Once again, I found myself absolutely loving It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia this week. I have to say that with the exception of the epic disaster that was the episode “Frank’s brother”, the show has all been absolutely amazing so far this season. I might even go as far to say that season seven is shaping up more and more to be one of my top favorite seasons of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia at this point. I love that the writers are taking some risks this season and doing some episodes that are very different from the episodes from the previous seasons of the show. With the exception of “Frank’s brother” where it was pretty much just Frank and his brother in flashbacks with very little screen time from the rest of The Gang, I’ve loved all of the other episodes this season that are very different from a typical episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. I’m still surprised by how much I loved “Chardee MacDennis: The Game of Games” considering that it was basically The Gang playing a homemade game for pretty much the entire episode.
I thought that last week’s episode was really different as well because most of the episode took place outside of the bar, but this episode was even more unique since it was set entirely outside the bar. Also, I love how the episode started when The Gang was right in the middle of their scheme to steal the vase from its owners and had already run into trouble because the owners of the vase were home and The Gang was trying to figure out how they were going to get out of the house without getting caught. I have to admit that I was kind of confused about what was going on for the first few minutes of the episode, but I figured out what was going on pretty quickly.
Dennis was definitely the main highlight of the episode for me, and I have to say that he’s pretty much taken Frank’s place as my third favorite character on the show behind Dee and Charlie thanks to the writing for Dennis this season. I loved all of his scenes with Dee in this episode, especially the one where he calls Dee a “gangly uncoordinated bitch”. That was beyond hilarious. The whole scene with Dee and Dennis in the bathroom was also beyond hilarious too though.
I love that Dennis and Frank both told Dee that her breath smelled bad in this episode. When I was on the IMDB board for the show after I watched this episode for the first time, somebody pointed out that there were characters that had both told Dee and Charlie that they had bad breath in previous episodes this season. I hadn’t noticed that running gag until now, but I have to say that I think it’s kind of funny.
The only thing that I wish had been different about this episode was that I would love to have seen the speech that Dennis gave, which convinced the rest of The Gang to go along with his plan to steal the vase since everyone kept talking about how great his speech was. Perhaps they could have shown his speech in a flashback. Although, showing us his speech would take away from the fact that this episode had a unique structure to it starting the episode when they were in the middle of their plan and had already run into trouble.
Mac and Charlie’s scenes in the van that they had gotten for their scheme were also very funny. I found their fighting over the fact that Mac wouldn’t share his chips with Charlie beyond priceless. Mac ditching the rest of The Gang to go to a burger joint to get some more food was hilarious too. I love fat Mac. Their whole discussion about moving to Arizona to start a leather clothing store only to have Dee and Dennis say that they would go out of business in a week if they did that, because there are tons of leather clothing stores throughout all of Arizona.
I loved the reference to the movie E.T. where they had Frank hiding in the stack of stuffed animals in the little girl’s closet when she went in their to get a stuffed animal. The fact that the little girl didn’t even notice Frank being in the closet made the whole thing even funnier.
The ending of this episode was absolutely brilliant, if you ask me. As it got closer to the end of the episode, I kept wondering how The Gang would all manage to get out of the house, and I love that they all decided to simply walk out the front door after Charlie just walked into the house through the front door and managed to find Dee and Dennis without any of the family members noticing him. They realized that the family seemed to have absolutely no awareness of their presence in the house due to the fact that the mom/wife was apparently planning to leave her husband and run off to Disneyland with some guy and her daughter only to have her husband come home and insist that they all sit down in the living room to talk about everything.
Frank managed to find the vase in the living room after the family had finally seen them and ended up breaking it trying to grab it with his whip. Why he thought that was a good idea, I don’t know, but he had also ripped apart the little girl’s teddy bear earlier in the episode thinking that the vase would be one of them. Right around that time, Mac walked into the house pretending to be a Swedish plumber, which was pretty funny. It turns out the family was Asian, and The Gang just looked at them awkwardly for several seconds before they told the family that they were just going to leave. As soon as they were outside Dee said that she wasn’t expecting the family to be Asian, and I wasn’t either. Based on how the mom and her boyfriend were dressed and how their voices sounded when they were talking earlier in the episode, I assumed that they were from the south like The Gang had. I thought that was a very clever twist.
All in all, I absolutely loved this episode for the most part. One last thing that I liked about this episode was the whole discussion about the whole situation with Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien hosting The Tonight Show after they found a bunch of tickets to The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. That was absolutely priceless. Like I mentioned earlier, the only thing that I didn’t like about the episode was the fact that we didn’t get to see the speech that Dennis gave to convince the rest of The Gang that they should break into the family’s house and steal the vase simply because they didn’t like the fact that a family owned it. They thought the vase belonged in a museum. Although, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s better that we didn’t get to see his speech because it would probably diminish the level of uniqueness that this episode had in terms of its structure compared to most of the other episodes of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Also, not getting to see the speech allows the viewers to imagine what they think Dennis’ speech was like.
I really do think that Glenn Howerton’s performance in this episode was worthy of winning an Emmy for it just like his performance in almost every other episode from season seven does at this point.
All things considered, I give this episode a rating of an A-.
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