I'm sure Donna feels just awful that she can't be here with you regulars for the final Sunny of the season, but since she's beachside hobnobbing with a bunch of smart people while I'm at home with the kids for the next five days–only one of which is a school day–she probably doesn't feel too bad.
Quite a send-off this week for a season that was, on the whole, pretty strong. (Even the shakier episodes usually stumbled because of excess ambition, not creative bankruptcy.) We saw the return of Rickety Cricket–now with air-cooled hydraulic leg braces–and "the waitress," both out for revenge on The Gang. Their plan? To win the bar in a dance marathon. And how is that even possible? Because Charlie signed up with "The Q Crew on 102"–that would be "DJ Fat Michael" and "Squirrelly D," played by the Sklar brothers–to have the bar host the marathon, and in the section marked "prize," Charlie thought it said "pride," and wrote in the thing he's most proud of.
So The Gang has to outlast everyone on the dance floor in order to retain ownership of the bar, which should be easy enough to do, except that they immediately turn their devious plans against each other. Because Frank, at the beginning of the episode, devised a ranking system for every bar employee, they all think that if they undercut each other in the dance marathon, they'll rise in the rankings. (All except for Dennis, who's already Frank's #2, and so uses his time in the marathon to convince a curvy bombshell that he's a dance instructor, and then teach her moves that amount to a standing lapdance.) First they fell Frank, which they assume will drop him to the bottom of the rankings, but alas, "You can't rank me last, I came up with the ranking system!" Frank then teams up with Rickety Cricket–whose hydraulic legs seized up during the first "dance challenge" of the night–to bake cough-syrup-laden brownies over a trash can fire in the back alley.
From there it's just a matter of who's going to eat the brownies when, and who's going to be shoved to the ground when they're most vulnerable, and who's going to lose the next dance challenge and be forced to carry around a 20-pound keg with "Q102" stamped on it. As far as plot goes, there wasn't much happening this episode. As far as comedy though? It was so rich that I'm going to turn the entire Stray Observations section below over to a list of funny lines, in roughly the order in which they were spoken.
But one thing I can't really convey is how amusing it is to watch people constantly dance, even if their idea of "dancing" is just to wave their hands around while shuffling from side to side and carrying on a normal conversation. (Or at least as normal as this show gets.)
Donna thanks you for reading, and should be back with you next season. Can they shoot that season right now, please? These guys aren't in the WGA, are they? It would make Strike Spring go so much easier if we could at least count on Thursday nights to be Sunny.
Grade: A-
Stray observations:
"Your illiteracy has screwed us again!"
"I think we should kick him in the dick!"
"The technology failed me!"
"I do not even understand the smell coming from your body!"
"You've never once seen me wash my testicles either but that doesn't mean I don't do it every Friday."
"You're like made of cream, and your cream is all over his face, dude."
"It looks like a shitball. Why is it so heavy and big?"
"You're wearing Rickety Cricket's exo-skeleton!"
"Can't a man enjoy a sexual lady?"
"Let these strong, sweet sexual arms hold you."
"I'm about to show you the white-hot cream of an eighth-grade boy."