This week’s episode was subpar by my standards. It had its good points and it had its bad points. I’m sure many of you can contest to Chad being the high point of the episode, with the Malcolm/Reese storyline being the low point.
Ditch Day was a superb idea, and the writers could have taken it far, I’m sure. Instead of continuing on the Ditch Day line, though, we say Malcolm and Reese complain to each other, something we’ve seen far too much of lately. I know teenagers like to complain—heck, I’m a teenager and I like to complain, but it’s getting a little bit old. They need to mix things up a bit. Instead we have the lame “haunted house” instead of an “empty house.”
For all of you who are looking for episodes reminiscent of seasons one and two, this is why we can’t do them; they just no longer work out with Frankie and Justin’s age. I think this storyline could have been very successful five years ago, but even though we were shown how lame everyone (including Malcolm and Reese) thought it was, it just came off as rather boring to me. It was quite like watching a horrible season one episode, with actors that are five years too old to play the part. If the writers continue to have trouble coming up with storylines for Malcolm and Reese now that they’re older, I fear that the series will end very soon indeed.
I mentioned that I thought the high part of the episode was Chad. I expected Chad to take things out of order, not put things in order. That was a brilliant twist that I quite honestly never saw coming. Dewey’s calmness throughout the whole thing and eventual humbling to his father was interesting to watch. Also, we’ve seen Hal act crazily before, but we’ve never seen his obsessive side. How much time can one man waste filling in the I’s and the E’s and the question marks and the percent signs in encyclopedias?
My two favorite scenes had to be the pizza man scene and the “pictures of things should go on the things they’re pictures of” scene. You could tell something was wrong and awkward right from the beginning in the pizza man scene; giving us clues like that is a gift Erik has, and while he may not be good at crying (Dewey’s Opera) he played this part extremely well.
Of course, the scene that had everyone on the floor laughing –and the highlight of the episode—was when Lois finally found the warranty on the blender. Chad had put it there because pictures of things should go on the things they’re pictures of. And of course, he put Lois’ naked picture on Lois. The screaming and spinning I found to be absolutely hilarious. This is good evidence from earlier discussions in which we talked about how Hal is one of the boys. He really is, isn’t he?
Overall, Ida Loses a Leg was very dramatic, and I think the writers intended to get some comedy relief flowing this week. At times, it worked well, but Ditch Day was a complete disaster.