6x12 Dee Gives Birth

[7.3/10] Not a bad episode, though also not the homerun you might hope for from the finale for what I’d venture to call the show’s best season yet. As I said for the last episode, the show has its banter and character interactions down pat at this point, so just having Dennis and Dee interact in the confines of a maternity ward is pretty amusing. Between Dee’s nonchalance about the whole thing, Dennis turning into the birth-assisting version of a helicopter parent, the whole Weekend at Bernie’s deal, and the nurse who will brook none of Dennis’s bullshit, there’s some great laughs.

There’s fewer laughs in Charlie, Mac, and Frank rounding up everyone Dee has slept with over the course of the show (plus Duncan and Chad L. Coleman again). A continuity geek like me can appreciate the show’s attention to detail, but there’s not much comedy to come from the mix-and-match of Dee’s former lovers or the interrogations.

But I did get a kick out of the guys in The Gang ending up all wanting the responsibility of parenthood that they’d been trying so hard to avoid at the start, even as they’re clearly misguided in their view of it. It’s the kind of comic reversal that works for IASIP. And I particularly like the twist that the father of the baby is Carmen, who wanted a child with the new husband, playing on both the beginning of the season and Dee’s prior attempts at surrogacy.

Plus, it’s rare that this show goes for genuine sentiment, but there is something pretty sweet about knowing that this is, in its own bizarre way, a tribute to Rob McLehenny and Kaitlin Olson’s child, and the way they shoot the scene of Dee arriving with her baby delivers just enough of the feels.

Overall, there’s plenty of good moments in this one (including Cricket continually hitting up his own cobbled-together pipe in the background) but it feels like a pretty good regular episode rather than a stellar season finale.