Bob's Burgers: Les Lizárdables (16x08)

The rare Gene-centric episode, I love it!

Cons: 

To be honest, I felt a little let down by the whole subplot in this one. Linda's sister Gayle comes to visit, and brings her cats, which makes Bob's allergies act up. Also, Gayle is using Tina's room for massages, and the family thinks she's a sex worker? But then she isn't? Obviously? It felt like the setups didn't have punchlines that actually landed in any sort of significant way. I usually love a visit from Gayle, but this one just maybe didn't go hard enough.

Pros:

That said, I did love Teddy's utter despair at the fact that Bob sneezed on his burger lol. "This is all I have!!"

The main plot features Gene and Courtney basically adopting a lizard together, but Courtney does all the hard work of taking care of him while Gene just wants to be there for the fun part. Then, when Courtney drops the lizard off for Gene to handle, Gene messes up and leaves the door open, leading to a close call with Gayle's cats.

Intersecting with this story is Frond's effort to create a new mediation initiative in the school, to boost his own reputation. He ends up forcing a solution on Gene and Courtney as they basically fight for custody over this lizard. In the end, Gene's research on the species pays off and he realizes that their pet is hitting puberty and needs to be released into the wild.

This was a lot of fun shenanigans with the kids. I loved that all three Belchers got in trouble for messing around and spraying each other with milk during lunch, I love that Tina is sort of in on not caring about doing the right thing, here. The show resists having her be the "good girl" to offset Louise's rebelliousness and I think that's great.

Obviously the stuff with Courtney and Gene was imitating a co-parenting situation, with Courtney being frustrated with Gene's lack of effort, and a scene where she foists the kid on him without warning and he has to step up, his crisis about not being a good lizard dad, then Courtney wanting to keep the kid away from him because she can't trust him... the custody battle scene with Frond... it was all fun stuff. But I appreciated the way Gene and Courtney still felt like kids to me throughout it all? It never tipped over into too much of a parody, where the only joke is that kids are doing things like adults would.

And I thought it was sweet, the way Gene was legitimately in crisis over this and tried to find out what to do to help this poor helpless creature. Having the wisdom to let him go in the end was also very lovely.

So that's what I've got for this one! Maybe a little lackluster in spots, but I loved the focus on Gene, he needs more of a spotlight sometimes!

7.5/10