Cupcake Bitches Versus The Serial Killer Puppeteer

2 Broke Girls, S02E17

Max had a great idea to rename her cupcakes to bring in a lot of hipster customers into their shop, but a puppeteer performing outside of their business was driving people away.  After trying to convince J.Petto to move his puppetry show somewhere else, he ended coming into the cupcake shop and slipping on a cupcake.  His fall broke his favorite puppet, Pierre, and Max and Caroline soon found themselves being sued by the man for damages to it.

The girls versus Andy Dick as this nutty puppeteer was sort of funny.  From the beginning he was a little off, and the girls had a hard time dealing with him.  I knew with his crazy behind the girls wouldn't be rid of him so easily, but I didn't think that he would try and sue them.  I can't believe that they had to pay him a grand to try and shut him up.  Of course, since he wasn't living a fabulous lifestyle, it wasn't a surprise that once Caroline and Max paid him, he wanted more.  He was being a greedy jerk, but I couldn't hate him because seeing him in his apartment filled with puppets (the "dead body car wash" as Max put it), I couldn't help but pity him.  He didn't have anyone but his freaky little puppets.

I didn't know if the girls could get out of the situation until I saw Max take Pierre hostage.  She shocked me by going further and making the puppet hump with some naked dolls.  I loved that this was enough to make J.Petto cave into them.  They were pretty smart to use that disturbing display as a threat to his business.  I'm pretty sure that people would want to avoid him knowing that he was going around using his puppets in some kind of sexual play.  I liked how much that got to J.Petto.  Serves his money-grubbing ass right.

What I liked best about this episode, though, was just Max calling J.Petto a serial killer.  She kept alluding to the fact that they were getting closer and closer to ending up as his victims.  It made J.Petto seem all the more unbalanced and funny that they kept getting more and more involved with him.  I halfway expected Max to be right in the end.  That would have been a hilarious ending (providing they didn't get hurt, of course).

I liked this episode, even though I'm not much of an Andy Dick fan.  However, I think that his role as an annoying puppeteer really suited him, and he made an entertaining adversary to the girls.  However, he did make them lose a grand for nearly nothing more than a lesson about the necessity of having a friend to tell you when you're wasting your life on a bad idea.  If that's all he's going to add to the value of the show, I really hope that his appearance is just a one-shot.

Bob's Bad Review

Bob's Burgers, S02E07

Thanks to his restaurant buddies, Bob worried that a local food critic would come to his place and give him a bad review that would hurt his business.  They recognized the critic, despite his disguise, but the whole family screwed up from their panic, and they got a bad review anyway.  Bob was upset about it until he had a dream where he was working an office job.  With a renewed love of his job, Bob decided to go to the critic's house and cook for him again.  That led to a hostage-like situation where Bob had to leave without getting the critic to eat his burger.  Bob wondered when the police would get him, but it turned out that the critic had eaten his burger after all and had given up reporting the incident.

One of my favorite things about this story was when Bob exploded at his family about how they were so horrible.  I just love when H. Jon Benjamin yells in general, but it was even funnier because it was so true.  All they had to do was serve a simple cheeseburger without burning it or making the customer uncomfortable and not one of them could act like a normal human being for a few seconds.  Maybe that's asking a lot of his family.  Bob had some blame too (since he couldn't remember a simple order), but his kids and Linda's burping didn't help him at all.  It was also funny when he was shouting at people on the street that they were "overdone and dry."  Who would want to give bad-reviewed shop another chance if he was insulting people right outside of his store?  Bob is a piece of work.

The hostage situation that developed made me shake my head.  Of all the things that could have happened, this was one of the last things I would have thought of.  The thing I expected least was that the Moody Foodie would be willing to eat Bob's burger.  It just kept getting worse and worse as his family, friends, and an innocent postal worker got thrown into the mix as well.  Even though I thought the critic was a jerk, he still didn't deserve to have people shoving recycled noodles and such in his face.  Plus, any normal person would think that Bob's restaurant wasn't that good after the experience that the critic had, so he wasn't unreasonable.  He's an unpleasant guy, but he's not unreasonable.  I mean, he could have easily thrown away Bob's burger after they had let him go, but he ate it for some reason (perhaps he had been taped up for so long he was starving?).  And it all worked out for the good.

Oh, I did like how the kids pretended they had a PR firm.  That was cute, and I liked how Bob pointed out that they were part of the problem with his image when they were pitching plans on how to turn the bad review around.  At the end, their idea to offer half off a burger for exchange for a clipping of the bad review seemed to have brought in a lot of business for them.  Wow.  They may be mini-maniacs, but they're not dumb.  It's just too bad they don't use their brains to help the family business more.

I think this was a good episode to get a little insight on how Bob stays in business in the first place.  We learned that he gets fresh ingredients and is at least a step up from his other half-assed restaurant friends.  He doesn't have the gift of naming his burgers really well, but at least he's more than a one-trick pony from what I saw.  And if the Moody Foodie didn't call the cops on him, his burger must have been damn good.  This is exactly the kind of thing that I wanted to know, so I'm glad that it was addressed.  Now, if only Bob could get a handle on his crazy family maybe he would have a chance to be something more than a second-rate burger shop.  But asking for that is like asking for a damn miracle.