16x08 Dennis Takes a Mental Health Day

[8.4/10] Hoo boy. This one hit close to home. And when you find yourself relating to Dennis Reynolds, you are getting old, getting deranged, or both. So not a good sign for yours truly.

But holy hell I felt this one. I don’t mind paying via a QR code or other modern changes. But boy, I do get perturbed that everything has its own app now. I do hate the byzantine process one must transverse in order to get customer service. And most of all, I feel that sense of not being mad at the person your dealing with, but being frustrated with a system that seems intentionally maddening, in my bones.

I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Frankly, it makes me worry that I’m an old crank who’s too sclerotic to adapt. For good or for ill though, Dennis’ frustrations when operating his car, buying tea, purchasing a phone, trying to get customer assistance, and any number of other small, seemingly insignificant tasks that leave him in a Kafkaesque nightmare is deeply, deeply relatable. As is the sense of trying to maintain your calm while needlessly frustrating parts of navigating simple tasks in everyday life pop up.

It’s a great showcase for Glenn Howerton. He does a great job of reacting to all the comic absurdities around him, while contributing some of his own. The episode asks a lot of him, with only amusing-but-brief cameos from the rest of the game. And Howerton is up to the challenge, Dennis has his own Falling Down-style adventure, and you buy every increasingly aggravating step of it.

I appreciate the little touches of the story. As is often the case with IASIP, there’s something amusing about how a member of The Gang generalizes a problem from the literal to the abstract. A clerk at a tea shop apologizes that “the system” won’t let her sell him tea without boba, while Dennis takes it to be a complaint about The System:tm: that seemingly acts from above to make his life miserable. (Think Frank feeling hot and complaining about “the climate” in the #MeToo episode.)

But what really puts this one over the top is the bonkers ending. I love the show getting weird and impressionistic for Dennis’ confrontation with the car company CEO. There’s something that feels very clockwork about it. The Roxette song makes a hilarious return after Dennis listening to it in the car to provide the soundtrack to his strange liminal encounter. The very tagline “Listen to Your Heart” has layers of meaning, from Dennis gently pulling out his erstwhile tormentor’s actual heart, to the whole thing being a reaction to a diagnosis of high blood pressure. Even Dennis crushing the heart into a diamond seems like a tie into the rest of the Gang’s scheme to put coal in a pressure cooker.

And even as the ending is caked in irony and humor, I kind of like it as a bizarre and outre, yet cathartic rendition of how many folks feel about trying to resolve their problems with the tiny but accumulating problems of the day-to-day. It’s insane, but by god, you kinda feel it.

Plus, I love love love the reveal that this was all an internal fantasy from Dennis to help him process his stressed out feelings and manually lower his blood pressure in a way that, against all odds, actually works! It’s a big swing, and I’m normally resistant to “It was all a dream” endings, but this one clicks within the general tone of the show’s bolder outings and the confines of the episode. I particularly love the Keyser Soze-like nature of Dennis’ dream, and all the repeating faces and motifs he sees on the way out are doled out perfectly.

Overall, this is a hell of a high note for the season to go out on. Creative, ambitious, and different. Now I just have to worry about having common cause with Dennis Reynolds. Uh oh.