8x05 The Gang Gets Analyzed

[7.2/10] Fun episode. The premise of each member of The Gang being psychoanalyzed individually is a sturdy one, though it plays like fan fiction a bit of the time. The best sessions were Charlie’s, which zeroed in on the combination of his innocence, weirdness, and idiocy, and unexpectedly Mac’s, which took his Freudian fixations and own inability to understand things to funny heights.

But really each segment was pretty good, even if it didn’t really amount to a whole. Frank talking about his first kiss at a “nitwit school” and complaining that the therapist “unzipped” his repressed feelings was outsized enough for a laugh. Dennis demonstrating his detached derangement and need to control his friends was a bit over the top, but had its moments. Dee’s was probably the weakest, but it may have just been that the episode was running out of steam by that point, and she did get a good note to go out on with her dish-breaking temper tantrum at the end.

Overall, I didn’t really feel like I got a better understanding of the characters here, which is something you hope for from a psychology episode, even in a zany comedy, but it was a good episode of individual showcases for the performers.