[6.8/10] I felt bad for Bob in this one. He tends to be so supportive of the other family members’ activities and fascinations, and when he finds something as mundane as gardening that sends him over the moon, the show has to stack the deck to make it unsustainable.
I know that you gotta maintain the status quo, and that the show was a little more pointed and less cuddy earlier in its run, but I really didn’t like the way the show framed Bob as putting the welfare of his plant babies over the welfare of his real babies. It felt tonally off and out of character, and had to put things to extremes -- Bob spending all his time at the community garden, Logan being over the top obnoxious, and Cynthia somehow needing to be in the restaurant to write her son’s essay --to get to the desired lesson. The whole thing left a kind of sour taste in my mouth.
Still, there’s plenty of bright spots here too. For one thing, the “Happy Place/Crappy Place” song is one of the show’s best and catchiest, which is saying something. Bob’s talking to his gardening tools and plants may be the peak humor of him having conversations with inanimate objects (especially given the blank stares he gets from everyone around him). I also like the final conversation between Bob and Louise, where she admits that she always thought of the restaurant as “our place” and she likes it like that. It’s another hint that one day the youngest Belcher child might just follow in her dad’s footsteps, and that the intrusion on their family space is the biggest affront of all of this, more than just having to deal with Logan as an annoyance.
That’s good material, and I wish the show leaned into that rather than into the over the top overfixation from Bob and cartoonish pestersomeness of Logan and his mom at the restaurant. What’s more, the smaller running gags of Gene wanting high fives and Tina wanting to learn more about teen boys from Logan fizzled pretty quickly.
Overall, this one feels out of character for the show in a lot of ways, but hits some nice songs and emotional beats when it gets to the crux of the matter.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2020-05-29T19:40:57Z
[6.8/10] I felt bad for Bob in this one. He tends to be so supportive of the other family members’ activities and fascinations, and when he finds something as mundane as gardening that sends him over the moon, the show has to stack the deck to make it unsustainable.
I know that you gotta maintain the status quo, and that the show was a little more pointed and less cuddy earlier in its run, but I really didn’t like the way the show framed Bob as putting the welfare of his plant babies over the welfare of his real babies. It felt tonally off and out of character, and had to put things to extremes -- Bob spending all his time at the community garden, Logan being over the top obnoxious, and Cynthia somehow needing to be in the restaurant to write her son’s essay --to get to the desired lesson. The whole thing left a kind of sour taste in my mouth.
Still, there’s plenty of bright spots here too. For one thing, the “Happy Place/Crappy Place” song is one of the show’s best and catchiest, which is saying something. Bob’s talking to his gardening tools and plants may be the peak humor of him having conversations with inanimate objects (especially given the blank stares he gets from everyone around him). I also like the final conversation between Bob and Louise, where she admits that she always thought of the restaurant as “our place” and she likes it like that. It’s another hint that one day the youngest Belcher child might just follow in her dad’s footsteps, and that the intrusion on their family space is the biggest affront of all of this, more than just having to deal with Logan as an annoyance.
That’s good material, and I wish the show leaned into that rather than into the over the top overfixation from Bob and cartoonish pestersomeness of Logan and his mom at the restaurant. What’s more, the smaller running gags of Gene wanting high fives and Tina wanting to learn more about teen boys from Logan fizzled pretty quickly.
Overall, this one feels out of character for the show in a lot of ways, but hits some nice songs and emotional beats when it gets to the crux of the matter.