Modern Family: Spread Your Wings (7x11)

This episode contained one stand-out plot thread and two that were so-so. Let's take a look!

Cons:

The weakest thread of the night was Mitchell throwing a slumber party for Lily and her friends from her Vietnamese dance troupe. Jay comes over and teaches Mitchell that the goal of a sleepover is to exhaust everybody so they go to bed early. This plot thread intersects with Cam and Gloria's, as they enlist the girls' help to create their sauce that they're trying to finish in a rush. All the girls end up asleep before eight.

Now, the main reason I didn't like this plot thread is because it lacked focus. At first it seemed to be about Mitchell's inability to win over the parents of the other kids. But that was quickly abandoned in favor of Jay teaching Mitchell how to throw a proper slumber party. Mitchell didn't seem to have a problem with the kids being too rambunctious until Jay told him that it would be a problem, so that felt unbalanced. We got a scene of all of them dancing to a Jane Fonda work-out video, which tied in with the fact that Jay apparently feels like he needs to lose a few pounds. All of these different ideas might have made for a funny plot thread, but when put together it felt unfocused and crowded.

Meanwhile, Gloria is getting annoyed with Cam for commandeering their sauce-making business. The recipe is Gloria's, but Cam keeps butting in. They need a specific type of pepper for the sauce that can't be found in a store, so Manny helps them to sneak into the botanical gardens and steal some. In the end, Gloria confronts Cam over his behavior in taking over the sauce-making, and Cam ends up thanking Gloria for pushing him to achieve his own sauce-related dreams instead of piggy-backing off of hers.

This plot thread had a lot of individual moments that I found amusing, but the overall premise never did much for me. Again, it felt like there were too many ideas vying for attention. The three big obstacles for getting the sauce completed each could have been its own storyline. The peppers that they needed were quickly acquired, in a scene that could have been a lot funnier and more elaborate. The time crunch was solved by making a weird joke about Vietnamese kids on an assembly line, which I felt was in poor taste, and then the Cam vs. Gloria obstacle was solved because Gloria is really good at dumping people and making them do all the work. I don't know... there's just too much going on!

Pros:

But like I said, there were a lot of individually funny moments. I loved Manny's elaborate plan to get to the guarded peppers in the botanical gardens, juxtaposed with Cam and Gloria's direct and obvious method of actual extraction. I wish we could have seen more of this, in fact. It could have taken up a lot more room in the episode.

The wining plot thread of the night goes to the Dunphys. Claire, Haley, and Luke all hate living with the now-grown ducks, but Phil is still attached to them, refusing to let them leave the nest. When Phil goes off to visit Alex at school, Claire and the other kids use the opportunity to sneak the ducks out of the house. They try to abandon the ducks at the golf course, but at the last minute realize that Phil is attached to the ducks because they remind him of his children - one is an idiot who's always getting himself in to trouble, one is obsessed with herself, and one is really smart. Claire and the kids bring the ducks back home.

Meanwhile, Phil discovers that Alex isn't having such a good time with the social aspects of school. She wants to move back home and commute for the next semester. Phil initially tries to get her more jazzed about her social life, which involves hilarious antics in the school's robotic's lab. But Phil then realizes that his own experiences in college aren't going to transfer to Alex. If she wants to move off campus and back home, then it's her own choice. She's not the type of person to run away from a challenge, and she's always been good about knowing what's best for her. In the end, Alex decides to step out of her comfort zone and participate in the "Freshman Cannonball," a fun tradition for first-year students.

When Phil gets home, he learns that Claire, Luke, and Haley tried to get rid of the ducks but changed their minds. Phil realizes it's time to let them go free, and that he was holding on to them out of selfishness. The ducks fly off, and Phil receives a phone call from Alex so the two can just chat. Maybe Alex won't be so hasty in moving back home after all.

This plot thread was so strong that I pretty much don't care that the other two weren't all that great. It had a lot of emotional weight - the father/daughter relationship between Phil and Alex hasn't been explored very much over the years, and it worked really, really well here. I loved the moment when Phil explained his own college experience, but then told Alex that he trusted her to know what was best for her. That was really important - if I'm ever a parent, one of the mistakes I want to avoid is projecting how things felt for me onto my child. Just because you've already been through something doesn't mean you're an expert on how a different person will respond to it.

But then, on the flip side, it turns out that Phil was pretty much right about Alex. She was so disdainful of her classmates for all their partying, but really she just felt isolated. The cannonball thing was pretty funny. Everybody dresses up in prom outfits and jumps into the pool. What a cute tradition! When Alex called Phil at the end to talk to him, it felt like such a powerful, earned moment.

And then on the comedy side, you have the scene in the robotics lab. Phil is always so funny with his over-the-top enthusiasm and destructive antics. I also loved the running gag about the kids from Alex's school all being nerds. The nerdy guy from the robotics lab turned out to be the captain of the football team. And later, when Phil catches a football, the kids are impressed - "how did he do that?"

Claire's stuff with the ducks was also really great. It might have been a bit on the nose to have each of the ducks represent one of the kids, but it was oddly charming all the same. And when Phil let the ducks go at the end, it was really touching. Somehow, the sincerity of the emotions behind it made the cheesiness factor acceptable.

That's all I've got. I think the Dunphy plot thread was good enough that it cancelled out the negatives from the rest of the episode pretty well.

7.5/10