User blog comment:Mattalamode/A Second Opinion: The Roots/@comment-31129705-20171006061306/@comment-31194372-20171007042608

The point of "The Roots" was to serve as a mockery of sorts of those deeper, more emotionally-charged episodes by being deliberately baity and manipulative, though. Spilling Darwin's desire for a fishtank at the beginning would ruin the entire plot of the episode that was reliant on his desire being wildly misconstrued. The whole gist is that Darwin knows that there's no way he would get a larger tank except by trying to hoodwink the rest of his family, it's just that his tactics don't work. (Even with the ultimate reveal, Darwin's not getting that tank. That's just how this stuff goes.)

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