User blog comment:ThatGuy456/A Guy's Thoughts: Season 6 - Richard's Rise/@comment-31194372-20190809025210

I apologize for my lack of timeliness with this comment—my Internet went out for a few days and I slipped into a funk because of it—but stellar write-up as always! Season 6 didn't knock it out of the park as a whole, unfortunately, and it really ended on some of the worst possible notes that you could imagine (even if the finale salvages things), but Richard was always one of its greatest assets.

Richard, of all characters, really deserves the spotlight that Season 6 cast onto him. He's been used to incredibly mixed effect during the series' entire run, too often falling into the slump of being lazy and stupid, but the writers really turned him around this season. We've rarely seen Richard actually applying himself to narratives in profound ways—the only examples that come to mind easily prior to this season are "The Return" and "The Routine"—but there's been this massive shift towards showing him to be as multi-dimensional as everyone else on the show, and it's done nothing but good for the series. Richard episodes suddenly went from something to be feared and approached with caution to something worthy of celebration.

Obviously, you've touched on everything that I could have, and with more detail than I can use here, but I might as well also praise him for his minor appearances across the season, too, since you didn't really have the time to detail that. Little moments like his boomer speech in "The Candidate," an obvious bit of satire that lands against all odds, or his one-way corn beef discussion from "The Parents" (iffy episode to say the least, of course, though he helps make it a little more palatable) showed that Richard could still find some fun, interesting utilization even when not the main focus of a narrative. No matter what Richard's purpose is in a given episode, he'll always end up commanding a lot of attention because of the comedic persona he has, and it's good that he that he wasn't merely exploited due to that characteristic for the expected, easy digs.

It's a shame, then, that his final appearance from the series is him being brutalized in a massage chair in "The BFFS," but hey, it's pretty easy to pretend that episode never happened.

How come you're linking to my old URL. Get with the times, grampa