5x15 Courting Disasters

[7.0/10] Hey! This one was OK! My favorite part was the conversation between George Michael and Michael. The two obviously have a lot of baggage, but the pair having the sort of talk they should have had a long time ago was weirdly refreshing. George Michael comes clean about FakeBlock. But at the same time, he challenges Michael about his need to try to save everyone thereby not only putting himself in the middle of other people’s business, but getting himself entangled in even bigger problems.

Michael still tries to butt in and doesn’t take his son’s advice, but he’s not mad when George Michael comes clean and it’s weirdly wholesome. So few characters in this show are honest with one another that when it happens, it’s almost uplighting on a show that doesn’t really deal in sentiment.

The other side of the coin is that the Dusty stuff is miserable. Lucille accidentally sleeping with the wrong Dustin Raddler is mind-numblingy stupid, as is her not realizing that Dusty wasn’t interested in her romantically, but rather is a “mtoehr boy.” The reveal that Lottie is his stepmom does nothing , and his antics as a manchild brought no laughs.

I’ll confess to appreciating the reveal that the “flashbacks” we’ve seen are, in fact, a dramatization from Imagine based on second hand info from Warden Gentiles. It caught me off guard, and it makes some of the more weirdly melodramatic and contrived elements make a little more sense. It even pays off the “Michael gets everyone’s releases” story from last season.

All that said, as much prequelitis is involved, I’ll also cop to liking this as an origin story for Michael’s need to rescue everyone and for little parallels with Buster being a potential murderer in defense of his mother. It’s a little much, but it’s clever enough to pass muster.

The trial business gets pretty convoluted though. I’m glad to see Gene Parmesean’s shtick and Warden Gentiles’ routine once again, but it requires a lot of voiceover glue from the narrator to get it to all add up, with obvious instances where they’ve redubbed lines or have to hide people’s faces to try to make it all work. Honestly, some of these episodes have felt a little ramshackle in terms of production, which is unusual for a professional operation.

Last but not least, I liked that Murphy Brown is, unexpectedly, the answer to FakeBlock being real. Him being forced into acting while actually being into computers just adds to a strange “Ziggy from The Wire”” vibe he has. Tobias’s efforts to “act” his way into shelter are amusing enough, and George Michael’s relief that this mumbly burnout invented FakeBlock leads this weird story into a solid direction.

Overall, this still isn’t great, but it at least adds some direction and closure to a lot of the more aimless bits the show’s been tossing around since the start of season 4. Maybe the need to close things out will add greater focus to the finale, and we can see whether Buster, Stan, or someone else entirely (stair-pushing Murphy?) go down as the culprit.