Hal's Dentist: Opinions and Analysis

rzombie1988

New member
What did you guys think of this episode?

I thought it was passable but nothing special. I didn't really like the Lois/Reese plot, the Malcolm/Dewey plot was pretty much useless and a waste, and Hals plot was the only redeeming plot for this episode. It's the only one I liked. This episode was pretty much a waste for me along with the episodes where Reese is married.

Did the Wilkersons move or something? I guess its possible that the house Malcolm/Dewey was in front of, could have been someone elses, but it really doesn't even fit their neighborhood. Malcolm's neighborhood seems like an average neighborhood, rather than a upper class looking one.

Another question is did Malcolm really dream of the mattress or was it actually there? I'm leaning towards the latter with Dewey somehow switching it, but that would be tough to pull off.

I give it a 4/10 and I'm being generous.
 

ReMoss85

New member
As usual, I have the opposite opinion of most people on this board. I thought this episode was simply classic Malcolm in the Middle. And I thought Hal's plot was the worst and most un-MITM. Too much violence and screaming and genuinely uncomfortable moments which this season seems to have a lot of. The rest of the episode may have been pointless and "useless" but that has always been the humor of the show. I thought it was overall much more back to the roots of the show than most other recent episodes.
 

tony_montana

Semper Fidelis
This was an excellent episode!
Let me just say that Hal's storyline was one of the best he's ever had! The whole tooth thing was so friggen funny, but also painful(as I mentioned in the shoutbox). I actually held my hand to my mouth when he pulled his tooth out. Then I almost laughed to death when he put that cupboard around his neck and started screaming, but it was so low you could barely hear him!:D The best part was when Hal got the glass of ice cold water and said he'd drink it while Abe and the others were telling him not to do it(since the cold would hurt his tooth EXTREMELY bad). But of course, Hal being Hal, he did it anyway! I was standing up when he did that and I actually fell back in my chair laughing when he got the water in his mouth and then went "AGHGHHHAAAAAAAAA!":D It was also hilarious at the end when the cop pulls them over when they are taking Hal to the dentist office, and the cop lets them go even while Hal is tied up and trying to scream!
The Malcolm/Dewey storyline was very good as well, but I have to say it was a little....strange. Did anyone else catch that weird part where Malcolm and Dewey wake up from sleeping on the bed the first time and Malcolm goes,"Last night was.." and Dewey says,"Fantastic." ................umm, does that sound a little bit...um...how can I put this lightly.....sexual? You will understand what I mean if you saw the episode(just the way they say it....really weird). Other than that, great plot for them, and kind of cool because we hardly ever get to see a Malcolm/Dewey story!:)
Lois and Reese was great too, at least to me, because it kinda parallels stuff that I went through when I was younger and tried to learn how to ride a bike. I loved the end of their whole storyline when Reese tries to plow into Lois but he taps her and he goes flying in the air and then lands his...crotch....right onto one of the bike bars(DAMN! There's a lot of pain in this episode)! Anyway, great story. And does anyone notice this is TWO Lois/Reese storylines in a row? They sure are bonding!:D

Hal/Friends-10/10
Malcolm/Dewey-9.5/10(gotta take off half a point for the sheer weirdness!)
Lois/Reese-9.5/10
OVERALL-10/10

Another classic season seven episode! Already a fave of mine!
 

alleyboy

New member
Great episode! Two weeks in a row Lois and Reese have me laughin' my ass off. I knew Reese was going to get the worst of the collision.:D Damn there is so many more hysterical scenarios those two can be in. Two weeks in a row a Wilkerson has been tied up in the back of a vehicle also. I cried laughing at the look on Hal's face when they were stopped by the cop. Bryan Cranston is by far the best physical comedic actor on the tube today. I was also on the floor laughing after Hal drank the water. Classic! There was no need for Malcolm and Dewey to be over-the-top funny because this was a very nice and well rounded episode. And yeah Tony_Montana, Malcolm/Dewey morning bed scene was kinda ummm......weird. God I'm going to really miss this show.:(
 

simon_4420

New member
They just keep getting better! :D

I thought this was a great episode, and totally unique. All the plots were great, although I thought that Hal was alittle over the top at times, more than usual.
But now I am left wondering if there really was a mattress???:rolleyes: :confused: :confused:

Each episode is more and more painful to watch, knowing that its closer to the end.:(
 

yardgames

Retired Administrator
I find it absolutely hilarious that you're all calling Hal's storyline over the top, but it was completely natural that a brand new and really comfortable mattress just fell out of the sky and landed in perfect condition on the street. :D That was more than a little cheesy for me.

