8.5/10. Again, opening an episode with a Mountain Goats song, let alone one as great as "Old College Try," is a good way to get me on board with an episode. I appreciated the flashback to how Clay and Blobberta met and married. There's a weird heightened reality to Moral Orel that creates a really strange atmosphere when such an exaggerated show gets serious like this, but it's interesting.
The idea that Blobberta was just trying to get married due to social pressure, and Clay just happened to be there works as a stand in for the "musical chairs" theory of marriage, that a lot of people get hitched because it's just that time in their lives regardless of whether they've thought it through. There's also an interesting theme about damage caused by families. Blobberta is essentially left out of her own family, and her father is basically completely cowed by her mother, so she not only doesn't have a good role model for what a good husband should be, but she's anxious, even desperate to feel like she's capable of "helping" someone, of being needed.
So she marries Clay, who Blobberta encourages to drink because her father does, and which reveals that she is a cad, causing her to sublimate her distress at this "filth" through cleaning. It's all pretty pop psychology, but it works in the moment, and it's interesting to see the matriarch and patriarch of the Puppingtons as young people. Clay as an uptight, slightly Orel-like square is interesting (and is the implication that he killed his parents?) And the close up still frames that seem to show wedded bliss in the opening of the episode, contrasted with the zoomed out versions at the end that show Clay and Blobberta were already having problems at their own wedding, was a nice touch.
Overall, a little too neat in terms of the backstory, but still a great look at the various factors that led to Clay and Blobberta getting together, and the seeds of their unhappiness.
(But I gotta ask, how far in the season are we going to get before we actually deal with the consequences of the hunting trip?)
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2016-09-23T14:42:05Z
8.5/10. Again, opening an episode with a Mountain Goats song, let alone one as great as "Old College Try," is a good way to get me on board with an episode. I appreciated the flashback to how Clay and Blobberta met and married. There's a weird heightened reality to Moral Orel that creates a really strange atmosphere when such an exaggerated show gets serious like this, but it's interesting.
The idea that Blobberta was just trying to get married due to social pressure, and Clay just happened to be there works as a stand in for the "musical chairs" theory of marriage, that a lot of people get hitched because it's just that time in their lives regardless of whether they've thought it through. There's also an interesting theme about damage caused by families. Blobberta is essentially left out of her own family, and her father is basically completely cowed by her mother, so she not only doesn't have a good role model for what a good husband should be, but she's anxious, even desperate to feel like she's capable of "helping" someone, of being needed.
So she marries Clay, who Blobberta encourages to drink because her father does, and which reveals that she is a cad, causing her to sublimate her distress at this "filth" through cleaning. It's all pretty pop psychology, but it works in the moment, and it's interesting to see the matriarch and patriarch of the Puppingtons as young people. Clay as an uptight, slightly Orel-like square is interesting (and is the implication that he killed his parents?) And the close up still frames that seem to show wedded bliss in the opening of the episode, contrasted with the zoomed out versions at the end that show Clay and Blobberta were already having problems at their own wedding, was a nice touch.
Overall, a little too neat in terms of the backstory, but still a great look at the various factors that led to Clay and Blobberta getting together, and the seeds of their unhappiness.
(But I gotta ask, how far in the season are we going to get before we actually deal with the consequences of the hunting trip?)