Too bad they started the season with a story telling scenario
For me, out of every child character on television, Louise Belcher may suffer the most from not being allowed to age in any way. She'll make these great mature strides in one episode (like last season's finale) and then backslide so stubbornly, so brutally at the start of this episode that the whiplash is frankly, obnoxious and exhausting, and a storytelling format was not what I was looking for to resolve it. What's more is that I know how amazing the writing can be. This just didn't do it for me.
[8.0/10] Bob’s Burgers is a loony show. Enough crazy things happen to the Belchers in a single season than happen to most real families in their whole lives. But what I’ve always liked about the show is that it’s always stayed relatable. Even when Bob, Linda, and the kids are enmeshed in some kind of bizarre crisis, there’s always something real and recognizable at the heart of it.
Which is to say that “Fight at the Not Okay Chore-all” is a little out there as a concept. The story is a wild west pastiche, with a buffed up pony named Pepperoni, bean-shooters as pistols, and a town full of the usual goofy kids who don’t want to be ordered around by the married sheriffs. It’s one of the show’s usual homage-filled riffs on classic films, with the usual suspects playing the main characters.
But it’s rooted in a genuine, relatable dispute, chiefly between Linda and Louise over whether or not the kids should have to do chores. I remember clearly getting into stand-offs with my parents about what it was fair for me to be responsible for around the house. If anything, that part of the episode hits too close to home, with Louise’s steadfast refusals to do mundane tasks as a form of resistance, feeling embarrassingly similar to my own childish protests.
It’s also what puts the wild west homage over the top. There’s a peculiar resonance between a couple of sheriffs trying to bring law and order to an unruly town and a couple of parents trying to impose some very basic responsibility to their growing girls and boy. I don’t know if the writers intended for the allegory to be that deep, but treating the taming of the wild west as akin to the move from childhood into maturity is an interesting one, if only in how it frames the Belcher kids’ response to their parents.
Not for nothing, it’s also just fun! The show’s one-liners and absurd gags are in rare form here. Jokes about Gene’s cowboy equivalent “just being dramatic”, or Tina being fixated on the buffness of Pepperoni the Pony, or Bob defending the honor of lima beans are solid laughs. Plus, I love how the western pastiche is realized as a game of exquisite corpse, with Bob, Linda, and Louise, each butting in to try to take control of the story, in a way that reveals everyone’s perspectives: Linda as overwhelmed mom, Louise as overstressed kid, and Bob as peacemaker.
That ends up being what I appreciate the most about the episode -- as silly and entertaining as the cowboy antics are, it takes everyone’s perspectives seriously. I very plainly remember being in Louise’s position, having teachers confiscate this or that in ways that seemed arbitrary and unjust, feeling like it sucked to have grown-ups be able to tell you what to do without you having a say. Even if the ask is reasonable, and the protests a bit childish, that pint-sized sense of having the rules imposed on you is still palpable.
And yet, the most sympathetic person in the episode is Linda. She’s my favorite character on the show, not just because she’s hilarious, but because she earnestly and unironically wants such good things for her and her family. The stress of worrying about whether you’re doing enough for your kids, helping them to become good and capable humans, teaching them self-discipline, living up to your own parents’ pressures and expectations, wanting your children to know that you have their best interests at heart, is a lot. Bob’s Burgers doesn’t shy away from that, taking Linda’s plight, and her tears, seriously, in a way that’s affecting.
Of course, there’s reconciliation. Louise comes to understand why this simple demand is so important to her mom (and is willing to do it for some candy), and Linda is ultimately reassured, not aggravated, by her daughter’s spunkiness. There’s a mutual affirmation between them that’s one of the show’s trademarks. And in the same vein, there’s a rejection of outside standards for what it means to be a good parent and a good kid. Linda’s wild west rebuffing of her mom’s tsk-tsking (and recollection that she wasn’t exactly “mother of the year” either) is cathartic.
That’s what the best Bob’s Burgers episodes do. They take us into crazy scenarios like pec-bouncing ponies intervening in bean-shooting contests, while remembering the real life core that makes the show great, and the touching family connections that make it special.
Do the writers come up with a lame pun title for the episode first and then write an episode around it? I think they ran out of passable puns after the 4th or 5th season.
Episode summary: The parents want the kids to do more chores (super original), the kids -Louise especially - arrogantly refuse, A Western-themed story is told which tenuously applies to the main, err..., "plot". Linda start crying, Louise feels guilty for making mummy cry and despite acting entitled & disrespectful towards her parents she is praised as "spunky" by Linda who thinks these traits will serve Louise well as an adult. The only plot point you could say was worth noting was Louise arguing Linda only wanted to make the kids do more chores because Linda's mother put the idea in her head. That is hardly worth an entire episode, though.
Not a very fresh start of the season, i wish they go out more they meet new people and new things happen in the restaurant , I don't like story episodes but bob's burgers is back and let's have some fun!
Really nice western pastiche! We need more of these.
Yayyyy bobs burgers is back!!!
Review by JCVIP 4BlockedParent2023-10-03T04:02:11Z
Something that’s been subtly core to Bob’s Burgers from the start and has truly started to bloom in later seasons is child autonomy. Not the comedic rebellion of Bart Simpson, though it started off that way, but something deeper. The previous season ended with Louise’s fear of powerlessness, of being dismissed just because of being a girl, and this episode follows up on that but with the tint of being a child. It isn’t easy having someone bigger than you telling you what to do all the time, especially when they don’t hear you out or give you reasons that are just ‘because I say so’. We don’t acknowledge how demeaning and frustrating that is- say children are a lower class of citizen and it’s a nonstarter despite that functionally being the case. It’s not that Bob’s Burgers says that. But what it does say is still quietly revolutionary in saying that Louise has a point, that she’s not just a bratty kid who needs to obey, obey, obey. She’s a person.
And Linda is too. It’s a generational cycle, her being unable to buck the pressures of her own mother. What solves the conflict is stepping outside of the traditional, rigid boundaries of what the parent and the child are ‘supposed’ to be- the child as property of the parent, and thus something to enforce the parent’s will on- and instead talking it out as people. It’s finding a compromise and rewarding the kids for their work. It’s hearing them. It’s a rebuttal to one of the most common criticisms of Bob’s Burgers’s later years- why do they let the kids ‘get away’ with so much, talk to them like that, etc.
It’s because Bob’s Burgers is the opposite of that saying- ‘I am not your friend, I am your parent’. Bob and Linda are their parents AND their friend, and what makes this show stand out is the fact they treat them this way. And Linda’s and Louise’s friendship has been hard won. They started off distant not because they had nothing in common but because they had so much in common. Confident, crafty, loud, headstrong. They didn’t know how to coexist, and after 14 seasons of groundwork we got a finale and a premiere back to back that shows that once they understand each other they have a deep connection brought by those similarities. It’s a joy seeing this relationship blossom. This is how the Belchers’ do it. You can criticize it, but you ain’t in it, and they ain’t changing.
On top of that, the episode is very funny and the animation has kept its bump since the movie. I may be alone in this opinion, but I truly think Bob’s Burgers might never have been better than it is right now, still stirring emotions in me, pushing its animation, and going deep on what it truly has to say about family all while remaining deft and light all these years in. Here’s to many more.