Anyone hoping Stuart Fails to Save the Universe‘s odd, disjointedly intriguing premiere would give way to something a bit clearer and full-throated are more than likely going to be rather disappointed by “Spoiler: Zack’s in This One”, another incredibly odd mush of comedic tones married up with a premise that is both too high concept and lowbrow at the same time. And yet, with its distinct sense of chaos and an infectiously stupid, juvenile sense of humor, Stuart‘s second episode is strangely watchable, a weird amalgamation of a series that may be less than the sum of its already paltry parts, but still represents one of the more ambitious attempts to Frankenstein a franchise to life in recent memory.
“Spoiler: Zack’s in This One” picks up directly from the end of “Spoiler: Gary Dies”, following our merry trio of misfits as they try to unpack a world in which Richie Rich: Effective Altruist and Superman and Lex Luthor: Best Buddies are suddenly popular (Stuart even has a full wall of Archie comics, which he’d never carry in his actual store). And to its credit, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe doesn’t try to play coy with its premise; it’s only a scene or two before the trio are in the town square, being followed by an obelisk shape that Stuart rightly points out ignores all the known laws of human physics.
Unfortunately, instead of spending a few minutes bringing some texture and profundity to this world (you’re telling me a world where AI saw human suffering and thought to end it by authoritarian, shock-implant based control, might have some alliterative benefits?), “Spoiler: Zack’s in This One” tries to wring out 10 minutes of material from precisely two items: a recurring bit where Kripke gets shocked that it repeats more than a dozen times, and a cameo from Ramona Nowitzki (who made all of three appearances on The Big Bang Theory), whose enthusiastic disinterest as an admin at Leonard and Sheldon’s science department (which no longer holds the Geology team, a travesty in its own right).
Does this work? Absolutely not: but there’s a certain demented quality to the script, which requires Kripke to get shocked, over and over again, each time getting more and more comically ridiculous, to the point it begins to take on the qualities of an absurdist piece. Almost; it’s a bit too much, and it increasingly becomes a thing for “Spoiler: Zack’s in This One” to use as a crutch in moments it is trying to ignore its story as subtext – just like the show’s slapdash application of cameos, which here not only comes from Lindhome, but an appearance from Christine Baranski (playing herself, recording a video for re-education campes) and a well-disguised cameo from Kaley Cuoco, in the form of a post-apocalyptic Penny, who has gotten a bit trigger-happy and paranoid trying to avoid being controlled by rogue technology in this alternative universe.
While these two moments are expectedly fun in how they play with audience expectations (Baranski letting go some curse words while she cackles at the unfortunate souls still clinging to lives of conflict), both Baranski and Cuoco’s presences only exacerbate some of the issue I had with the pilot episode, which felt detached and pointless to a point it affected the text itself – but ultimately, their presences are both hollow elements of an episode that actually has small pockets of being interesting, and large swaths of being mostly pointless and mindless, as the episodes moves from intriguing premise to overwrought comedic bits to disinterested resolution, as the endeavor into this world simply ends as the group (with a different version of Denise in tow) dodging killer AI drones as Penny and Zack’s resistance army made their last stand against the robots.
At least this episode ends with a bit more narrative friction; after transporting out of the AI hellhole, the group ends up in a world where magic is real, leading to a more confrontational appearance from the two nerds fighting over comic books across the multiverse in Stuart’s shop – and more importantly, a final image of Bert being burned on the stake as a scientific zealot. And in there belies part of the problem with this series (beyond those godawful opening credits and the fact this show didn’t really need to exist); balancing high stakes and low stakes in a science fiction setting a challenging, often off-putting balance to try and find (just ask the short-lived, dearly departed Other Space), and one that requires some sort of investment by audience and writer’s room both into the characters on screen.
The problem is that this series does not feel invested in its characters; Stuart chases Denise because he loves her and it’s all he knows, while Kripke yearns for his harem and Bert shrugs his way through life in every dimension. These bits of character are entirely static, lowering the narrative stakes of their adventures through time and space (my hopes was that this series would be The Big Bang Theory by way of a more action-y Hot Tub Time Machine) in a way that makes it feel largely disinterested in itself, as if it was already bored with its own premise, and was starting to lean hard into big-name cameos to fill the space once held by human personalities and complex decisions. By keeping everything so wink, wink and nudge, nudge, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe feels like it wants us to know it is smart and surprising and silly – but decidedly not heartfelt, a strange decision that undercuts the balance between nostalgia and creative freedom that presumably forms the creative core of this strange little spinoff series.
It makes for an episode with a few fun moments, a number of intriguing ideas, and a lot of unnecessary slapstick humor, as Kripke, Stuart, and Bert get stunned over and over and over again through the episode’s surprisingly brief 19-minute running time. So while I don’t think anyone is arguing Stuart Fails to Save the Universe is one of the better new series of 2026, it has already established itself as one of the weirdest, a strangely detached, dissonant marriage of millennial nostalgia cringe and corporate-friendly escapism that, like its pilot, feels like it could use a bit more calibrating and tightening to really hone in on what could make this a more consistently enjoyable, relatable watch.
Other thoughts/observations:
- Kripke wiffs about his old hawem for a few minutes.
- Bert imagines a “world where everyone’s French, but no one speaks French”.
- How are the comic books not correctly alphabetized? Crazy work.
- Love the “30 Months Later” cut.
- Definitely don’t need Stuart to point out the presence of Gary is a recurring joke. Almost as bad as the opening credits.
- The idea of an AI trying to save humanity is like a middling Love Death + Robots premise.