Although it’s again light on Scrooge, this is a fun episode. It’s always entertaining to have Goldie pop up, but this time around, her main story is with someone other than Scrooge, which makes for an interesting change.
Louie has decided that Scrooge’s whole “honest work” way of earning money is a sucker’s game. Instead, he wants to learn the ways of the con under Goldie’s tutelage. At first, she wants nothing to do with a kid apprentice, but she changes her tune when she hears about Louie’s invitation to a birthday party for Doofus Drake, a tyrannical rich kid with more money than he knows what to do with. Meanwhile, Della and Huey play her favorite old video game, but she gets frustrated with Huey’s refusal to take risks.
We’ll start quickly with the B-plot, then swing back around to Louie and Goldie. Even though Della and Huey have certain traits in common, namely their affinity for the Junior Woodchuck handbook, she’s a lot for him, and their sensibilities tend to clash. In the video game, Della is eager to get questing and adventuring, while Huey is happy to tend a garden under a forcefield, racking up frillions of experience points that he’s too cautious to cash in. Della struggles to encourage her anxious son out of his comfort zone without scaring him.
Doofus Drake isn’t a favorite character of mine. Spoiled and demanding, he turned his own parents into his servants after becoming the sole inheritor of his late grandma’s fortune—fine enough for an antagonistic character, but he has some neurodivergent coding that feels meanspirited. For his birthday, he has goodie bags stuffed with gold and jewels, but he’s suspicious of grifters at every turn, and anyone who’s only in it for the goodie bags is dropped through a trapdoor.
This adds a high-stakes wrinkle to Louie and Goldie’s con. Goldie wants to get all the goodie bags, not just one, so she and Louie set out to expose all the other party attendees as frauds while simultaneously keeping Doofus’s suspicions off of them. This pits them against various unscrupulous adults like Mark Beaks and Glomgold, who’ve shown up with convenient children (or in Glomgold’s case, a puppet with a surly-kid attitude.) Can they keep one step ahead without drawing heat themselves?
Louie and Goldie make a fun team. Allison Janney is great as usual—at one point, she frankly informs Louie, “If I told you the whole plan up front, you’d never learn anything. Also, I don’t know yet.” At first, she views him as just the annoying kid who’s her in to the party, but over the course of pulling the con, Louie demonstrates his value to her. On the flip side, Louie is eager to learn all that Goldie has to teach him, but he comes to realize that a con artist might not have his best interests at heart.
It's another episode where Scrooge bookends the story, so there’s not much for David Tennant to do here. When Louie invites Goldie to the mansion, Scrooge senses a disturbance in the Force, as it were. There’s an amusing opening sequence of him poking around the mansion, trying to figure out what’s amiss. Naturally, the sight of his relations fighting some sort of ghost bear in one room and taking on a literal “tempest in a teapot” in another is all business as usual.
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