Cons:
This isn't really a flaw of this episode, but a general note... one of the things I love about Louise is that she's an agent of chaos but she always comes through when it matters. I've noticed a trend recently of her being a little more... responsible, end of the day, than you would expect? It was interesting to me that her role in this episode was to convince Tina to do the right thing, even though the wrong thing was causing so much chaos and making people act so wacky. You'd think maybe Louise would be into that, at least at first? And then maybe have a turn a little later? But she immediately was against all these shenanigans, which I thought was a little odd.
Pros:
I liked the subplot back at the restaurant a lot - basically, Teddy has been having Bob and Linda recount the plots of various horror movies to him, since he hasn't seen any of them. Linda ran out of movies to describe and just starts making up fake plots to movies she hasn't seen. Bob gets involved one day against his will, but then finds that he actually really loves the creative outlet! They get found out when Teddy actually goes to see one of the movies they've been describing. He's barely mad, though - turns out, he thinks their versions of the stories are better than the real thing!
I liked that this was a Bob vs. Linda competitive thing; often the joke is that Bob is a pushover or just has to stand there while Linda is a chaos agent, but here we see them both getting invested and going a bit wild about it.
The main plot features Tina's morning news show segment at school, and some drama with Mr. Frond's new video game diagnosis tool. Tina gets a lot of positive feedback about featuring the game, and when it turns out it's all a fraud, Tina is tempted to keep up the ruse for the sake of the positive attention on the show. I really liked Mr. Frond conspiring with the kids for his own ends, it's always funny to see his supposed scruples fail in the face of potential personal gain. The twist that it was Henry Haber making the game for him in secret was also pretty funny.
This show exists in this kind of timeless zone where these kids have all been the same age for the past fifteen years, but one thing I loved about how this episode played with that specifically is that Mr. Frond's game is like... extremely archaic, 2-bit graphics, the most basic shit imaginable, and the idea of children this age in 2024 being impressed by something like that when they have a bajillion cooler things on their smartphones that most of them probably would own by middle school if not sooner... I don't know. It just made me smile. This show plays fast and loose with the anachronisms and I like that.
Also, it was fun to see Tina getting a clean win in this episode. She's often the sad sack, but this time, she got success on her show, and then even when she chose to do the right thing, she still won in the end, as it's decided that her show will stay on the air! Her bad-ass moment where she tricks Mr. Frond on the air was such a triumph! She even got some extra time with Jimmy Jr. being open and emotional with her, during the chaos of everyone trying to live up to their game-assigned personalities.
That's all for this one!
8.5/10
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