Review: “Blockheads,” Arrested Development season 4, episode 15

Serving as the final installment of a 15-episode swirl of twists, plot-threads and exciting glimpses of…oh, to hell with it. I can’t even finish that sentence as a joke.

Arrested Development season four was a mess. “Blockheads” is a mess. It might have seemed like somewhat less of a mess if it wasn’t the final episode, but as it stands its almost overt refusal to offer closure to even one of this season’s frustratingly aimless storylines makes it seem that much worse.

There’s not much plot going on here, aside from the fact that Michael and George Michael realize they’re dating the same woman (which happens, of course, in the very last scene, because if we saw anything beyond that it might have taken some narrative effort), so I guess I might as well talk about Isla Fisher — who I’m not sure I’ve even mentioned yet — and the season as a whole.

Talking about Isla Fisher will be easy, because there’s not much to say. Like all of the characters invented for season four, there’s nothing to hers. At least in this case, however, they don’t attempt to mask “nothing” with cartoony shenanigans. Come to think of it, I guess they figured the fact that she’s an exceptionally beautiful woman would hide it enough…and while that’s not particularly good writing it does at least manage to avoid being particularly bad, which qualifies as an accomplishment here.

When compared to Michael’s previous romantic interests, though, it’s immensely lazy. We’ve seen him canoodling with Charlize Theron, Jill Ritchie, Christine Taylor, Heather Graham and Julia Louis-Dreyfus* and while they’re all very attractive women, that never stood in the way of developing them as characters. They all managed to still feel human, with quirks and charms of their own. Isla Fisher as Rebel Alley is just an attractive red-head. Oh, and she wants men more when they are mean to her, which is a character trait that would have been seen as embarrassingly sexist for a writing staff back in 1958. In 2013 it just feels like the setup to an easy subversion that never comes.

They toy with her hard-partying lifestyle a bit, but it never really lands. Every so often we cut to her having to appear in a PSA, and those are for the most part pretty funny, but it would be nice if this had something to do with her character rather than serving as an irrelevant running gag.

I can’t say much bad about Rebel Alley, but considering how much time we spend with her there’s no excuse for her character to be stuck in neutral the entire time. We need to see something from her, unless she’s just a receptacle for Michael and his son to cum into at different times, and the more I think about it the more I realize that’s actually all she is.

So, yeah. Better than China Garden, Dr. Norman and the Asian Women Housewife Reality Show Prisoner Shits, not as good as Heart-Fire or Kristen Wiig as young Lucille.

And that’s it. George Michael learns that his father has been porking his girlfriend (or vice versa) and punches him in the face, then the credits roll. The punch is a nice, shocking moment, but in retrospect it pales in comparison to Maeby calling her mother a whore. Maybe it’s just me, but that felt like a much “truer” punch in the face…it’s a word that would hurt Lindsay no matter how accurate it was, and it’s something that Maeby’s thought for a long time and has only now brought herself to articulate. In comparison, the physical punch between George Michael and his father was just a reaction…a heated moment with a physical, isolated punctuation. It’s not bad, but there’s not as much to it.

It also works better in Maeby’s case because it’s not the end of anybody’s episode or storyline. In George Michael’s case it’s both, which doesn’t leave any room to do anything with it. Maeby’s punch to the face is metaphorical, but it lingers, and it stings. George Michael’s just leads into some silly song playing over the credits. Ho hum.

I guess we can also talk about how hilarious season four thinks it is when adults have sex with minors, as it’s a major component of three stories this season (Tobais, Maeby and George Michael) and a tangential one for at least two others (as GOB and Michael supply the homes for the sex offenders).

I think it worked in the Maeby episode, for the reasons I outlined there (and also the fact that Alia Shawkat can evidently sell anything you give her), and I at least see what they were trying to do with Tobias, but with George Michael it feels exceptionally cheap, and watching a pile of shirtless men tackle him on the lawn to passively grope his genitals isn’t awkwardly funny…it’s just awkward.

It also keeps up the tradition of the second episodes each character gets being worse than the first, as George Michael’s first episode was a coming-of-age character sketch that worked, overall, quite well, and this one can’t think of anything to do but surround him with slavering pedophiles who hang around outside his window and masturbate.

As much as this season did right, I’m going to remember it most for the one thing it did that I never expected: it took away all desire I have to see season five.

