NTSF:SD:SUV:: works best when it focuses on one plot and peppers it with runners over the course of ten minutes. Shifting between two stories can work, but with such a short run time it’s a gamble. “Family Dies” attempts to cut between three different plot threads, which doesn’t quite work out, but the main arc with Trent confronting his father is by far the funniest, with an appropriately over-the-top setup.
Trent participates in a fake assassination attempt on the President of the Navy in order to gain access to the Nick Cannon Underwater Ultramax prison and actually assassinate his father—a prisoner there for life after “blowing up orphanages and nursing homes.” That concept alone is inventive and ridiculous enough to keep me interested, and Trent’s nonchalant attitude toward reconnecting with his father made it even funnier.
With Trent undercover in prison, Sam takes the President of the Navy to a resort safe house to lay low during the mission. But Rob Riggle can’t abide four-star amenities, since the POTN only gets “five-star Michelin Diamond quality” accommodations. If you like Rob Riggle yelling at the top of his lungs and riffing for a few minutes, then you’ll love those scenes. For me, it wore thin after about thirty seconds and didn’t change.
Not only is Trent reuniting with his father, but it’s also Father’s Day, the one day he has custody of his and Kove’s sons Cherokee and Jericho. Kove wants her day off, though this is the first time we’ve seen the kids, so she pawns them off on Alphonse for the day, who promptly loses them. Thankfully this C-plot barely got any screen time, since Trent’s reactions to everything in the prison was the best material.
As a send-up of reunions with absent or deadbeat fathers, “Family Dies” compiled a litany of great one-liners and ridiculous gags. Trent and his father trying to outwit each other with the poison needle—strong enough to kill 50 kittens, Kove tested to make sure—is particularly effective, as is the second-to-last scene as Trent embraces his sons with some typically saccharine music in on the soundtrack while Alphonse and Kove look on, grinning like idiots. The twist ending is expected, closing out an episode that had plenty of laughs, but didn’t measure up to the show’s best this season.
Stray observations:
- Seriously, the Nick Cannon Underwater Ultramax prison? Hysterical. I paused my screener to laugh at that one.
- “Sure. No problem. Love it.”
- “Remember Chandler from Friends?”
- “Screw you, space dildo!”