THE FALL FESTIVAL FIASCO

A trio of fourth graders known as the Prime Detectives count up the clues to find out who’s sabotaging Arithmos Elementary’s fall festival.

In this series outing, mathematical mavens Abby Feldstein, Cam McGill, and Gabe Kim—who respectively present as white, Black, and Asian in Kissi’s cartoon line drawings—show each step of their work in boxed-out segments as they track a classmate’s spending, calculate the odds of dunking their teacher at a dunk-tank challenge, estimate the weights of outsize pumpkins, and engage in other real-life arithmetical operations. All the while, they also assemble evidence that various events at the annual festival have been deliberately sabotaged and reason their way to a culprit. The relentlessly instructional narrative also offers such non-mathematical tidbits as a mnemonic for how to spell February (“The rumor is that there are two R s in it!”), the value of a “memory palace” (a technique for recalling important things), and that there really is an African country called Eswatini (known as Swaziland until 2018), even if many recent maps don’t show it. In any case, the saboteur’s motives and the outcomes turn out to be relatively benign, and the episode winds its way to a peaceful close, with just a tantalizing hint that things may get “weird” next time around. Final art not seen.

There’s a bona fide mystery, but most of the solving goes by the numbers.