I no longer care about the show. At the end of season three I felt sad that there was still obviously so much more for these characters to do. Now, however, that I actually have a season four I’m sad because the things the characters are doing are things I have no interest in watching them do.

Because nothing was resolved in season four — and we spent 15 episodes wrapping up a relatively clean ending in season three — we can get a pretty good idea of the kinds of things season five will be about, and I don’t care to see any of them.

We’ll learn more about the wall, which was apparently built but who knows. We’ll talk more about the land it’s built on, and who it belongs to. We’ll check in with Marky Bark and his face blindness, and what he’s up to now that he blew up a boat. We’ll hear something about DeBrie. Tobias is a sex offender and we’ll have to talk more about his Fantastic Four play. We’ll have more tedious back and forth with GOB and Tony Wonder. Sally Sitwell will continue her transformation into Snidely Whiplash. Buster is going to jail, or something, where his robot hand will do hilarious things in the shower. George Sr. has low testosterone and dresses like a woman. Michael and George Michael will have to deal with the fact that they’ve both been dating Generic Woman #4. Maeby is also a sex offender. Lucille 2 is dead or missing or who cares. Herbert Love is in a coma. Lindsay may or may not run in Love’s place, and Sally may or may not run in Lucille 2’s place. Sudden Valley is a haven for kiddie rapists. And so on and so on and so on, and as the pile grows, I realize more and more that…

…I just don’t care. I really don’t.

I don’t.

None of this matters to me, but with 15 episodes of dancing around and through all of this crap, I can tell it’s supposed to. I came out of the other end just thankful that it was over. And I guess there’s going to be a season five, and I guess that’s a good thing for the people who get their paychecks from this show, but it’s not something I’m even interested in watching.

I wish I wanted to see it. I wish I was excited. I wish I cared.

But I don’t. I’m not, and I don’t.

As I said before, if this show didn’t have the Arrested Development brand on it, I never would have sat through the entire thing. But I have, and the last thing I want is to see more of it.

Maybe season five will be brilliant. I don’t know. Going by what a lot of other sites are writing about season four, this is supposed to be brilliant too.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m a stick in the mud. Maybe Tobias in a Thing costume and Marky Bark covered in blue paint and China Garden screaming in the desert are right up there with anything else the show has ever done, and I’m just stubbornly refusing to admit it.

Who knows. All I know is that I no longer care. If it took 15 episodes to explain what happened after the Queen Mary, it’ll probably take 150 to dig us back out of this mess. And frankly, I just don’t have the patience for that.

Arrested Development made this bed. It’s not my responsibility to lie in it.

Forgive me for sitting the next one out.

Episode 15: “Blockheads”
Central Character: George Michael
Other Family Appearances: Michael, GOB, Maeby, George Sr., Lucille, Buster
Most Clumsy Reference to Original Run: Nothing that I noticed. I assume there was a deleted scene in which Ron Howard and Brian Grazer negotiate the rights to Mr. Bananagrabber.
Scene That Most Needed Tightening: OH GOOD MORE PHONE TAG AND DORM VOTING
Best Line / Exchange:

MICHAEL: You want this as much as I do. As much as I want this extension. Two different thises.

—-
* Maybe not everyone’s cup of tea, I know, but I’d definitely say she’s a very attractive woman. Also, in the course of double-checking the spelling of her name I learned she’s 52 years old. Fifty-two! Puttin’ women half her age to shame. (Call me, Julia.)

Review: “Off the Hook,” Arrested Development season 4, episode 14

The previous two episodes, which centered around Maeby and George Michael, were great and very good, respectively. They represent exactly the late-season upswing I had been hoping for, and I’m overall quite happy with them. And there’s no reason “Off the Hook” couldn’t have been just as good. Instead, though, it’s a reversion to the bottom-rung material that’s hung like a smothering cloud over season four. Those two episodes were flukes, and “Off the Hook” wants to make sure we know it.

By the way, I’m not just saying that this episode could have been as strong for rhetorical purposes. Buster, as a character, was very much in the same boat as Maeby and George Michael; he lives in the shadow of a parent, and while the fact that he’s an adult makes that somewhat more tragic, it was otherwise a great complement to the situations of the actual kids.

