Modern Family: The Day Alex Left for College (7x02)

I don't know if I liked this episode all that much. It wasn't in-your-face horrible or anything, but I felt like the themes were all over the place. Too many plot threads to juggle, not enough focus on what should have mattered. Let's get started.

Cons:

I'm going to briefly mention the list of the different plot threads here, so you can see my main complaint: this episode was too crowded, and too disconnected.

- Alex leaves for college a day early so she can avoid the hassle of messy goodbyes. Phil and Claire are shocked and sad. Haley drives Alex, where they meet her annoying roommate. Haley tells Alex that she should give her roommate a chance, because sometimes it's nice to have somebody be your cheerleader.

- Phil tries to get Luke interested in showing a house, but Luke seems more interested in hanging out with his hipster friends. In the end, Phil lets him go off with his friends. Luke proves he still cares by rescuing some duck eggs for he and his dad to look after. Claire uses this as an excuse to call Alex and ask her all about caring for duck eggs.

- Cam and Mitchell's lives have become very chaotic. They are renting out the place upstairs, and Mitchell has been working from home helping people with executing the wills of departed family members. In all the chaos, they also have to make it to Lily's soccer game. Mitchell is thrust into the position of coach when the regular coach can't show up, but he sucks at it. Cam is ejected from the game, but he talks Mitchell through his coaching over the phone, and Lily's team wins!

- Meanwhile, Gloria, Jay, Manny, little Joe, and Claire all try and get out of going to the game. They invent an excuse that Jay has shot himself in the foot, but then Gloria gets out a pellet gun and actually shoots him in the foot to make the excuse valid. In the end the family comes up with the idea to give each adult a free pass to miss out on one kid-related thing a year.

So... pretty much any one of these plot threads could have held its own as a full episode. Most of the family was involved with the Lily's soccer game plot, and I definitely felt like that was the strongest. But it took up so much time that Alex leaving was pretty much a footnote, and Phil and Luke's little plot thread got totally lost in the shuffle.

The duck egg thing was too cheesy, as were Phil's musing on how he needed to let Luke go. It might have been an interesting thing to do if it had been compared more strongly with Alex leaving, but it wasn't. Alex and Haley's scene in the dorm room where they share a hug would have been quite sweet, if it wasn't so confusing. Haley says that she knows what it's like to have a younger girl hero-worship her, and how that can be really comforting. She's asking Alex to give her fifteen-year-old roommate a chance. But wait... do we really think that Alex ever worshipped Haley? It seems like they've never gotten along, even when they were younger.

The biggest problem here is that we barely got to explore Phil, Claire, and even Luke's reactions to Alex going to college. That could have been the focus of a whole different episode. The soccer game plot thread, with Cam and Mitchell's crazy lives at the center, was a really strong focal point, but it meant that poor Alex's goodbye episode was pretty much lost.

Pros:

As I think I've already made clear, I liked the Cam/Mitchell plot thread the best. Lots of chaotic action and funny, quippy moments here. I loved the scenes when the renters from upstairs constantly interrupted Mitchell when he was conversing with grieving family members about the wills of their partners or parents or what have you. There were constant interruptions. My favorite is when one of the tenants was disgruntled about how cold the room upstairs was. She says something along the lines of: "do you know what it's like to wake up in the morning with your husband freezing cold beside you?" The grieving widow with Mitchell says "yes!" and bursts into tears.

Mitchell was a grossly incompetent coach - I loved when one of the mothers of the girls came and pulled the whistle off of his neck, declaring herself the new coach. And then there was Cam, standing across the way in the parking lot with a pair of binoculars, giving Mitchell his instructions from afar. So funny!

The flipside of this plot thread was Jay and his family, along with Claire, hanging out by the pool and trying to find an excuse not to go to Lily's game. The best moment of the whole episode was Gloria "accidentally" shooting Jay in the foot, and then demonstrating for the camera that she's a perfect shot by taking down a sippy cup with her back turned. Gloria is the best!

The little boy they've got to play Joe is quite cute. It's kind of hard to understand him, but did he call Jay "Jay" instead of "Dad"? That's a little weird! In any case, it was funny how he was the one to out Gloria for shooting Jay when they finally end up at the soccer game.

I liked the weird house that Phil and Luke were showing, even if this plot thread didn't go much of anywhere. Alex's new crazy roommate was awesome, but, again, we didn't really have enough time to flesh out this scenario. Hopefully we'll get more of her later on.

So... yeah. Not a particularly strong episode, if only because they should have given the good stuff room to breathe, and separated some of this out into other episodes.

7/10