Hal's Dentist: Opinions and Analysis

yardgames

Retired Administrator
helter-skelter: [SIZE=-1]chaotic: lacking a visible order or organization
haphazardly; "the books were piled up helter-skelter"
with undue hurry and confusion; "a helter-skelter kind of existence with never a pause"; "a pell-mell dash for the train"
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn[/SIZE]
 

Dabney

Deutscher Moderator
I wrote a pretty long review yesterday, and just befor I could submit it my computer crashed. Man i was really furious. Maybe I'll give it another try later.
So only in short:

For me, this was one of the best MITM episodes ever, maybe even better that burning man.
 

Dabney

Deutscher Moderator
Allright:
As I said, this episode was really fantastic. Okay, obviously it was mostly intended to provoke simple laughter and we didn’t have to think too much during the episode. But look how much you guys discuss about whether the Malcolm-Dewey plot was a dream or not. The episode does make us think. I kind of like such things, and that’s why I like films like Donnie Darko, too. At the end you just keep on thinking about what was real and what not. By the way, in my opinion this was no dream, it was real. It is unprobable that a mattress just falls off the sky onto the street, yes, but how probable is it that an underaged guy joins the army, goes to Afghanistan, runs away, gets married to a man and again runs away? There have been more plots in MITM which were rather surreal, and I like that.

The Reese-Lois-plot was just fantastic in this episode. I thought it was so nice of Reese to help his mum and teach her how to ride a bike, and he even protected her by not telling everybody about her problem. We could see his evil side, though, when he blackmailed Lois and wanted to get her piece of cake. In the end I felt really sorry for Reese, that must have hurt terribly… :D
From this plot I especially liked the scene when Lois dragged Reese down to the ground and he just said: “Mom, there’s glass down here!” It was just so funny…

Hal’s story was amazing, too. Bryan could show all his skills as an actor, and he did a great job. I think I would have reacted just like Hal did, I mean, his buddy tells him that he would take care of it, so I would have thought it was for free, too. The scene in which he pulled his tooth out was disgusting, though. I could nearly feel the pain myself. And I liked his scream-box. Yeah, that’s all I can say concerning this subplot. It was just physical comedy, not much to talk about, but much to laugh.

The Malcolm-Dewey-thing was not too original, but still totally amusing. And it reminded me again, that both brothers have to share one bed. I mean, how sad is that? And after having seen their former mattress at the end I can really understand their joy when sleeping on the new one. The old one was so disgusting… And it was very nice of Dewey to change the mattresses again when realizing that Malcolm didn’t care for anything else than sleeping anymore. This also meant a loss for him. So there were actually two of the Wilkerson sons who reacted very kindly and helpful, Reese and Dewey.

By the way, the fact that Hal refused to get all the money at the poker play because he thought he didn’t need charity reminded me a lot of Lois vs. evil from season 1, when Julie Hoolerman (was this her name?) and her friends gave food and other things to the boys, which they found pretty embarrassing.
 

tony_montana

Semper Fidelis
My sentiments exactly! It made us think yet at other times this episode just provided mindless laughs(like Hal's whole plot, which incedently is the best one of the episode to me). I am holding my position that the mattress was real.
 

Dew_Fan

New member
Hal's Scream Box

One of the best things about that ep was the fact that he seemed to be fine one minute the next minute he screaming into a odd wooden box, priceless.
 
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