On the one hand, I am genuinely thrilled that two-year-old Irene can say (or anyway approximate) “superhero.” In this household, it’s not hugely surprising, nor was it hugely surprising that she saw that picture of the giant hand statue a church group was protesting and said, “Pi-Man! Mama, Pi-Man!” Her father and I met and bonded over his superhero drawings, after all. She loves The Incredibles and DC Superhero Girls and her Captain Marvel underwear. Unfortunately, she also loves PJ Masks.

By day, Connor (Jacob Ewaniuk, Roman Lutterotti or Jacob Ursomarzo, depending on the episode), Greg (Kyle Harrison Breitkopf), and Amaya (Addison Holley) are children of an unknown age in a generic city. Things go missing, and the adults respond with, “Huh, that’s funny.” But the three children know that whatever-it-is has been stolen by a Night Villain—either Romeo (Alex or Carter Thorne or Simon Pirso), Luna Girl (Brianna Daguanno), or Night Ninja (Trek Buccino or Devan Cohen) and his Ninjalinos. So at night, the kids transform into the PJ Masks—Connor is Catboy, Greg is Gekko, and Amaya is Owlette—and go after the villain, always quite aware of which it is, to get the thing back.

So far, so predictable. But there’s also some issue the kids were dealing with during the day that has to be dealt with in order to successfully defeat the villain, and honestly those messages start seeming toxic after a while. Amaya is showing off. Greg is being ignored. Connor is being pushy. Amaya is refusing to accept an apology. Greg is insecure. Connor is vain. And whatever-it-is will be directly relevant to the mission. Fine so far as it goes, but it starts to feel, after a while, as though the kids are being punished for being kids.

In one episode, Connor is excited about finally being tall enough to play on the big kids’ playground. For a kid, that’s a big deal, and it’s something worth celebrating in my opinion. But Romeo and Night Ninja have teamed up and have a shrink ray and shenanigans and anyway, Connor decides that he’ll just play on the little kids’ playground because his friends are more important. Which, again, your friends are important, but this suggests, possibly without meaning to, that you should actually hold yourself back for your friends and you shouldn’t be happy about milestones.

I also feel as though half the Amaya plots are “Amaya is trying to better herself and shouldn’t.” She feels the one most constrained by societal expectations to me—whenever she’s trying to stand out a little, she gets pushed back in. And in the episode where she won’t accept Connor’s apology, I start out on her side—he really gives her a bit of a notpology the first time. “Oh, I’m sorry if you were scared.” But then when she holds out for a real apology—and remember she’s had to ask for one—she starts coming across as obnoxious for it. The way she’s written really is obnoxious, but also she’s right to try to make Connor understand why she wasn’t okay with the trick he played on her.

There’s an episode where Luna Girl steals something from Greg that he’d borrowed from someone else, and the moral of the episode is “don’t blame other people for your own failings.” When I think Greg was pretty well justified in saying, “the person who stole the thing is the one really responsible for its being missing,” and if he shouldn’t have left it out all night, well, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t Luna Girl’s fault for stealing it. There are multiple episodes that involve how they should’ve trusted the villains when the villains ask for help, because yeah. There’s one where Amaya’s aunt has given her something so she can give it away, because doesn’t that feel better than having something you like that was given to you by someone you love?

What happens to the villains after their schemes are thwarted? Well, I’m glad you asked! If they’ve stolen something, it gets taken back, and, um . . . then they’re on another episode later! The thing is, there are absolutely no long-term consequences for the villains, and given the show’s weirder conceit, it’s impossible for there to be any. Unless the PJ Masks themselves maintain some kind of supermax prison in the basement of their weirdly prominent headquarters in the middle of a local park, that is.

See, the thing here is, the conceit of the show is that, during the day, the kids are having normal lives and being kids and so forth. But at night, they put on their magic pajamas (I guess) and become superheroes . . . in a completely empty city. Literally. There are no other humans seen in the show at night. Just the kids and the villains. The houses and so forth tend to have lights on in them, but all you see is the light. Is there anyone inside the houses? Could be! But they certainly don’t respond in any way to what’s going on outside.

Now, I don’t live in a big city, and I never have. But this is not and never has been how cities work. Especially in higher latitudes. Right around the winter solstice here, it’ll be dark possibly by the time my kid would be getting off the school bus, if he had school that day. You don’t have to go that far north before finding somewhere that the sun sets before four in the afternoon at that time of year. And even leaving that aside, there are all kinds of school activities and shopping trips and so forth after dark; there has never in my life been a time when I wasn’t out after the sun set now and again, no matter how young I was.

And that’s just kids—on weekends during the school year, there’s an hourly bus running to and from my alma mater where the last drop-off at the college is at 3:25 in the morning. And I’m willing to bet some of the people riding that bus aren’t college students, since it’s open to the general public. Some of those people are just, you know, getting home from work. My partner works at Lowes and often works a ten to seven shift; when we worked together at a call center, we worked the two to eleven shift. That was in the afternoon, but no matter which one it was, we’d be out after dark on one end or the other of it!

The show seems to take as its premise that Night Time is a mysterious other world for kids, that after the sun sets, kids have no idea what’s going on and for all they know, the streets could be completely empty and deserted. But has there ever been a kid anywhere for whom that’s been true? I’m rather left wondering what would happen if one of the villains started a fire; does the fire department come out after dark?

You can’t even just pretend it’s really transporting them to some other dimension at night, since day activities affect the nighttime world and vice versa. I could probably come up with something deep and involved about why it works the way it does, but I shouldn’t have to. It would be one thing if the kids were solving mysteries that adults couldn’t somehow, but even when the mystery is “a train from an amusement park has been stolen,” the adults’ reaction is just “well, I guess the ride’s closed now,” and we never see an adult trying to solve one of these problems.

Which I suppose is a take on the idea that kids and adults live in fundamentally different worlds, and in one sense, that’s kind of true, but in another, more accurate sense, it isn’t. Just because my six-year-old Simon (whose fault it is that Irene watches the show) spends all day in school and I spend all day at home and his dad spends all day at work, it doesn’t mean that we don’t all interact quite a lot. And of course there’s his teacher and the other adults at school, so there are a lot of adults who are a fundamental part of his day-to-day life.

And of course it’s a fairly white world they live in, and not only is Amaya the girl to two boys among the PJ Masks but Luna Girl is the girl to two boys among their villains. And the other kid they interact with most is also a boy. And practically the only adult we see is their male teacher, and while I’d like more support for the idea of male elementary school teachers, you know, is a man literally the only adult in this town? Which does, I suppose, answer how none of the adults notice that the giant totem pole-looking thing in the park is in fact a three-story building. There aren’t any adults to notice.

If you’re shy or smart or imaginative, I can’t see how this show wouldn’t feel awfully judgemental after a while. “You need to stop being who you are and be someone else” feels like the moral of half the episodes. Heck, I’d imagine most adults would have a problem with “just don’t have stage fright,” and there are two episodes where that’s the moral. These aren’t implied morals, either; the moral of every episode is explicitly stated by the kids. And half the time, it feels as though they’re trying to shoehorn in a “we were all wrong” when, no, they weren’t. There’s one where the moral is that Greg should make the other two listen to his ideas, which misses quite a lot of reality.

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