It definitely was not a dream; Malcolm was sleeping so soundly and Dewey was so worried about him that he swapped out the beds. We know because Reese's storyline would have simply ended if it were a dream. Also, Dewey was wearing the same shirt when Malcolm was "sleeping."
 

rzombie1988

New member
yardgames said:
I find it absolutely hilarious that you're all calling Hal's storyline over the top, but it was completely natural that a brand new and really comfortable mattress just fell out of the sky and landed in perfect condition on the street. :D That was more than a little cheesy for me.

I felt it was cheesy as well, not to mention stupid. They should have found it just laying somewhere and not literally falling out of the sky.
 

simon_4420

New member
I thought it was cheesy too, but as MITM doesn't really have lots of cheesy stuff going on, it didn't really bother me that much. But it was strange how they could sleep in the road til it got dark and there was no cars (until that one came all).
 

Wildcat

Retired Moderator
This was a pretty good episode. I wouldn’t say it was great, but it wasn’t bad. Sometimes I find it hard to get into Hal’s off-the-wall storylines because I just prefer stories that are centered around the boys, but this one pretty funny—especially the end where they had him tied up in the car. The Reese/Lois plot was good—it’s been nice to see them bonding in the last two eps. It’s also good to see Reese feel like he has a purpose by teaching someone something that he knows and they don’t. Opportunities like that are few and far between for him. Of course, he had to end up turning it into a form of black mail, but he wouldn’t be Reese if he didn’t try to pull something like that. :D

I agree that the mattress falling from the sky was a little ridiculous, which is what makes me question whether it was a dream, or not. I mean, mattresses don’t just fall from the sky. I agree with rzombie that the houses in the neighborhood look more expensive than those in the Wilkerson’s neighborhood. Also, a mattress is really hard to move by yourself (not to mention having to move Malcolm without waking him) and Dewey isn’t that big so I don’t think he could pull it off. So this makes me think it was all a dream. The only thing that leads me to believe that it wasn’t a dream is the little smirk on Dewey’s face when he said “you were happy, of course it was a dream.” I guess it’s another one of those MITM things that we’ll never know. :D
 

tony_montana

Semper Fidelis
Great, now all you guys got ME wondering wether or not it was a dream! I have to say it was real, though I have absolutely no idea how Dewey moved Malcolm, then the matress, and then Malcolm back onto the older matress. Weird.:confused:
And Im still kinda raising my eyebrow about Malcolm/Dewey wakeup scene. It was just weird the way they were talking...just sounded too.....well, you know what I mean.....
 

Malcoholic

New member
This was a pretty unambitious episode that just aimed for laughs by mining two reliable laugh-getters: Hal going nuts and Reese's ham-handed attempts at being helpful. The broken tooth is a pretext for triggering Hal's fail-proof routine of spasms, howls, convulsions and conniptions. I found this one especially funny--some day, the Emmies should give Bryan a lifetime achievement award for Best Reincarnation of Curly.

Reese's helpfulness is as always a mixed blessing at best--"No lady! I don't want your drugs!" he shouts at Lois so as not to embarrass her in front of a passer-by. His bike antics are throwbacks to the go-kart collision and firehose-powered bike of seasons past. I liked the very fancy camera work that vividly showed Lois' fear of falling was due to an exaggerated sense of how high she was off the ground--it showed that she felt as if she was a hundred feet off the ground. We don't talk much about camera work on these threads, I guess because it's show biz insider stuff, but very creative camera shots have always been one of the trademarks of Malcolm that give it its distinctive look and feel.

