I have to admit that I'm getting tired of the recurring plots where Randal is a complete sadist and everything happens as a result of him gleefully making Dante's life a living hell. Just once I'd love to see a story where Dante manages to move away one day, leaving Randal behind and realizing that was the chain that was holding him back all these years. Granted, knowing Randal, he'd hunt Dante down and pester him relentlessly just like he did the judge in this episode.
After wasting the great sitcom concept of Dante and Randal deciding to swap stores for the day, this settles into an amusing if uneven courtroom parody, with Judge Reinhold preceding, a jury made up entirely of professional basketball players who are excited at the freebies jurors get (five whole cash dollars!), and Randal digging Dante even deeper by acting as his attorney. Some gags work, like the multiple dream sequences, especially Reinhold getting to run around with Axel Foley again and shove bananas up things. Some don't, like the WNBA gag, or Randal trying to appeal to the jury by playing on black stereotypes, or Randal calling famous directors to the stand to force them to refund his money (the Joel Schumacher gag was especially tasteless in this show's continued gay bashing). Mostly, it's the entire thing being driven by just how much of an asshole Randal is, which has always been a part of Clerks, but so deeply overwhelms this episode that I almost want to stop watching these just to take a break from him. Which alas I can't because that convention is looming!
The sequence this episode is infamous for is when a title card announces that the last few pages of the script went missing, so the Korean animation team had to make up their own ending. Parts of it haven't aged well, and I'm still haunted by the image of a car transforming into a robot while blood sprays out from the crushed passengers within, but it's so audacious and so wild ("bear is driving the car!") that it absolutely stands up as one of the highlights of the series.
Review by noelctBlockedParentSpoilers2023-06-25T15:44:23Z
I have to admit that I'm getting tired of the recurring plots where Randal is a complete sadist and everything happens as a result of him gleefully making Dante's life a living hell. Just once I'd love to see a story where Dante manages to move away one day, leaving Randal behind and realizing that was the chain that was holding him back all these years. Granted, knowing Randal, he'd hunt Dante down and pester him relentlessly just like he did the judge in this episode.
After wasting the great sitcom concept of Dante and Randal deciding to swap stores for the day, this settles into an amusing if uneven courtroom parody, with Judge Reinhold preceding, a jury made up entirely of professional basketball players who are excited at the freebies jurors get (five whole cash dollars!), and Randal digging Dante even deeper by acting as his attorney. Some gags work, like the multiple dream sequences, especially Reinhold getting to run around with Axel Foley again and shove bananas up things. Some don't, like the WNBA gag, or Randal trying to appeal to the jury by playing on black stereotypes, or Randal calling famous directors to the stand to force them to refund his money (the Joel Schumacher gag was especially tasteless in this show's continued gay bashing). Mostly, it's the entire thing being driven by just how much of an asshole Randal is, which has always been a part of Clerks, but so deeply overwhelms this episode that I almost want to stop watching these just to take a break from him. Which alas I can't because that convention is looming!
The sequence this episode is infamous for is when a title card announces that the last few pages of the script went missing, so the Korean animation team had to make up their own ending. Parts of it haven't aged well, and I'm still haunted by the image of a car transforming into a robot while blood sprays out from the crushed passengers within, but it's so audacious and so wild ("bear is driving the car!") that it absolutely stands up as one of the highlights of the series.