The Book of Rannells: Big Mouth: Season 3, Episode 9 – “The ASSes” (2019)

Now that season 4 of Black Monday is over, it's finally back to season 3 of Big Mouth! Although enjoyable, this is kind of a “regular” episode for me. Some great jokes, some good content, but it doesn’t go out of its way to be really impressive in the way that Big Mouth often is.

All of the kids are gearing up for the arrival of the ASSes, their annual standardized test with a predictably-crude acronym (it allows for gags such as signs at school talking about the “BIG ASS TEST” or characters saying things like, “I’m gonna blow the ASSes”/“If I fuck up my ASSes…”) Jay has been newly-prescribed Adderall, and he discovers the lucrative business of selling his pills as a “study drug.”

There are some good themes here. I like the looming specter of the returning Depression Kitty as Jessi’s anxiety increases, and I enjoy seeing Missy’s evolving feelings, going from confidence at being the smartest girl in the grade to worrying about how she’ll measure up if all the kids around her are “doping.”

The depiction of Adderall in everyone’s brains is really well-done, and I especially like the contrast between Jay’s brain and the other kids. Best lines include Jay’s declaration that he’s “the wolf of Walgreens” and, in reaction to the shock of the other kids at a bizarre turn of events, Caleb explaining, “If this were a shared hallucination, the animation style would be different.” I also love a climactic confrontation at the end, featuring a lot of hilariously-dramatic confessions and DeVon deftly avoiding any suspicion.

The episode has hardly any Andrew Rannells at all, which is always a bummer. Matthew only appears in one scene and only has one line, even if it’s a funny one. Now, I’m not saying that’s the reason why this episode is more good than great, but it doesn’t help.

 

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More new promos, nothing too noteworthy in terms of stuff we haven’t seen before. It’s not specific in either of these, but I like the hints in various promos that we’re going to get a more compelling relationship between Shang-Chi and Wenwu than purely Wenwu being the “evil dad.” Obviously, there’s plenty of evidence that he’s a bad guy, and the film is clearly going to be building to an epic fight between the two, but I’m really interested in the emotion of the shot I included above, and I love the detail that we’ve seen multiple flashback shots of Wenwu holding young Shang-Chi’s hand when he was a kid. So, while Shang-Chi’s rise as a hero is definitely going to involve taking his dad out, there’s some form of love somewhere in there too, and that’s going to make it harder for him.