The lovely and enchanting mothers of Mac and Charlie come together and bond in this family oriented episode of Always Sunny. The issue of taking care of parents arose as a result of Uncle Jack, Charlie’s pedophilic uncle, moving out of Charlie’s mom’s house. As a result, Charlie is fed up by his needy mother’s incessant phone calls. Following Charlie‘s outburst, Mac finds out his mother fell asleep with a lit cigarette in her mouth and caused her house to burn down. Seeing how negatively Dennis reacted to the idea of taking care of him when he grows old, Frank hopes to convince Dee that he is the loving father deserving of her care.
Overall, the episode was enjoyable to watch with a moderate amount of laughs to go along with it. The dual parenting storylines had some funny moments, especially the bits involving the “truth“ about nursing homes. When Dennis suggests that Mac send his mother to a nursing home, Mac hilariously responds: “Nursing home? Why don’t I just rape her myself?” Later, when Dennis suggests that he send Frank to one instead of taking any kind of responsibility, Frank responds: “I don’t what to live there. As soon as you drop the soap, they rape your butt…That’s what Mac told me”.
While Dennis shows a severe disregard for parental care, Mac and Charlie hope to make their mother’s codependent and friendly towards each other like the old ladies form The Golden Girls. Some funny changes have been made to the two maternal characters with Charlie’s mom being a extremely neurotic than normal and Mac’s mom speaking in unintelligible grunts that only Mac can understand. It was fun to see Charlie’s mom’s unfounded night time ritual of doing everything in threes so that Charlie doesn’t die. Although initially disconcerting, Charlie starts mimicking her actions in an effort to prolong his life as well. Although starting off on the wrong foot, the two mothers eventually connect on their mutual prejudice of Muslims…like a racist episode of The Golden Girls.
Meanwhile, Frank tends to a sick Dee whose only desire is to make it to a Josh Grobin concert with Artemis. Realizing that she doesn’t actually need him for anything, Dennis and Frank heavily spike her juice with cough medicine and bring her unconscious body to Frank’s cold, dirty apartment so that Frank could to be there for her in her time of need. The plan, however, falls through when Dee sleep walks out of the room and falls down a flight of stairs. Dee awakes to find herself tied down to the bed with rope while her face and body are covered in bruises, bed bug bites, and the body of Mac’s dead dog Poppins after overdosing on the cough medicine. Leaving a now conscious Dee tied to her bed, they dump Poppins body in an alley trash can. Coincidentally, Mac catch in the middle of the act and is appalled at the fact that they would throw his dead dog in the trash, to which Frank wittily replies: “What do you want us to do? Send him to the moon?”. Holding true to his epithet as the dog that can‘t die, Mac opens the trash can to find him chewing on a diaper. While the episode ends on a good with Poppins actually surviving a lethal dose of cough medicine, Dee is left tied to the bed as she misses her Josh Grobin concert.
Original Author: Andrew Ebanks