The mattress story was a rare venture into the surreal. I don't think we're supposed to know whether it really happened; it really doesn't matter, since the point of the story is the same either way: the boys' characters have been hardened by a lifetime of deprivation, and a sudden exposure to comfort has a corrupting effect. That tasteless morning-after pillow-talk joke seems to me due to the fact that the story isn't very funny, and so the writers groped for some sort of joke to add humor, even it wasn't a really good joke--a rare case of uninspired writing.
 

yardgames

Retired Administrator
You both raise some interesting points. I just assumed the storyline to be real because they've never shown us dreams before. Sure, they've shown us stories like in Watching the Baby and little clip-its of things that haven't happened, but having half an episode that's a dream seems a bit extreme to me. It seems that if that was their intent, they would have--could have--indeed, should have done something really neat with it to make it a memorable and unique episode like my favorite one of this season: Blackout.

I found the Hal plot comfortably funny, but a bit over-the-top and indeed it got old rather quickly. We've been there, done that with Hal. It indeed made for LOL comedy, but that's never been MITM's strength--sure, there's certainly plenty of times where you just can't stop laughing during the show, but MITM has always been more of a layered comedy, if that makes sense. I found it entertaining in the beginning, but they moved too quickly through the initial procedure in an effort to get to the point: the part about Hal not wanting to pay the bill. To be honest, I found the two punch lines of this storyline not at all funny: the water-drinking and the shouting at the cop. They seemed somehow stale to me.

Seeing Reese's teaching antics were quite entertaining, but again, I really felt like this storyline was missing something.

I think what this episode lacked was integration. At first, I was really impressed with the eppy--thinking, wow! they've gone back to like season one, where they have a gazillion storylines going on--indeed, one of the things that made the show so great early on. Yet it's also one of the things that doomed the show for a mass audience in its latter seasons. They simply ran out of storylines. So they have to resort to things like we saw in Hal's Dentist: a barrage of completely un-related ideas, all thrown helter-skelter together. The episode completely lacked unity, save for the one scene at the dinner table.

So much more should have been done with Malcolm's "dream" and Hal's dentist storyline needed to take a back seat because it's been done before.

But despite my seemingly negative review, I thoroughly enjoyed the episode and I still don't know what I'm going to do when we don't have any new MITM to look forward to anymore.
 

alleyboy

New member
Yardgames I think you're letting the looming demise of MITM effect you from truely enjoying the rest of the season. I so hate that I found this board too late. You guyz here are real fans of MITM. You know the show you love the show and you appreciate the pure good comedy. For over six years of negative hate and world problems Malcolm In The Middle has gave us somewhere to escape to and laugh something fierce. I don't know you guys personally but you also have made me laugh with your posts. Thanks. MITM Lives!!!!!......in reruns.:D
 

NeCoHo

Retired Mod
And on FX starting in '07!!!

I wasn't able to catch the entire ep (was there a cold opener?)

But I liked that Hal finally gets something that he needs to be comfortable and happy(a crown for his tooth) and he gives it up just to prove a point. And the bed thing was just creepy...In the one scene where they both were just lying there enjoying the bed talking aout the sheets......enough said...
 

Amigo22

Super Moderator
The episodes with "dream" clips confused me, an example being Vegas. They haven't always used a "split" thingy like they do when changing between settings & subplots to divide the reality and the dream (if you know what I mean) so it made it quite confusing.
 

yardgames

Retired Administrator
Amigo22 said:
The episodes with "dream" clips confused me, an example being Vegas. They haven't always used a "split" thingy like they do when changing between settings & subplots to divide the reality and the dream (if you know what I mean) so it made it quite confusing.
That's an interesting point. I think the idea is to blur the distinction between fantasy and reality. In the case of Vegas, we weren't exactly sure what was going on. It adds to the suspense and the depth of the plot.
 

tony_montana

Semper Fidelis
@yardgames-What in the world does "helter-skelter like" mean?(the only helter skelter Ive heard of is the Beatles song.):confused:
And about the mattress-maybe a cargo plane was delievering them to a warehouse and they accidently opened the cargo door and one the mattress fell out and..and....never mind.:D
 
Top