3x05 Mr. F

[8.0/10] Look, Arrested Development was made a decade and a half ago. Some things aren’t going to age well. For example, there’s a joke in this episode that isn’t racist exactly -- it’s a joke about GOB being racist toward people of Japanese descent -- but it’s close enough to the line that I wish the episode hadn’t included it.

Likewise, now that the cards are on the table, on rewatch I am uneasy about the Rita storyline. I think the show generally avoids punching down when it comes to her. The core of the joke is that Michael’s so enamored by her looks that he projects all these things onto her, with a side of poking fun at the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype. The triple bluff with feints toward her being a spy and a traditional MPDG are well done. But there’s still something uncomfortable about the whole “MRF” designation and treating her like a child and her obsession with a big chocolate badge and the Deliverance homage. I don’t know what to do with all of that. I still love this show, and I still like a lot of what they do in this plot, but parts of it don’t sit as well with me now as they did when I watched them originally.

Still, I like the mole business here! As usual on Arrested Development, there’s a ton of different flavors of the same type of gag, which turns out to be a lot of fun. Tobias dressing up as a literal mole when the CIA tells him to be one, actual moles hurting the foundations of Bluth properties, and the triumphant return of Annyong as the actual mole is all a blast.

My favorite storyline though is Buster pretending to be George Sr. so he can finally build a model train set with GOB. GOB’s childlike affection for building “Tiny Town” with someone he thinks is his dad, Buster being just as delighted to get to spend time with his big brother, and poor Larry the Surrogate losing his patience as “such a pro” makes for one of those distinctively loony but hilarious AD comic setpieces.

Speaking of which, I like the clockwork comedy that leads to the Godzilla homage. The model train set identified by Rita as a good gift for George Michael leading to the miniatures that become “Tiny Town” is a great bit of setup. Tobias’s mole costume and mistaking needing to be there with the Japanese investors as a “backers audition” is just dopey enough to work. And the mixup with George Michael and the “jet pants” is a great excuse for him to be the hero of the piece.

All the smaller gags work too. Maeby struggling with both the movie and the ride version of her Love Actually knockoff, and giving us a classic “That was a freebie” when Michael finds her out but is too oblivious to notice is great. Michael tearing down George Michael’s motivational poster and finding a Les Cousins Dangeroux poster behind got a huge laugh out of me. Even Lucille’s Godzilla-like noises when missing vodka was a cheap but hearty laugh. (The same goes for the Pretty Woman homage.)

Tobias mistaking his “gym buddy” for a potential date and missing that he’s a CIA agent rather than a CAA agent works for some cheap laughs as well. And as squeamish as I feel about some of the Rita stuff here, Michael turning on her when he thinks she’s the mole, only to turn around and marry her works as a parody of the Love, Indubitably-style romantic comedies the show is spoofing here.

All-in-all, there’s some parts of this that fall short, and part of going back and revisiting things you like is understanding that you can still like them while acknowledging the places where they go wrong.