*Episode premise spoilers.*
Okay, wow. There’s gonna be thoughts on this one.
The penultimate episode of the season really hits for me, but it’s also the sort of episode where I find one of the plots so good that the others have a hard time holding my interest, through no real fault of their own. Let’s get into it.
Caleb is preparing for his first day of high school when he experiences a crisis: the handle on his wheely backpack breaks. He makes a plan to brave the mall to get an exact replacement, and Matthew comes along to help (in exchange for Caleb’s “brutal honesty” in helping him pick out his new high school look.) Jessi and Missy are also at the mall, but their back-to-school shopping is disrupted by Missy’s growing anxiety about starting high school. Meanwhile, Nick, Andrew, and Jay are having a “last week of summer” sleepover, where Andrew frets over the upperclassman who’s already promised to kill him on the first day of school.
We’ll start with the subplots. As I said, there’s nothing really wrong with them, I’m just too into the main storyline to really focus on them. Missy’s litany of fears about high school are great: “What if the cafeteria only takes Bitcoin? What if your English teacher asks you to read his novel? What if you have to poop during an active shooter drill?!?” Unfortunately for her, however, Jessi isn’t picking up on the extent of her distress. Given that Jessi has also dealt with anxiety in past seasons, I’d have hoped she’d be there for Missy. But despite the overall “social justice” slant of her character, Jessi can be pretty self-absorbed a lot of the time, so I suppose it's in character. But somebody get Missy some help!
The Nick-Andrew-Jay stuff is amusing, although the grossest jokes are definitely in that storyline. Andrew is convinced that he’s absolutely going to die at the hands of Pumbaa (not his given name,) which mostly just aggravates Nick for bringing down the mood of their sleepover. When Jay tries to reassure Andrew, explaining that he’s only going to “get the shit kicked out of [him]” every day for the foreseeable future, Andrew cries, “No, no, you gotta help me! My bones are too Jewish for that!”
Okay, onto the Caleb-Matthew storyline. In past seasons, Caleb has most definitely been portrayed as a fairly flat archetype—before we ever learn his name, we learn that he has a wheely backpack and uses a chart to identify facial expressions, and his characterization has mostly been limited to “textbook autism,” frequently telling other characters blunt truths in a monotone voice. But for all that, I’ve kind of enjoyed him. The show has given him some funny lines over the years, and he can be used to call the main characters out on their shit.
This season, Caleb doesn’t just get the most screentime he’s ever had, he’s also gotten multiple storylines that show his experience as an autistic kid, rather than just showing how it looks from the outside. In episodes 1 and 5, where he’s also paired with Matthew, they’ve primarily been Matthew stories that he plays a major part in—we see him do his best to feel safe and prepared on the high school tour, and we see him struggle to come to terms with not doing the morning show with Matthew anymore when they get to 9th grade.
But this episode? This is a Caleb episode, explicitly from his perspective. We learn that his main puberty creatures are the Logic Rock (a Human Resources character, voiced by Randall Park) and the Anxiety Mosquito, which 100% tracks for an autistic brain. But I’m really glad that Maury is in the mix too. It would’ve been easy for the show to desexualize Caleb, but he’s like the rest of the kids (sans Elijah) in that regard, even if he keeps a much tighter lid on it than most of them. When Maury tries to distract him with sexy thoughts, Caleb flatly tells him, “We can think about that at 8:30 p.m. That is when I masturbate.”
I love that this episode takes something that might feel like a small issue—Caleb needs a new backpack—and clearly demonstrates why it’s actually a huge deal to him. There’s of course the sensory nightmare of going to the mall, full of harsh lights, a cacophony of noises, and crowds of people. And we also see why having his familiar security object is so important to Caleb as he starts high school, as well as the list of reasons why he loved it in the first place. Because Big Mouth is so vulgar, it can be dismissed as a bunch of cheap, irreverent gross-out laughs, but the show is capable of great sensitivity, and it does so really nicely here.
As I said, Matthew led the previous storylines he shared with Caleb this season, but even though his role is more secondary here, there’s still some good moments for Andrew Rannells. Since the graduation episode, Matthew has been more cognizant of the fact that he and Caleb are friends, and they meet up on Saturdays for coffee, which is how Matthew gets involved in the backpack quest.
I like how Matthew is characterized here. He’s genuinely trying to help Caleb and recognizes that this is important to him, even if he doesn’t get why, but he’s also preoccupied with his own stuff, looking at the pictures on Ocean’s socials and fretting that he won’t impress the queers in high school. “Ugh, I really need a new look,” he laments after Caleb points out that he’s dressed “like that middle-aged coffee shop manager.” He and Caleb are both figuring out how to navigate intentionally being friends with each other—throughout the episode, the Logic Rock consults Best Friendship for Dummies to give Caleb pointers—and they muddle through together.
Because this is first and foremost Caleb’s story, he has the brunt of the dialogue, but as always, Rannells’s reaction game is on point. When their first attempt to find the backpack doesn’t pan out, Matthew suggests going to the food court and trying to search online. Caleb deadpans, “Okay. We will eat unearned pretzels while avoiding hate speech,” and I just love how Matthew replies, “Well, that sounds fun.”
For the sake of spoilers, I won’t get into the specifics of the episode’s resolution, but I like what the show does with it. Matthew is able to come through for Caleb in an important way, but he’s not just the neurotypical person coming to save the day. He pays attention to Caleb’s needs and tries to help him achieve them, and he doesn’t try to speak over Caleb or take away his choice. Just wonderful—my neurodivergent, Andrew Rannells-loving brain was very happy with this one!
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