I enjoyed all three of the stories, but let’s start with
Penny’s because it’s really at the heart of why this episode is great. Penny’s
boyfriend feels like they only hang out with Penny’s friends. He asks if they
can hang with his friends for once. Penny dislikes the idea but agrees to it
anyway. When they’re hanging out with them, Penny assumes their crazy and weird
like her own friends, but turns out their pretty normal (they enjoy discussing
the debt ceiling! How more normal can you get?). She immediately pegs the guy
who talks about the debt ceiling to be Dave (because he’s talking about
something she thinks no one cares about). But then the rest of the group says
that nope that’s the sort of thing that matters to them. When another friend
spills wine on themselves, she loads on her not realizing that they don’t make
fun of other people at their expense. Penny is BAFFLED. What sorcery is this?!
Penny is the meta-commentator for this episode. She’s the oddball in this group
of normal people, and her awkwardness and feelings of not fitting in show just
how damn bizarre and dickish the Happy
Endings friends can be. It’s only to them that their antics seem normal (“No
hijinks or taking a miniature pig to a car dealership to make point on gender roles?”
Penny asks aghast).
When Penny returns to the other two stories and begins
making meta-commentary on them, the payoff is so good, so funny, and so in line
with the sort of humor Happy Endings
does well that it ties together an episode that was already very funny, and
very well-grounded.
Brad, meanwhile, doesn’t want to have dinner when Jane’s ex
comes to town. But he changes his mind when he discovers that Ryan is actually
a girl who Jane dated during her lesbian phase. Now he wants to hear all the dirty,
sexy details of their relationship, but ends up being turned off when he finds
out that they told eachother that they “loved” eachother way back when. Brad,
of course, doesn’t take this well, and invites his own ex over the next night.
This devolves into an incredibly uncomfortable dinner party.
Penny doesn’t possibly think the other story could be any
more interesting, and she’d be wrong. Max has a new roommate who’s very cool,
but he never sees. Dave and Alex find him so cool; they convince Max to try to
hang out with him. They wait up for him as an excuse to hang out with him. But
his roommate is nowhere to be found, and so they track him down. Only to
discover that he’s been using the apartment to secretly cheat on his wife,
crashing his date and wrecking his marriage.
The Happy Endings gang (who need to get some official name coined for them. Somebody get on that!) is not exactly the most likable group of people. When the guy in the booth next to them says, “Shut the fuck up” in “Fowl Play/Date”, it’s another sign that to the outside world this is a co-dependent, selfish, narcissistic group of individuals who do some pretty stupid and bad things towards one another, and in general. The fact that its often incredibly funny and capsizing over with jokes sometimes makes up for this fact, but a self-awareness (the series is pretty self-aware to begin with but this is furthest it’s gone) helps alleviate many of the problems it has with its plotting and characters. Meeting your boyfriend’s friends, meeting your wife’s ex, and trying to befriend a new roommate, those are all things that most of us can relate to. Adding a mad-dashed sprinkle of crazy, a bountiful amount of jokes, and an appropriate level of meta-ness, well that’s all for the better.
The Happy Endings gang (who need to get some official name coined for them. Somebody get on that!) is not exactly the most likable group of people. When the guy in the booth next to them says, “Shut the fuck up” in “Fowl Play/Date”, it’s another sign that to the outside world this is a co-dependent, selfish, narcissistic group of individuals who do some pretty stupid and bad things towards one another, and in general. The fact that its often incredibly funny and capsizing over with jokes sometimes makes up for this fact, but a self-awareness (the series is pretty self-aware to begin with but this is furthest it’s gone) helps alleviate many of the problems it has with its plotting and characters. Meeting your boyfriend’s friends, meeting your wife’s ex, and trying to befriend a new roommate, those are all things that most of us can relate to. Adding a mad-dashed sprinkle of crazy, a bountiful amount of jokes, and an appropriate level of meta-ness, well that’s all for the better.
Stray Observations:
-“You can’t have disposable income when you are $11,000 and
3 cats in debt to us” “You will get your cats when you get your cats!”
-“We’re not going to have a threeway”
-“Hope he doesn’t weasel his way into my life like my last
roommate”
-“… And that’s how I gave my mother my kidney”
-“…We just stripped down to our tank tops, and talked about
feminist theory all night long… and that was it”
-“He definitely got eaten by a bear”
-“A real gentleman saves somebody from a well and never
talks about it again”
-“We hardly ever use tiny farm animals to solve our problems”
-Dave fails at the “Dramatic Chair Swivel”.
-“Chad and Lisa had a baby” “Really?” “Probably …”
Grade: A
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