Maeby lives under parents who don’t notice her, George Michael lives under a parent who doesn’t hear him, and Buster lives under a mother who actively holds him down. And just as the previous two episodes explored how those children grow up when separated from that defining dynamic, Buster’s can do the same. The plot has already taken Lucille from him, so what now? Where does he go? What does he do?

Almost any other answer to that question would be more interesting than what we got, which is an episode that uses Buster as a hook (ahem) upon which to hang both the Love campaign and Lucille 2 murder-mystery aspects of the season…which we might as well start referring to for simplicity’s sake as the two least interesting turds on this mountain of shit.

Buster’s always been a fascinating character, mainly because the show never quite knew what to do with him. I don’t offer that up as a criticism, but rather an endorsement. Even without a clear character trajectory, Tony Hale managed to bring a level of naive sincerity to the character that made him at once the most likeable and most fucked-up Bluth. He rarely got episodes of his own, and was just as rarely an integral part of somebody else’s. That’s why “Off the Hook” has more or less carte blanche; we have no expectations. A Buster episode can be anything, so all they really need to do is make it funny.

So what do they do? Replace the hook with a giant robot hand that plays music and breaks things. Great character work, boys.

This is the problem I’ve had with Arrested Development all season; for one reason or another, the writers seem to think that puns and pratfalls define their characters…and that’s absolutely false. Audiences responded to Arrested Development for exactly the opposite reason: these were characters in spite of those things…not because of them.

Did we like GOB because he was a deluded, conflicted charmer, or because he chased people around with bees and had buttsex with men because lol buttsex? Did we like Lucille because she was an icy, domineering presence or because she wrote songs for comic-book musicals and tussled with offensive Asian stereotypes?

Season four not only takes the laziest route through these episodes, but it also takes the most irrelevant. Consider Buster’s hand. Yes, the fact that he gets a robot hand is true to the character in the sense that in season two he also had his hand replaced by something, but isn’t that the most superficial connection imaginable? It’s literally skin deep.

What does this new hand say about him? I could write pages about what the hook said about him, both specifically and in more general terms about the tragedy of a missing hand being inflicted upon the already tragic Buster. It was funny, and it had resonance.

The robot hand has neither. Buster absent-mindedly attempting to rub Oscar’s shoulders with a hook is funny, and it taps into character work going all the way back to the first episode. Buster standing in the kitchen while his robot hand malfunctions and plays silly music isn’t funny, and taps into absolutely nothing.

The writers then knew what to do with a hook, and that’s why they did it. The writers now know nothing of what to do with the robot hand, and they do it anyway. That’s the season four difference.

Seeing Buster at the start of the episode with Ophelia Love is a great beginning, mainly because of the good will engendered by the previous Buster relationships we’ve seen…not the least of which was with Lucille 2, which was always such a tragically perfect pairing in itself. We have every opportunity to trod interesting ground here, but it goes nowhere. Ophelia falls for him, then doesn’t want him, then the episode ends. And Gene Parmesan is back because I guess Martin Mull was free for another day of shooting and they didn’t want to waste him.

Of course I’m cheating slightly, because the Ophelia thing does tap into one aspect of Buster’s personality: his need to be mothered. This is something the episode toys with, which is great. What’s not great is that it only toys with it, and never bothers to explore it. We never get anything deeper than Buster repeatedly stating outright that he wants to be mothered. I know I’ve used this comparison already, but the more I think about it the more I really do believe that season four of Arrested Development is exactly what the Robot Devil sees in his nightmares.

That’s not character work, any more than Dickens making Scrooge say, “I’m such a mean old man, and so stingy, and I won’t change my ways until some ghosts come and make me” would qualify as character work. That’s just characters explaining, and in a season that already relies far too heavily on a narrator to do exactly that, it’s completely pointless. It doesn’t suggest an understanding of the character at all…it suggests that the writers reminded themselves of who the characters were by reading a paragraph-long bio on Wikipedia.

The episode ends, of course, with something that has genuinely nothing to do with anything we’ve been watching for the past half hour: Buster finding the “dead” body of Lucille 2 on the staircar. Huzzah.

It has nothing to do with the story we’ve just been told, which is bizarre, because you’d think showing the “dead” body of a major character would be…y’know…worth building up to, or something.

I really do believe they dropped the ball substantially with this mystery aspect of the plot. For starters, I don’t care about it…but here’s why I don’t care about it: the season doesn’t convince me I should care about it.

