7X05-06 - Large Brother, Where Fart Thou?/The Quirk-ducers

It’s a two-fer this week as we get “Large Brother, Where Fart Thou?” where the kids are on their own at home sans Tina and our Thanksgiving episode with “The Quirk-ducers” pulling up the rear where Mr. Frond’s annual play needs to be sabotaged with the most powerfully poor thing imaginable, Tina’s fanfic. Pull up a chair and let the festivities begin!



The Belcher family dynamic remains a strange mystery to me, a spirit of bonding and genuine love yet also a rigid system of doing what the family wants even if it results in never having nice things. They’re not huggy but they still hold close and to see Louise and Gene hug it out at the end was a bit weird, do they do that now? Anyway, the core of the episode is about weed cookies and rotten canteloupes and prolonged eye contact, it’s a sweet little episode that manages to be adventurous without really going too far away from the core episode elements. It’s also a three liner where everyone gets split up and has their own little story which is different from the anthology style three parter where everyone stays together but has their own little story and it works. Tina’s is pretty much all Tina in how the concept of love for her means everything is love no matter how insubstantial. Gene and Louise’s is the main storyline where inadvertently splutting Logan with a 3 year old melon leads to a real moment of weakness for Louise and a real big brother moment for Gene doing the whole reaffirmation of what makes Bob’s Burgers tick. Bob and Linda’s storyline is a bit poor being about weed cookies at their accountants office but had enough funny moments that there weren’t any real dead spots besides Tina’s irrational approaches to love but it did give us a nice fantasy moment and an end credits song so it breaks even.

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This did have potential, it really did. It wasn’t wasted but it felt like it was lesser than it could have been even with an episode containing entrails. While I thought that Linda’s potato grandpa would have been a bit of a sleeper gag, it really worked far better than I imagined and I guess that’s more just because the Thanksgiving play fell a bit flat to me. I am probably the only fan who isn’t all that enamoured with the songs in Bob’s Burgers, they’re good but they don’t really do much for me in general and this is no exception. It’s not specifically the origin being Tina’s odd “erotic” fiction based around a very thinly veiled Tina as a turkey who’s seen as “quirky” that makes it poor nor the fact it was constructed to be shut down quickly. It just felt like maybe the mean-spirited part of me wanted a better payoff than Louise once again being softened by Tina’s shark-like unfocused deadeyed stare and having heads and guts go everywhere as traumatic! It did have some good standout moments but they were brief and didn’t include Tina so I won’t mention them. It did at least remind me that you really do need Bob deeply engrossed in his turkey making for it to be truly Thanksgiving-y and reminding me of the Ving Rhames Bible joke I thought I forgot.