User blog:Mattalamode/A Second Opinion: The Refund

First of all, since it's been so long since I actually watched a Season 1 episode out of choice (let's face it, me watching "The Picnic" hardly counts as "by choice" so much as "out of a necessity of being addressed"), I'll just give a text recap of my general thoughts.

This is weird. This is disconcertingly weird. The voices sound... different. My head hurts a little. Darwin has leg hair? Oh, that's just a joke. Heh. Simpler times. Oh, look, Gumball's penchant stupidity again, though he apparently knows about superheated quasars for some reason. I detect a logic hole. Seriously, Matt, this is Season 1 you're thinking about; you just have to just let things happen. And the back of Gumball's head looks really, really terrible.

Yeah, that's about it. Basically, it took a bit of effort to get back into the swing of Season 1, and "The Refund" is perhaps one of the most true-to-form Season 1 episodes out there but, as we'll talk about shortly, that's secretly one of its greatest assets. Onto the plot.

The Actual Start of the Article
"The Refund" is an incredibly simple bit of comedy. The whole premise is that Gumball and Darwin buy a game for the wrong device (to the effect of failing to jam an SNES-esque cartridge into a disk-based console), and with Larry unwilling to comply in a simple refund, the two take exceedingly bizarre approaches to get their money back. After a series of failed attempts - almost succeeding by impersonating police officers, using hypnosis, and presenting the sob story of Jimmy - they call in the big guns, wheeling out Richard (handlebar mustache included) to take carry of the situation.



Unfortunately, he instead commits petty theft from the register, unleashing the store's very angry boss, an innocuous-looking teddy bear-looking guy. The two brawl it out for a short while (by which I mean Richard gets beat up - punchline.) before Gumball threatens the manager with a tape of the incident. The manager then decides that, while he can't provide a refund, he'll give them a minuscule discount on the game's proper console. The three accept, only for it later to be revealed that they were tricked into buying a paper shredder. And thus the cycle starts all over again.

Analysis
I think the interesting thing about "The Refund" is that it actually found a way to use Gumball's stupidity to decent comedic effect. Sure, it's not the inane stupidity of, say, "The Picnic," but his slight obliviousness and aloofness actually helped out a bit. The point of the episode is to be fast-paced, joke after joke, so it helps that Gumball isn't directing the situation to too great of an extent. For him to think his idiotic plans to get a refund will work is a testament to his Season 1 idiosyncrasies, but there's no other way for the episode to exist, and since it's still somewhat grounded in a less haphazard reality, it works out a heck of a lot better.



At the same time, though, the episode made Larry look quite a lot dumber as well. As such, there's sort of a weird mix of him both operating as the straight man and klutz at the same time as he, more often than not, gets almost duped by Gumball and Darwin's routine repeatedly. (Him believing the two to be police seemed especially uncharacteristic, and I'd say the same about the hypnosis bit, but that is sort of the point.) Still, this is Season 1, and Larry escaped relatively unscathed while still delivering some nice, deadpan zingers along the way; I'll give it a pass. I'd always sympathize with the poor guy, anyway.

On the plus side: a lot of the gags worked in their own right. For one thing, the idea that Gumball and Darwin asked Larry a series of question prior to their purchase, only for those questions to effectively be meaningless trivia, was a nifty reveal. I also really liked the pair guilt-tripping Larry with their tale of poor little Jimmy, a victim of villainous consumerism who lives in a shoebox (a bit of a slippery slope there, guys); the much-in-demand (joke) "We Are the World" spoof, "Refund the World," was the icing on the cake. Other than that, there's very little I can say I especially hated, so that's good, right?



Looking back, it's really weird to see how well this episode worked, especially since it inhibited everything that made Season 1 so uneven: Gumball and Darwin's lack of common sense, Richard making some non-sequitur about food, and some clunky ending (bringing out Larry's boss was both necessary and a bit of an odd step). Still, everything worked out nicely. It's distinctly a Season 1 episode, but it uses all of its shortcomings to the best of their abilities, exerting some of the best, most salvageable material into this episode, of all episodes. It just feels recognized (no doubt aided by the simplicity of its whole set-up). If anything, it's quite telling that you never hear people rag on "The Refund" as particularly bad; if we're talking Season 1, ignorance is a step in the right direction.



Seriously. There is very little I can aimlessly declare "academically proper" or any of that fluffy, esoteric garbage I'm so smitten with trotting out to make me sound smart. It's just a really good meshing of every aspect of the show to that point. There wasn't something that put a bad taste in my mouth, there wasn't some extended attempt to make everybody look worse, and there wasn't some ill-advised attempt to chase after some questionable idea; it was all a very clear-cut, in-the-groove affair for the show. You could tell that the writers knew what they wanted to do and actually executed it just as they would've hoped because the episode is very tightly-executed but still enjoyably bouncy. That's why I like it: against all conventions that primed it to fail, it doesn't, and it ended up pretty darn enjoyable.

(I swear to God, Guy, don't use this against me. I know that he will. I just know that he will.)

"I know this is a bit short - in my defense, I wrote this at one in the morning today - but that's all for now," Matt wrote for probably the third time, at a loss for a proper outro. "Next week we'll be looking at two more episodes, 'The Banana' and 'The Sidekick,' and discussing Darwin's utilization. Until then." Scene. Meta.