After seven truly enjoyable
episodes, this seems to be the first truly weak episode of It’s Always Sunny in
Philadelphia’s eighth season. Thankfully, it’s the farthest thing from being as
bad as the episode “Frank’s Brother” was last season, but it was still
incredibly lackluster. I feel like this episode had potential to be great, but
the writers unfortunately really dropped the ball with this episode. The
episode began with Dee coming to the bar and finding Dennis, Mac and Frank watching
a fictional version of the Real Housewives franchise with Charlie fiddling with
the wires on the TV to get good reception on the TV and getting shocked in the
process. Dee wanted Charlie to watch her game and water her crops in the game
while she ran some errands in exchange for five dollars, which led to Dennis,
Mac and Frank fighting with Dee about whether Charlie should go with Dee or
stay with them. After a little bit of fighting, Charlie decided to go with Dee,
but not before telling the others that he had a lot of potential and that he
might rule the world the someday. I have to say that I loved Dennis’ reaction
to Charlie saying that.
Charlie’s reaction to
discovering that Dee had created embarrassing avatars of him, Dennis, Mac and
Frank in the game was rather amusing. Despite the fact that Dee had originally only
wanted Charlie to look over her tribe and water her crops in the game while she
ran errands, he ended up doing a lot more than that. Thanks to Charlie, Dee got
thirty new followers and she actually started doing much better in the game
than she had been before. Charlie quickly became addicted to the game after that,
perhaps even more than Dee already was, and after Mac and Frank discovered that
Dee had made embarrassing avatars of them for the game, they also got sucked
into the game.
In my personal opinion, if
the writers wanted to do an episode where Charlie is in charge of something,
they should have had Charlie be in charge of something real like he was in the
season four finale “The Nightman Cometh” rather than have him telling everyone
how to play an online video game. Charlie trying to control everyone as he
played the game had some entertaining moments, especially when it came to the
way he treated Dee throughout the episode, but this episode still fell short of
being great. Although, I also loved the scene where Charlie meets with a woman
from the game and he ends up giving her a box of spiders and starts lashing out
at her.
As I mentioned in my review
for episode 8x07 “Frank’s Back in Business” (My thoughts on episode 8x07 “Frank’s Back in Business”), Mac kissing Dennis in
episode 8x02 “The Gang Recycles Their Trash” had originally left me wondering
if the writers were planning to have Mac come out of the closet at the end of
the season, but after that the writers didn’t really do anything to hint at the
possibility of Mac being gay until that episode to make me once again wonder if
they were planning to have Mac come out of the closet. Charlie’s comment to Mac
in this episode about how he wonders if he (Mac) is attracted to men in
addition to the fact that Mac appears to be hitting on a waiter in a restaurant
in the promo for this week’s episode, episode 8x09 “The Gang Diner” has once
again left me wondering if perhaps that’s the direction the writers are going
in with Mac after all.
The best thing about this
episode was definitely Dennis’ material. Dennis strongly objected to the others
getting sucked into the world of online gaming, saying that they should go out
and experience real life in the real world. At one point in the episode The
Gang ended up watching a video of Dennis cutting a woman’s hair in his bedroom.
The video of Dennis cutting that woman’s hair was both extremely weird, yet
extremely funny all at the same time, especially the way Dennis was talking to
the others about cutting the girl’s hair in the video.
One of my favorite scenes
from the episode is the scene where Dennis, Mac and Frank were hanging out at
another bar dancing to the song “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” by Deniece Williams
from Footloose. Glenn Howerton was great in that scene, but the scene as a
whole was great too. My other favorite scene from the episode was definitely
the scene where Dennis was walking through the mall calling out to people,
asking random people if they wanted to “experience” him. Dennis’ time at the
mall took an even more bizarre turn after he got in a sensory deprivation
chamber where he had a vision/dream where he was having a conversation about
what is reality with a British version of himself. I’m honestly not sure what
to make of that, and I can’t help but wonder why out of all the different kinds
of accents that Dennis could have, he imagined himself having a British accent.
Plus, the way “British Dennis” was dressed made him look a lot like a
stereotypical flamboyantly gay man, if you ask me.
The episode came to a rather
quick end like the show so often does when Dennis tells Charlie, Dee, Mac and Frank
that he deleted all of there characters from the game since they all had the
same password: Paddy’s Pub, once again telling them that they shouldn’t get so
wrapped up in a fantasy world. That whole scene was great, but I do think that
once again Glenn Howerton stole the entire scene, especially when he/Dennis
kept talking in a British accent like “British Dennis” did in the sensory deprivation
chamber sequence. That was beyond hilarious.
All things considered, this
episode comes across as having a great idea for the plot of an episode, which
would be Charlie being in charge of something and bossing everyone around in
the process. Unfortunately, the execution of that concept in this episode was
rather poor. As I mentioned earlier, it’s my personal opinion that the concept
of Charlie bossing everyone around as he’s in charge of something most likely
would have worked a lot better if he was in charge of something real where the
stakes were higher instead of simply bossing everybody around as he plays a
video game. Once again Glenn Howerton had some great material to work with, and
he did a pretty good job with it. It still wasn’t enough to make it a great
episode though, because the rest of the cast’s material in this episode was
rather weak.
That being said, I give this
episode a rating of a C+.
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