Over the course of 15 episodes we only get a handful of mentions of Lucille 2’s death or disappearance (it’s the latter, of course, but we might as well play along), and most of them are exactly that: mentions. I think we spend more time with the fuckin’ ostrich.

So season four doesn’t even seem to be interested in her death itself. Why should I? Lucille 2’s fate is a shocking moment, but it’s shocking mainly for just how clumsily it’s revealed. This isn’t clever, this isn’t interesting…this is just there. Here’s a character, here she is lying in some blood (it’s not, of course, but we might as well play along), here’s George Sr. dressed as a woman talking to the cops. Great stuff!

The best comparison point for this is probably the Rita arc in season three. While it wasn’t overtly positioned as a mystery the way this Lucille 2 crap is, it followed the general template: we get a sense there’s something strange afoot, we’re led to believe it’s one thing, all the while hints are dropped as to the truth, and we arrive, at last, at a revelation that causes certain details and moments to play differently in retrospect. The mystery is solved, and when rewatching we can pick up on new things for ourselves, and hear the same old dialogue in new ways. It’s great; Michael’s a terrible detective figure and we’re likely to arrive at the conclusion ahead of him, but that doesn’t make it any less fun.

Here’s the template the Lucille 2 mystery follows over the course of season four: nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, she’s missing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, DEAD BODY IN SOME BLOOD, nothing, nothing.

Like everything else, it’s just a thing that happens. It has nothing to do with the character, or any of the characters, at all.

Maybe she got an attack of vertigo and fell over. Maybe Gene Parmesan went insane and slit her up with that knife he bought for no reason a few episodes ago. Maybe GOB put a Tony Wonder mask on her and anally fucked her to death.

Whatever happened, I don’t care. Neither do the writers, and neither does the episode I just saw that climaxed (in the loosest possible sense of that word) with her unconscious body lying on the staircar.

Here’s what a mystery is: a story told in tantalizing and well-layed fragments that eventually resolves itself into a clearer picture for the audience and, often, the characters involved.

Here’s what a mystery is not: a cheap flash of an old woman in some blood, and the assumption that someone gives a shit.

Because we don’t.

You’re killing me, Buster.

Episode 14: “Off the Hook”
Central Character: Buster
Other Family Appearances: Lucille, Michael, Tobias
Most Clumsy Reference to Original Run: The literal doctor.
Scene That Most Needed Tightening: Buster falling out of his chair and the Army treating it like an actual plane crash. I’d like to say it sounds funnier than it is, but…you know.
Best Line / Exchange:

BUSTER: Well, they said the miniaturization comes later. I mean you remember how big your first cell phone was!
LUCILLE: That was a phone. This looks like you’re pointing to a place that buys your gold.

Review: “It Gets Better,” Arrested Development season 4, episode 13

“It Gets Better” really does live up to its name, serving as the second very good episode in a row, right after “Señoritis,” at a point when the season is running short on chances for redemption.

Michael Cera’s obviously been busy enough in the Arrested Development downtime to hone his comedic chops, and fans of the show get a big payoff here as his focal episode manages to be funny, painful, and surprisingly insightful. It works as a character sketch and it also works as an exploration of how a young man finds his identity. It may also double as a sort of origin story, but we’ll get into that in a bit.

It’s not quite on the level of “Señoritis,” though that’s mainly down to structural differences. Whereas that episode told a more or less complete story, “It Gets Better” doesn’t manage to wind itself to a conclusion. We just get a shot of Michael and Ron Howard hanging out next to a photo booth and that qualifies as an ending only because the “On the next…” title card follows it. Which is a shame, because “It Gets Better” was heading in a very interesting direction by that point, and it would have been nice if the episode had the courage to see its own story through.

George Michael’s always been a great character, and one of the things Arrested Development always did so well was allowing its characters room to grow. That sort of thing is easier to handle with the adult characters, as a simple change in occupation or a new relationship is enough to shake things up, but for the kids it’s a little different. Their lives change much more rapidly — and the aging of the actors is much more apparent — so the shakeups need to be a little more severe if anything’s going to qualify as growth.

So what we get here is a great little episode that shows us exactly that. George Michael goes off to college, and on behalf of every socially-retarded young man who did the same thing before him, let me say that his transition from insecure boy to awkward man is absolutely perfect.

