4x06 Double Crossers

[5.8/10] What a weird grab bag of different bits these episodes are. There’s barely even complete scenes in a lot of this. It’s nominally a George Sr. episode, but for a big chunk of the middle, it just branches off into being a Michael/GOB episode. Then we’re doing a Herman Cain parody, and the George Sr./Oscar flip, and a bit about colony collapse, and finally back to Cinco de Quatro to where the whole episode just has no spine.

It also continues to be a half hour largely devoid of laughs. I got a kick out of the return of GOB’s bees/beads bit, and the colony collapse pun is worth a larf. But the jokes that presage Jeffrey Tambor’s turn on Transparent are just uncomfortable, and maaan, all of the jokes about building the wall play a lot differently now than when this episode first aired.

We do get a few solid links here, like the reason George Sr. showed up in Michael’s office with a bag of dirty magazines. But the synergy of those connections is messed up by the overall lumpiness of the episode, which doesn’t really work as a sequel to George Sr.’s last episode or Michael’s last episode, despite theoretically following both of them.

I keep coming back to the idea that having interconnected episodes that could potentially work in a lot of different orders is a bold idea, especially for the era of binge T.V., but it doesn’t really work. The stories you tell and jokes you try to spin in an individual episode all end up feeling incomplete and stapled together. Even seeing George Sr. and Oscar flip mojos can’t make up for that.