30 Rock - "Game Over" - Review

Shows will almost invariably reach a point where they’ve lived too long, but remain on the air because they’re critical darlings or have great ratings. 30 Rock never had impressive ratings, but it was able to tell the stories Tina Fey and co. wanted to tell about the crazy characters residing at 30 Rockefeller Plaza season after season. Telling stories with a zippy pace and plenty of jokes that mixed highbrow and lowbrow, the series proved itself one of the funniest shows on television, but even the best of shows can outstay their welcome and the show’s 6^th season was arguably its weakest. The show had become too broad, too cartoonish, awfully repetitive, and lost sight of its characters (Jenna could become terribly grating and Kenneth could descend into a caricature of a redneck at times). When the series officially declared its 7^th season at last, the show was given a new sense of purpose that has made the 7^th season one of the series best seasons. The show feels like its aiming to sendoff its characters with satisfying resolutions, including, so far, two equally weird marriages, a surprisingly funny funeral, and what appear to be plans for Liz Lemmon to get a baby (or older child as this episode now suggests). Oh, yea, and it’s also wickedly funny!

Doing reviews like these where we get all high and mighty, and overly academic about what makes something good can make us lose sight of what makes a show good. 30 Rock isn’t just daring in its style, format, and jokes but it’s also often incredibly funny. With such well-defined characters in the main cast to play around with, the show is nailing some of its funniest stories to date. 

Last night’s episode was mostly about Jack. Having stepped out from underneath the burden of his mother’s oppression, he finds himself with new found confidence just in time to compete with his nemesis Kaylie Hooper, the granddaughter of Hank, the CEO of Kabletown (played wonderfully by Chloe Grace Moretz). It being his 70^th birthday and all, Hank decides that it’s time to make Kaylie CEO; she’ll serve on the board of the company until she graduates college, while Jack runs the company until she comes of age. Jack knows he needs to get the upper hand on her. He hires out Steve Buscemi‘s weird, cross-dressing PI to track her, and befriends his old archenemy Banks (a welcome return of Will Arnett) who appears to have information to blackmail her. According to Banks, Kaylie is not in fact Hank’s granddaughter and her father is in fact gay. Jack seems to intend to use this information to take the CEO position. But wait! Tableturning at its finest takes place in the final act. Kaylie made up this information to trick Jack and make lose him the position. And just when we think the crafty Kaylie has one-upped Jack, Jack shows his hand and lets her know that he went along with it the whole time to distract her. “The only thing Hank cares about more than family is birthdays,” Jack tells her, and Jack distracted Kaylie long enough to get Hank a gift and make her forget about it. 

Liz was dealing with some baby stuff in the background of the episode. The always amusing Dr. Spaceman (Chris Parnell) somehow tracks Liz to Westchester (where she’s gone to avoid his antics) and recommends she start taking fertility shots to improve her chances of getting pregnant (which only serve to make her hormonal and heighten her emotions). Liz wonders whether it may even be worth having a kid at her age. Won’t she just be in her seventies by the time they’ve even gotten out of college? She considers adopting instead; first a baby, but the adoption wait list for that is too long (she’s only just moved up from the “lesbian adopter” folder to “found a man comma living a lie”) and then later a kid that’s a few years older (“If you can take care of me, you can do anything,” Tracey says with unexpected inspiration). We end the episode with the prospect of Liz getting a kid in some form very soon. And ya’ know what, this being the final season, I’m totally cool with that. Liz has been hopelessly single and … well … hopeless in general really. But she’s finally starting to get some well-deserved happiness. Jack and Liz are both getting exactly what they’d hoped for in this final season, and that’s totally alright. If the show continues to be this funny and stays true to its characters and gives them the endings they deserve (in its own weird fashion that only 30 Rock can manage), than the show will surely be missed. Only four more episodes of 30 Rock left everyone. 

Stray Observations:

-The final plot of this episode involves Tracey trying to direct an equally crazy Octavia Spencer in a Harriet Tubman movie (“You’re gonna re-write the script to let me walk through walls,” she informs him). Tracey attempts to act like Liz Lemmon but discovers Liz has a much harder time putting up with his shenanigans than he could have imagined.

-Liz once starred in a play described as “too confusing to be offensive”
-Hank on his mother: “She wanted to be cremated, and died in a fire. How considerate”

-“That’s the age I started Kabletown, got married, and had my first white child”

-Jack gives a business card to cheer up a crying Liz Lemon that says, “There. There.”

-The fertility shots are making Liz oddly emotional: “Just like poor Nixon. He did good things in China”

-“Okay, I don’t know why you had to be a woman” “That’s for me to worry about”

-“How much time have we wasted on scheming and gravel voiced entendres?”

-“How gay is he on a scale from gay hunting to hunting bears?”

-“For every Little Orphan Annie there is a Russian dwarf pretending to be a child”

-“I’ll be NBC’s head of publicity. You’ll never see me. I’ll be on a beach somewhere”

-“I’m desperate for approval. I would have been a Nazi”

-“I happen to have some powerful friends at the Maury Povich Show”

-“She tried to solicit sex from a police dog”

-No, Kenneth this episode. How does everyone feel about that?

Grade: B+