College is perhaps the one time in everybody’s life where we fit. That’s not because we have any more to offer at that point than at any other time in our lives, but rather because it’s such a broad experience. You can immerse yourself in studies, sports, girls, boys, drinking, drugs, sex, road trips, video games, music, theater or anything else you like. Absolutely every possible interest you might have is covered; there’s always somebody there waiting to share it with you.

And so your confidence grows. You might have felt like the only sane person in your town (or family), but you meet like-minded individuals. People laugh at your jokes. Someone thinks you’re cute. You get along with a particular professor. You feel, for once, like a complete human being. And all of a sudden, whatever life you had before college? It just feels so empty.

Which is George Michael’s arc in a nutshell. At UCI he falls in love, has his heart broken, makes a friend, is betrayed, makes amends, and experiments time and again with who he is. A new beverage with breakfast, some facial hair, a different shirt before a girl comes over. It’s a character becoming human.

We blow through the first three years of his college career, touching upon all of the expected rites of passage along the way, but things slow down for us exactly when they do for him: when his father moves into the dorm during senior year. Suddenly he’s just a boy again. That glorious, temporary new world gets snatched away from George Michael one year too soon.

So far, so excellent. And there really isn’t much to complain about here at all, apart from the fact that the narrative chooses to fray and unravel rather than lead us anywhere of merit. We get some nice toying with the idea that George Michael becomes more like his father the more he tries to distance himself from the man, but it’s a little too obvious (and is spelled out explicitly at various times) so there’s little joy in connecting those dots for ourselves.

Oh well. I’ll trade a solid plot trajectory (not that we really had one in the first place this season) for a great piece of character work any day, and that’s what “It Gets Better” is. It’s a too-brief moment of personal triumph for George Michael, and an ultimate reminder that the real world is always there, just around the corner, waiting to take it all away from you again.

I guess I do have to mention that we see George Michael’s mother for the first (and so far only) time in this episode, in some archival footage. The idea is nice, but I’m not sure I buy that Michael would allow his infant son to share a crib with a painfully hot, sharp metal box…Bluth Company product or not.

Also, as long as we’re on the subject, abrupt editing of the Cornballer infomercial can’t disguise the fact that at one point we used to put Jeffrey Tambor in a wig to play a younger version of himself, and that Seth Rogen with a mustache is really no substitute for that.

The young Barry on the other hand? That’s Henry Winkler’s actual son, and that’s spot-on perfect.

Anyway, we move on to the final two episodes now…and there’s absolutely no chance you’ll see the phrase “spot-on perfect” again.

Episode 13: “It Gets Better”
Central Character: George Michael
Other Family Appearances: Michael, Maeby
Most Clumsy Reference to Original Run: “Stay on top of her. You may need to ride her pretty hard.”
Scene That Most Needed Tightening: The reprise of the back and forth messages between Michael and George Michael, which not only goes on too long but almost completely dulls the emotional impact that the scene had originally earned.
Best Line / Exchange:

GEORGE MICHAEL: Boom! And that’s what we call only being behind by three.

Review: “Senoritis,” Arrested Development season 4, episode 12

Not a moment too soon — arguably around ten episodes too late — something genuinely incredible happens: we get a truly great episode of Arrested Development season four.

If there was ever any doubt that Alia Shawkat was one of this show’s greatest assets (and seriously, if there was any, you and I need to have a serious talk), “Señoritis” should dispel that immediately.

In fact, between this episode and the next (“It Gets Better”) I really started to hope that the concluding episodes of the season would retroactively make what came earlier play that much better. They’re both very good, though I think this one edges “It Gets Better” out, and particularly in this case it does a great job of filling in gaps and layering new details onto what we’ve already seen.

Sadly, as with just about anything good in season four, it’s an exception. But it’s an exception I will happily take, and it’s the one episode from this mess that I think might be able to stand next to the classic years.

“Señoritis” reveals that even though we haven’t seen much of Maeby, she’s been in the background the entire time, pulling strings and orchestrating (knowingly or not) much of what’s been happening to the rest of the family. This is both welcome from a narrative standpoint and absolutely true to the nature of the character.

The Bluths can be divided fairly evenly into three groups. There are the Leaders, who tend to set the direction that others will take (Lucille, Michael and Maeby); the Followers, who will go along with whomever appears to be in charge at the time (George Sr., Buster and George Michael); and the Bystanders, who won’t do much of anything unless it’s forced upon them (Lindsay, Tobias and GOB).

