Spoiler: Corn Is Delicious 2026 August 27
(First watched 2026-08-29) Definite Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey reference with playing Twenty Questions during an endless fall.

The sci-fi rules of this show seem pretty damn loose. So it seems that when they travel from one universe to another... they take over the versions of themselves from that world, which is why our familiar characters can in this episode have bodies descended from cows. But in the previous episode it doesn't seem like they had local counterparts, so they just... came in as-was? And as they leave from one universe to the next, are they leaving universes without a Stuart, Bert, etc.? At any rate it seems like they're killing their local selves each time they jump.

The frequent pauses in dialog for them to deal with cud was a pretty fun running gag, at least for one episode length.

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107: Spoiler: Dexys Midnight Runners Get a Royalty Payment 2026 September 3
(First watched 2026-10-02) When I saw the length of the episode I had to check that nothing was wrong. But nope, this show just has episodes on the short end, ranging from 15-25 minutes.

There wasn't really much going on in telepathy world, but their idea to mask their thoughts with a song reminded me of the "tensor said the tensor" bit from uhhh... some old book whose name escapes me.

The chase through the multiverse was fun, and definitely the kind of thing that in retrospect added a bit of work to the filming of previous episodes.

So there are multiple "teams" who think they're the only ones trying to fix things. Seems like more of a good thing than a bad thing, and I guess the two first teams we saw would've realized that if they'd had more than a minute of talking to each other before army team arrived.

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108: Spoiler: We're as Confused as You Are 2026 September 10
(First watched 2026-10-03) OK, so army team was not a proper third team, but the main team from slightly more in the future. I can dig it.

They clearly wanted to fill the show with cameos from Big Bang Theory characters but either couldn't get everyone or it was just simpler to do it this way: getting a handful of people and reusing them for different alternate universes. At this point we've seen multiple Rajes, Bernadettes, and Pennys. The only other main cast member to show up was Amy, so I guess we're due for at least one more of her this season?

Unexpected appearance by Dean Norris... who I just remembered was also in the military in Big Bang Theory, so I guess he is another instance of someone playing their counterpart, though not a main character.

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109: Spoiler: We Couldn't Get Green Lantern 2026 September 17
(First watched 2026-10-06) Another Amy appearance. I called it! Pretty good use here, married to The Flash in this universe whereas in the parent show she's just married to a big Flash fan.

On the whole this was one of the better episodes. Cool concept of being stuck in the comic book, which both allowed Stuart to use his usually-useless knowledge, and a decent use of corporate synergy allowing them to use some actual DC things rather than just generic comic book.

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110: Spoiler: Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience 2026 September 24
(First watched 2026-10-07) I enjoy a good bit of fictional meta metaphysics. Good use of lighting to illustrate the difference between "normal" reality and "sitcom" reality.

So the omnipotent "Adversary" is trying to keep them from saving the universe... I don't know. Seems like that should be a pretty trivial thing to manage for an all-powerful being. It must be some-powerful instead.

Adding on to what I wrote above yesterday: The sitcom stuff works especially well here. Any show could do a "we're in a sitcom" episode (somebody probably had to talk the Strange New Worlds writers room out of it it), but those shows aren't spun off from a standard sitcom. So their version of sitcom reality would just be a gag, whereas here they were actually able to incorporate things from their parent show like the animated atom scene transitions.

Also worth noting that at the end when they're leaving the TV set, we can see posters for fake shows like "Young Leonard" which is enough to tell us they're still in a world that's not intended to be like our real world.

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Stuart Fails to Save the Universe Season 2