11x02 Frank Falls Out the Window

[7.2/10] Man, I’ve talked about IASIP eating its own tail before, both in episodes where there’s a lot of meta humor and last season’s “The Gang Misses the Boat” where Frank tries to pull a stunt from before he joined the show, but this was a little nuts. Essentially redoing old bits from the show in a new context could be fun and creative, but mostly comes off well-intentioned but lazy.

Honestly, the thing that made me laugh the most here is the way that Charlie simply couldn’t understand the his bedroom window was not, in fact, a portal to 2006. That’s the natural conclusion a simpleton like Charlie would reach after Frank basically gets self el-kabonged and suffers amnesia, believing it to be that year.

There’s some good gags with The Gang trying both to take advantage of Frank’s date-centric dissonance, and trying to avoid the mistakes of the past, but a lot of the gags are too easy or repetitive from (now decade old) glories. There’s the hint of a “you can’t fight fate” sense as Frank beds a pair of exotic dancers and locks Charlie and Mac out, but it’s mostly an excuse to redo old shtick with a slight twist.

Dee and Dennis’s bit fares slightly better, though it is, if anything, more repetitive, as they get hooked on crack again. It was a solid bit the first time, so it still works (as does Dee and Dennis’s failure to “get real” with one another), but it’s mostly repetitive of the old episode with few new wrinkles. That said, I got a kick out of the punchline that their big check from Frank can’t be cashed since its dated for 2006, and god help me, I cannot help but enjoy the show’s renewed use of “Just a Friend.”

Overall, an episode that seems to suggest the show’s running out of ideas, but one that was perfectly good for what it was.