Maeby is a doer, and as much as what she does might be self-destructive — as evidenced here by continually re-enrolling in high school, backing a non-existent company and sleeping with an underaged boy — it’s always pro-active. Maeby may be the architect of her own misfortune, but in a season so aimless it’s positively thrilling to see somebody grab things with both hands and set a course of her own…even if that course is directly into the ground.

I love Maeby. I’d rank her right up there with Lisa Simpson as one of my all-time favorite female characters on television, and while I’m sorry we didn’t see much of her this season, that might be for the best. I came out of “Señoritis” wishing Maeby got a second episode (rather than, say, Tobias or George Sr.) but the way things have gone episode two would probably have been about Maeby traveling through time with a wise-cracking kangaroo so I’m not losing sleep over it.

The half hour or so that we do spend with her is so strong that it almost takes deliberate effort to notice why: Alia Shawkat herself. While the episode feels less sloppy and better written, the more I think about it the more I think we can actually attribute that to the actress herself, who simply takes command of the material in a way that her elder co-stars do not.

“The Netflick” isn’t a funny joke…mispronouncing “heiress” isn’t a funny joke…knocking a chair over at the end of a board meeting isn’t a funny joke. None of that would play on paper, and most actors wouldn’t know what to do with it. In Shawkat’s hands, however, these moments are hilarious. She’s evolved over the years from being an underutilized player to a driving comic force, and seeing her leap to the fore this late in the season with such a strong presence is extremely rewarding.

Her speech at The Opie Awards, it has to be said, is the single funniest sequence in the entire batch of episodes, and again that’s all down to the woman behind it. There’s nothing funnier than Maeby’s overconfident, profane screed (bookended by a perfect Kirk Cameron joke and a spot-on observational gag about the rigid structure of award shows) and it belongs on a highlight reel right between Lucille shrieking at Gene Parmesan and Michael reacting to the Mayon-egg.

I could pick things apart here, I’m sure, but as I mentioned in a previous review I’m only doing that when I’m not laughing. If I’m laughing, the flaws don’t matter. They smooth themselves over in service of the experience, and I’m happy to let that happen. It’s only when I’m not laughing that my mind wanders, and not once in any of the times I’ve viewed “Señoritis” has my mind wandered. That’s saying a lot.

It is worth mentioning though that as much as the episode paints Maeby into scenes we’ve already encountered, it’s really the small stuff that resonates most. While the “biggest” reveal is probably that she posed as her mother’s shaman in India, far more rewarding are the simpler details, like Maeby squawking like a bird just off camera when she’s caught by surprise. It’s not a problem, but just an observation…and again further reinforcement of the fact that Alia Shawkat works wonders with the smallest moments.

It’s probably also worth discussing the ending. While the episode (rightly) shows Maeby facing a very large consequence for sleeping with a minor, I do think it plays differently to the audience than it would have if the genders were flipped. I think Hurwitz and co. actually have some fun with this, as Maeby herself shrugs it off and she says she’ll be fine…whereas I think that would be a lot less funny if it were George Michael saying the same thing about sleeping with a high schooler, or Tobias after actually having done what that entrapment show believed he wanted to do.

There’s a double standard at work there, and I like that Maeby’s shrug is so obvious that it can’t help but also play as an observation of that imbalance. It’s a great moment that makes you laugh, and then very quickly reconsider that laughter. (Just as Maeby very quickly, in “episode time” at least, reconsiders that shrug.)

I like “Señoritis.” And — spoilerzz — I like “It Gets Better.” As down as I’ve been on season four, I really feel as though there are about five or six great episodes’ worth of material here. In most cases it would require a lot of whittling to find the gold, but “Señoritis” arrives fully formed. Much like the character of Maeby herself, who has the singular distinction of making it out of this clusterfuck unscathed.

I salute you.

Episode 12: “Señoritis”
Central Character: Maeby
Other Family Appearances: George Michael, Lindsay, Tobias, Michael
Most Clumsy Reference to Original Run: Nothing! This was actually a really good episode.
Scene That Most Needed Tightening: Detailed explanation of how George Michael kisses…though admittedly that’s the joke.
Best Line / Exchange:

KITTY: Guess what!?
MAEBY: What?
KITTY: I’ll just tell you because I feel like we’ll be here forever and I have a meeting.