Another great episode. Every plot is well-executed, there are plenty of hilarious bits, and to top it off, it’s the biggest showing of the season so far for Andrew Rannells.
The class is on a field trip to the 9/11 museum but no one’s feeling very reverential. Half of our characters end up ditching when they reach the city – Nick and Andrew sneak off to meet up with Jessi, while Missy gets an opportunity to spend more time with one of her cousins at NYU, which gives her a chance to further explore her Blackness. Meanwhile, at the museum, Matthew decides to mess with Coach Steve when he realizes the coach doesn’t know what happened on 9/11.
There’s good stuff in each major plot here. In the Nick-Andrew-Jessi plot, I love everything about Jessi’s pretentious city boyfriend voiced by Sterling K. Brown, from Nick complaining about him being a poser (“What’s with all the stupid pins? There’s one that says ‘Vote’ and another that says ‘Anarchy,’ and like, don’t those cancel each other out?”) to Andrew’s obvious man crush on him (“Is that an accent I detect, or are you just British to see me?”) And amid the hilarity, it’s a good continuation of how Jessi is spiraling as she fights to avoid everything she’s dealing with right now. Also, even though we’ve of course seen Maury and Connie being Hormone Monsters to multiple kids on the show, this is the first time they’ve openly acknowledged that that can be tough on the Hormone Monsters, as a fight between Nick and Jessi leaves their mutual Hormone Monster Connie stuck in the middle.
Over the summer of 2020, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests, it was announced that Jenny Slate would be stepping down from voicing Missy, a choice I applauded. So, it surprised me to start the new season and realize that Slate was still in the role, and while I initially thought that maybe this season had already been in the can when they made the decision, I’m now thinking that the show is deliberately working to transition away from Slate. In episode 2 (Rannells-less, so I didn’t review it,) a visit to her dad’s family in Atlanta helped Missy to start digging deeper into her biracial identity, and that journey continues here. What’s more, there have been increasingly-explicit references in the show to the fact that Missy is voiced by a white actress, so it seems to me like they’re intentionally building up to a switch.
As for Missy’s plot today? The continuing discomfort of the voiceacting issues aside, it’s really good. We get to see DeVon sticking up for Missy and the two of them bonding as Black kids in a mostly-white class, and I really like seeing the dynamic of the differences in racial identity between the middle schoolers and the college students they hang out with in this episode. Plus, we look at code-switching through DeVon having an actual code switch on his arm, and he sings an awesome song about it – one line that was especially good was, “When you’re young and Black, / You get the knack / For putting white people at ease.”
Then, there’s Matthew and Coach Steve at the 9/11 museum. I mentioned last week that Matthew has been more bemused than vicious in his meanness this season, and while he’s definitely mean to Coach Steve here, I think it still fits the pattern, namely because he misguidedly thinks that what he’s doing is all in good fun. He’s not actively trying to be hurtful, like he sometimes has in the past, but that’s still what’s happening, so he ultimately has to reckon with that.
Due to the subject matter, the humor gets dark. When another character points out that what Matthew’s doing isn’t cool, he tries to argue, “I’m not making fun of 9/11. I’m making fun of Coach Steve, the 9/11 of people!”, but of course, that still doesn’t make it okay. One thing that’s interesting here is a fact that hit me shortly before Matthew brings it up in the episode: 9/11 happened before any of these kids were born (“What, am I supposed to care about Hurricane Katrina and Columbine too?” Matthew drolls.) While they should obviously still understand the severity of that event, it isn’t visceral for them in the way that it is for adults. I used to work in education, and I remember the year that a teacher observed that her current crop of students was likely to be the last ones old enough to have memories of 9/11 – it was striking to think about, and it’s similarly striking here.
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