What if God is terrible at his job and he needs to be taught a lesson? How about transforming him into a cat and making him live in a regular American family? One doesn’t simply come up with an idea as genius as this one unless they’re on something. The makers of Netflix’s Exploding Kittens, a nine-episode adult animation comedy series, do one up this by adding the daughter of Satan into the mix. The series is adapted from a widely popular board game I haven’t heard about before, but now I’m very curious to look into it. How’s the show, though? In this article, we’re going to look into that. But let us first recap the plot of the series a bit.
Spoilers Ahead
What Happens in the Show?
Can you imagine heaven as a company with God as the CEO? Well, that’s exactly what’s happening here. But the board is not at all happy with the kind of job the Almighty is doing. He’s mostly slacking and not caring about humans at all, which is not at all done. So he’s sent to earth to answer a random prayer, which isn’t even a prayer, as one Abbie Higgins was only ranting about her life situation and used a “dead god” in the middle of it. There’s one major catch here: God is transformed into a talking cat who has to live with the family of four: Abbie, who works in animal control; her board-game enthusiast, supermarket worker husband Marv; their daughter Greta, a computer nerd; and their son Travis, a streamer who’s desperate for online popularity. Of course, the family is dysfunctional as hell. The spark from Abbie and Marv’s marriage is long gone; their relationship with the kids has declined, and the kids are not doing too well either; Greta is pretty much a loner, and Travis seeks therapy in an online game. It doesn’t take much for Godcat (let us address him as “GC” from here) to realize what he needs to do: unite the family and win his ticket back to heaven. He tastes quick success by transforming the Higgins into miniature versions of themselves and dropping them into Marv’s board game. They have no other option but to fight the threats together, which they do. But that’s not enough for GC to reclaim his own life, as he’s told by the Cherubs. He has to do much more. As if things couldn’t get any worse, GC now has a major obstacle in the form of another talking cat, who’s none other than Satan’s daughter, Beelzebub. She has come straight up from hell, and just like God hasn’t been up to the mark in heaven, Beelzebub has failed to make the board of hell happy.
Funnily enough, Beelzebub (calling her BB, alright?) and GC hit it off somehow, maybe because of their current situation. Sure, BB is here to make things difficult for people on earth, while GC has to make sure that the Higgins family’s life gets better, but the show makes sure to not make a villain out of Satan’s daughter. It’s also hilarious how BB lives with a woman named Karen, if you know what I mean!
Once Exploding Kittens is done with its set-up, it gets into the subplots. Marv is not appreciated by his boss, Herb, who’s particularly a bully. Abbie has to pretend to be her own son’s therapist inside an online game. Thanks to BB inventing this regret portal and the family taking a ride through it, Greta gets the idea that Abbie might regret having had her and Travis. Meanwhile, BB and GC find out about this merger between hell and heaven, and they eventually get into contention for the CEO post. BB also finds out about her human mother, Shirley, who just happens to be a really good person working at a church.
Anyway, it eventually boils down to two major things: who will win the God Games and become the CEO after the merger, and whether Marv and Abbie will be able to find the lost mojo of their marriage back. The latter was a given; otherwise, this show wouldn’t have a point. As far as the CEO post is concerned, GC wins it after a lot of drama, but then he lets it go after knowing that the new CEO has to destroy humanity. Thanks to all his time on earth, he now cares about people and can’t do them any harm. Neither can BB, but instead of just refusing to be CEO, she shows these board members what an angry pregnant (yeah, she slept with GC) woman can do by eliminating them instead. However, GC still has to save the world as one of the board members survives and hits the all-important apocalypse button. He does pull it off thanks to Greta’s presence of mind, and BB ends up delivering a large number of kittens. If you want to read more about the ending, please click on this link.
Final Thoughts
I’ve got to give credit to the makers of the show for coming up with such a cool idea. God as a cat is obviously a brilliant premise to build something truly genius on the basis of, but Exploding Kittens fails to do so. Barring the great idea and having Tom Ellis as the voice of God (which is ironic given his most famous role in playing Lucifer), there’s nothing in this show, if I have to be completely honest. Most of it is unfunny as hell; the writing is lazy, and even episodes that are less than half an hour feel like quite a slog. None of the subplots actually work, and you don’t care for a single character. Even though the show tries hard to bring in things like dysfunctional families, mental illness, alienation, cyberbullying, and many other relevant issues into the narrative, nothing works out thanks to the terrible job the writers have done. A lot of it has no point and doesn’t make any sense, like the character of Karen, or Marv’s boss going to the extreme of adopting him as a son through a ceremony. The list is never-ending, to be honest, so I don’t see a point in going into it further.
Exploding Kittens is a profound example of how a fantastic idea can go to complete waste if you have a bunch of pretentious hacks working on it. Sorry if I sound rude, but you have to realize that I did have to endure the pain of sitting through all nine episodes of the show because I had to. It does get some brownie points from me because I thought the animation was really good, especially the cute kittens at the end of it. It also uses “Chasing Cars,” the most famous Snow Patrol song, adequately enough. But it’s really like looking for a needle in a haystack if I have to start naming good things about this utterly terrible show. While I despise Netflix for canceling shows after just one season solely from a commercial perspective, for Exploding Kittens, I would ask for nothing less.
