Not The Best Halloween Story

The Cleveland Show, S04E01

Donna and Cleveland forbid Junior and Roberta from dressing up for Halloween, so to teach their parents a lesson, they dressed as their parents and went out to cause trouble.  Cleveland took Federline to a football game so he could be the designated driver, but the boy ended up stealing a wooden doll from Stoolbend's rival town and causing a riot.

Compared to last year's Halloween story, I didn't like this one as much.  I suppose because it didn't really have too much to do with the holiday.  Cleveland's story was about football/town rivalry, Donna was getting arrested for prostitution, and Junior and Roberta did a prank (which is a little more in the spirit of the holiday) but it didn't really lead to anything significant.  I will say that it is nice that they didn't make a cheesy horror story instead, but it being mostly about football and riots was kind of lame.

Rather to continue to go on about what I didn't like, I'll point out my favorite parts.  One was when Cleveland was trying to get a hold of Toonces, the driving cat.  That was great!  Toonces was one of my favorite SNL skits ever!  And I liked that the cause of Toonces' death was not the more likely car accident, but feline leukemia.  It was just unexpected and good (in a dark kind of way).  Cleveland was also funny when he told Federline to go after he had ruined their night sufficiently:

[Cleveland] Let him go.

[Tim] No one's trying to stop him.

 Junior also had a pretty good line when Chet had a knife to his throat:

How did you find my throat?

 Lastly, I enjoyed the insanity that Rallo was left to himself while he was bleeding to death.  It became a running gag in the episode and at the very end Rallo was seen as a ghost saying:

Hi, I died--just kidding.  I'll see ya'll next week.

This kind of echoes that running gag in the show that Rallo is often left unsupervised by parents (and siblings) who really couldn't give a damn about what kind of danger he gets into.  But although I liked this, I was annoyed that they pretty much left Rallo out of the story.  Last year was good because we got to see him be scared to death along with Cleveland.  But anyway.

This was probably better than most episodes I saw last season, so I can't be too mad this was their premiere.  I'm actually just looking forward to the episode they're supposed to have with Bruno Mars in it (love him!).  So until that happens, I can be all right with a few stupid episodes until then.