While I wouldn’t quite call this a satisfying payoff to the cliffhanger from the previous excellent episode, I still enjoyed it a lot. It takes the story to some unexpected places, and I’m curious to see where things go in the season finale.
Still at the school sleepover, everyone is reeling from the events of the last episode. In an attempt to regain some of the fun he’d hoped the night would bring, Nick invents a new game: “Smooch or Share,” a combination of Spin the Bottle and Truth or Dare (but if you don’t follow through on your turn, the other players get to burn you with teacher coffee!) Meanwhile, Jessi continues to act out and Gina finds a surprising ally.
Things get messy in this episode, as you’d expect, and the Shame Wizard’s various machinations have the kids turning on their Hormone Monsters (which gets more interesting when you remember that the Monsters are just personifications of the kids’ own feelings and urges.) Lots of the kids feel crappy and alone, but they also start to find some glimmers of hope and solidarity in each other. I especially like the subplot with Gina and her new friend; I love the realization they come to that it’s actually “mean jerks [who] make [them] feel shitty,” not the act of being physical with a boy.
My favorite line is probably Maury saying of Jay, “This kid is a goddamn prodigy; I think he’s his own Hormone Monster!” but there’s a lot of good humor here. I get a kick out of Coach Steve telling the Shame Wizard they’re not supposed to say “enigma” anymore, and Lola has some really great lines. In general, I like how this season has been giving us a little more of the side characters. The “Devon is secretly an old man” jokes are hilarious to me, and I’ve appreciated Caleb (a student who’s likely ASD) being more incorporated into the show; while he’s still just a minor character who mostly pops up for punchlines, he’s treated as a student in the class that the other kids know and not just “that kid with the rolly backpack who needs a chart to recognize facial expressions.”
I’m still trying to decide what I think about what’s going on with Matthew in this episode. He has less screentime here than he’s had in the past couple of episodes, but his involvement is still as a character rather than a bitchy commentator. What he gets here feels a little all over the place. It doesn’t seem to follow directly from where he was in the last episode, which makes his characterization feel like a bit of an afterthought. That said, there’s an interesting development here that I didn’t expect; I won’t get into spoilers on it now, and I’m somewhat-cautiously waiting to see what happens next, but I’m ready to see where it goes.
Overall, I think Andrew Rannells has done a nice job threading the needle with his voice work over these last few episodes. Since Matthew’s character is pretty much entirely founded on superior retorts and really mean quips, he’s inevitably going to feel different (and less funny) during a mini-arc designed to give him more depth. The writing on this storyline hasn’t always felt consistent, but Rannells’s performance hints at the links between Matthew’s catty posturing and his more vulnerable insecurities.
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