Everyone Sucks At Everything

The Cleveland Show, S04E12

Cleveland and his friends worried that the excitement had gone out of their friendship and tried to repair it.  After many failed attempts, they tried going to an amusement park they had once shared good times, ignoring the fact that it was closed down.  Donna wanted to boost Rallo's confidence by making him think he was an excellent bowler, but Rallo's overconfidence made Donna show him the harsh truth about how little there is that young kids are good at in general.

You would think that with such a variety of friends that it would take longer than 3 years for it to get stale.  Unless that group was composed of the most boring guys you could find, I find it hard to believe Cleveland and the gang were having problems already.  I'm sure that they do spend most of their time together sitting at the Broken Stool drinking, but they've done so many random activies that were also dangerous and thrilling.  That should make the days when they're not doing something to put them in jail or injury themselves seem like a vacation.  So I had problems just buying that they didn't have the same chemistry anymore.

There were little things that I sort of liked in this story, like Cleveland remarking he'd get another bear as a friend or how Tim looked in the fun mirror, but mostly I had neutral feelings about their frollick in the condemened amusement park.  The vomiting was gross and them being stuck on the Roter overall made me impatient for their rescue or just anything.  Things did get a little better when Rallo tried to save them and later Donna.  By the end of it, I don't even think I cared whether they were better friends or not.  The focus had really changed to Rallo feeling better about being a worthless kid.

Rallo, who had to hear the ugly truth about the skill level of a kid from his mother, didn't really start to grab my interest until he stopped acting like a superstar bowler.  I liked when he went to the strip club and met Robert.  His father actually had some good advice about finding Cleveland, yet he didn't give a damn that his 5 year-old was walking around at night to strip clubs and such.  Instead of driving Rallo home, he took him to an abandoned amusement park where Rallo could have gotten hurt (and very likely would have if the firemen hadn't come).  It was funny that even Rallo couldn't stay quiet as his father left him unsupervised in such a frightening place:

[Robert] Man, this place looks scary.  All right, see you later.[Rallo] That man is not a good father.

That was about the funniest thing in the episdoe, except for the disturbing picture that Junior had drawn.  It had him crying next to a grave with the caption, "I miss mommy."  It was sad in a way that made you chuckle that no one gave a damn about what might be going on in Junior's head to draw that.

After all of Donna's talk (and that horrible song) about how kids suck at everything, she really showed that any person of any age can suck when she set the place on fire.  Damn.  How stupid can she be?  Rallo was mostly stupidly courageous--Donna was just ignorant about electrical fires.   They were just lucky that the firemen showed up.  I don't know why they did, though.  How is it that they got there so fast, especially when that place was supposed to be empty?

I didn't hate this episode, but at the same time, I can't say there was much that was worth mentioning about it.  I did like that Cleveland and his friends' problem eventually became part of Rallo's story about wanting to prove his worth as a kid.  There are less intersecting stories in this show recently, so I like when they change things up once in a while.  Neither story was particularly good, so combining them into an almost decent story was better than having the two of them separate and completely awful.