6.2/10. I appreciated the bottle episode/12 Angry Men vibe they were going for with this one (it felt unusually stage-y for Moral Orel but the results were pretty mixed. A lot of the complaints and thinly-veiled insults among the cuckolds and cads assembled at the bar were pretty blunt and not especially interesting. But on the other hand, once Clay launched into his monologue about believing that maybe Darwin is right, and that the fit have taken and taken from him, the episode picked up. Again, Clay's self-pity and self-loathing has already been well-established, but he's a raw nerve here, presenting his inescapable resentments and regrets with ugly abandon. You get the sense that he wants to be punished, that he wants to suffer, perhaps if only to feel something.
There's even the hint that his anger and self-hatred comes from his own repressed issues about his sexuality. When he laments that Orel is "sensitive," there's the sense that he has had to try to ignore, to sacrifice, in the face of homosexual impulses (the show's been a little inconsistent about this, but he seems to have an attraction to Coach Stopframe), and that makes it all the more horrible for him when he fears that he's passed it on to Orel. This may easily be reading too much into things, but there's definitely a sense in which Clay seems to hate himself and his situation even more because he fears he sees bad characteristics in his son that came from him. The last two minutes or so of the episode are charged and raw; it's just a shame that there was a lot of not-so-subtle throat clearing on the way to that ending.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2016-10-06T18:52:48Z
6.2/10. I appreciated the bottle episode/12 Angry Men vibe they were going for with this one (it felt unusually stage-y for Moral Orel but the results were pretty mixed. A lot of the complaints and thinly-veiled insults among the cuckolds and cads assembled at the bar were pretty blunt and not especially interesting. But on the other hand, once Clay launched into his monologue about believing that maybe Darwin is right, and that the fit have taken and taken from him, the episode picked up. Again, Clay's self-pity and self-loathing has already been well-established, but he's a raw nerve here, presenting his inescapable resentments and regrets with ugly abandon. You get the sense that he wants to be punished, that he wants to suffer, perhaps if only to feel something.
There's even the hint that his anger and self-hatred comes from his own repressed issues about his sexuality. When he laments that Orel is "sensitive," there's the sense that he has had to try to ignore, to sacrifice, in the face of homosexual impulses (the show's been a little inconsistent about this, but he seems to have an attraction to Coach Stopframe), and that makes it all the more horrible for him when he fears that he's passed it on to Orel. This may easily be reading too much into things, but there's definitely a sense in which Clay seems to hate himself and his situation even more because he fears he sees bad characteristics in his son that came from him. The last two minutes or so of the episode are charged and raw; it's just a shame that there was a lot of not-so-subtle throat clearing on the way to that ending.