Although there’s plenty to enjoy in this episode, it’s one of the weaker entries of the season for me. The story revolves a little too heavily around a particular theme in a way that seems trite. That said, there’s still a lot of good humor here.
For Ollie, part of putting his own stamp on the business is doing everything by the book. He thinks there are too many dodgy workmen out there, and he wants to run things honestly. Unfortunately, no one else seems to agree with him. Darren wants to half-ass a council-mandated paint job for a blind client and Tony rustles up jobs by breaking things around other houses in the neighborhood. Even Emma wants Ollie to do something shady: break into the estate agent’s office to nab some inside intel, ensuring that she has the high bid on a restaurant property she’s after.
In the last few episodes, we’ve seen different plots tie together in fun comedic ways, upping the ante on a farce or coming full circle for a satisfying resolution. Here, the different plots all follow the same theme, but it feels kind of forced to me. For one, the handyman business hasn’t been characterized by dodgy dealings up until now, but suddenly Tony and Darren are both trying to get one over on their clients left and right, much to Ollie’s dismay? If they wanted to do this story, it would’ve been good to see nods to it in the previous episodes. As it is, I can feel the hand of the writer too much, making the characters do these things because he says so. And although I can admittedly see Emma sweet-talking Ollie into doing something underhanded against his better judgment, it gets to be too much when it’s combined with all the Darren and Tony stuff.
But like I say, despite the uninspired plot, it is still a funny episode. We get the return of Ricky, the enterprising thief from the pilot, and I get a kick out of Ollie’s exasperation with him reflexively stealing stuff—“It’s an addiction!” Ricky protests. Ollie’s jumpiness during the estate-agent heist is also a lot of fun. Plus, there’s some headway made on the Ollie/Emma/Liz triangle, and I’m interested to see where things are going.
As usual, Darren provides a lot of laughs. I appreciate that, while he’s trying to cut corners with a blind client, his sticking point is that she doesn’t actually care about the paint job. The council is making Martha get her walls redone, and she’s mostly just waiting for them to finish and get out of her hair, so in his mind, why bother? There are a number of jokes here that do rely on Darren being ableist, but 1) his main beef is how pointless he thinks the job is, and 2) he can’t get as much over on Martha as he thinks he can. Although this part of the plot isn’t my favorite, I laughed at Joel Fry’s delivery in this exchange:
MARTHA: “Working hard there, boys?”
DARREN: (lounging on the sofa) “Painting my little heart out.”
If we want to talk about Fry’s physicality, hands-down the funniest part of the episode comes when Darren is trying to move Martha’s sofa. For starters, I love that his first attempt involves jumping on it and trying to rock it over—it’s not just how effectively Fry uses his body in his performance, it’s the specific choices he makes with it. Then we get Darren trying to stagger out of the room while carrying the sofa on his back, which he of course can’t fit through the door. So good!
I want to mention one more bit I love: when Ollie asks Darren to find him someone to break into the estate agent’s office, Darren is annoyed that Ollie thinks he has those kinds of connections. “What, ‘cause I’m half-white?” he asks. The implication is obvious, that he thinks this is a racist request, but I like that this is the way he phrases it, emphasizing being half-white rather than half-Black. As with rocking over the sofa, it’s an unexpected direction to take the scene. And in an episode that feels more paint-by-numbers than usual, it’s good to get those unexpected moments.
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