Exposing Edison's Elephant

Bob's Burgers, S03E16

Louise's new science teacher and head of the science fair refused to let Louise use her recycled volcano as a project and forced her to do a new presentation about Thomas Edison.  Thanks to some hints from the librarian, Louise learned about a controversial experiment that Edison conducted that she could use in her project to crush her teacher's pride in Edison.  Bob and Linda also argued about who made the better spice-related invention.

There's nothing more I like than Louise scheming to get back at someone, eseicially if they are an authority figure.  Once I saw Dinkler crush her volcano, I knew that Louise would stop at nothing to teach him that you just don't do that to her without paying the price.  I liked how hard Louise pushed to expose Edison's cruelty to animals, even while endangering her own sister.

I particularly liked that the librarian first suggested that Louise look up Topsy, but he kept being really secretive about it.  He would whisper things to her that contradicted what he said in his normal voice.  He sounded really crazy and made it seem like the Topsy incident was this big conspiracy that only Louise could expose.  However, when Louise later accused him of being responsible for her trying to speak out about Topsy, the librarian wouldn't help her escape the principal's room and said that he was blameless because he always tells people about Topsy.  I don't know what his real reason was for wanting to lead her to that topic, but I liked that he got her riled up yet kept himself on the sidelines from all the trouble.

I think the best part was when Louise finally escaped and got Teddy to set up the sparks again during the musical performance Gene and Tina were doing.  Although Tina had been freaked out that the yoga mat melted the first time they did this, she still went through it.  She had me fooled too when she was knocked out on the floor after the lights came back on.  I liked that everyone was worried about her, even Louise who had been too blinded by her revenge to notice that she had nearly killed her sister.  Tina turned out to be just be acting very well, and Mr. Dinkler was indeed crushed by performance of Topsy being killed by Edison's experiment.  He spent the rest of the night crying in the bathroom--mission accomplished.  Also, I liked when Bob told Teddy that he nearly killed Tina and Teddy casually apologized for that.  It shows that Louise was just thinking of destroying Dinkler if she thought asking a screw-up like Teddy to handle the electrical aspects of her project was a good idea.  He could have killed all of them.

One other thing I liked was when Bob was watching Gene and Tina sing.  He noticed right away that it was Mr. Fischoeder and Gayle's voice coming out of their mouths.  He was the only one distracted by that.  It did look sort of weird seeing Gene and Tina prancing around with a different voice coming out of their mouths.  I was glad that Bob mentioned that.

As far as the "spiceps" and "spice rack" inventions, I agreed with Gene who said that they both looked ridiculous.  It's weird that Linda thought she could improve on Bob's creation instead of just trying to discourage him from talking about it in the first place.  Making her own version of his thing only made Bob more convincned that he needed to prove that his idea was good.  It was really childish that they both took their inventions to the fair and set them up along with the other kids.  I don't know how that was even allowed, but with Dinkler in charge, he was probably mostly concerned with shutting Louise down.  The craziest thing is that either Bob or Linda's invention won the science fair.  I don't really care which one it was, but that must have been some kind of horribly low-caliber fair if that was the best project.  I mean, second place was Andie and Ollie's counting of hairs on the head--what?  It's not unreasonable that two middle-aged people could have become the winners, I guess.

This was a pretty good episode.  It's always good to see Louise going after someone for revenge.  She's really good about becoming obsessed with making someone pay and making sure that the payback has enough sting to it to make her oppressor regret crossing her.  The funniest thing is that the librarian convinced her to do the Topsy expose, yet he refused to take any blame in all the trouble that Louise had caused.  It was great to see her take down Dinkler, even if Tina was in a little danger.  All of her scheming and Teddy's shoddy electrical work made the story interesting from beginning to end.  The spiceps and spice rack weren't that interesting, though, but it's strange that one of them was able to win the science fair.  It really shows that Louise and the others go to a rather stupid school.

Winston Wins My Heart By Cutting Down A Child

New Girl, S01E14

 Well, it's finally happened--I found an episode where I liked Winston.  For once, he wasn't just an afterthought on this show, offering a few almost funny lines from time to time and boring stories.   I thought it was a fluke the first time he got me to chuckle, but he was pretty consistently hilarious this time.

Before I get into Winston, I want to talk about Schmidt and Cece continuing seeing each other.  I was surprised that Cece is addicted to Schmidt, despite he is pretty repulsive.  The sex is obviously good between them, but when he was comparing himself to a river and her being a canoe, I wanted to gag a little.  Yet, somehow it failed to send her packing.  I wanted to feel bad for Schmidt, but his mouth wouldn't stop making me cheer for Cece to run far away.  I did feel a little for him when he had to stay in her car while she went to a party, but it soon went away.  I guess in the next episode they will announce their relationship to their friends.  As long as Schmidt doesn't run up the wall and give them way too much information about the nature of their sex as he did in the Chinese restaurant, he might have a chance to get approval, rather than incredulous protest, from the others.

Now onto Winston.  He had me grinning when he said he liked meeting the girls Schmidt brought home by pretending to be his downlo lover.  Oh, God, how I would like to see that!  But I was really laughing when he and Nick were talking about the meaning of the cactus Julia had sent to him.  Nick, obviously a person who over-analyzes things, thinks that the plants means that Julia wants to break up with him:

[Winston] Who told you that? Did the cactus tell you that? Is this one of those fortune-telling cactus?

Later, after Jess describes a bully problem in her class, Winston says that he used to be a bully as a kid.  Not a stretch at all.  He seems like that type, with his lack of emotions and need to compete with others.  Obviously he has grown as a person, but he still has that mean vibe about him.  That being said, I was pretty shocked in an amused way to see Winston leap out of his seat in order to look at the crescent moon outside.  While Jess questions why they are so excited about seeing it, Winston longingly looks into the sky and says that he hopes to live there one day.  Wow.  Where did that comes from?  It's the first time I've thought he was kinda cute besides the one time he bonded with a child at Schmidt's Christmas party.

Winston was also good as the support for both Jess and Nick in this episode.  Jess had broken a bitchy, evil student's robot arm after the little brat asked her several rude questions including why Jess' voice was so deep and why did she break up with her last boyfriend.  She needed Winston's help to fix it and all he brought were his "good scissors."  Ha.  With Nick, Julia did end up breaking up with him (finally--knew they wouldn't last, especially after Valentine's Day) because Nick's voicemails made her realize that was what she really wanted.  So Nick was in a very, very fragile state and needed a friend by his side.  Schmidt was too busy sneaking around with Cece, so Winston had to do.  Nick was so scary, it was hilarious.  He was way too cheerful and uncharacteristically positive that you knew he was going to explode with despair and possibly rage that no one wanted to be on the other side of.

This forced Winston to come to Jess' science fair at her school along with Nick.  It's interesting that two guys who definitely weren't there to see their own children were allowed to walk around, as crazy as they were being (Nick anyway).  The best thing that happens there is that Winston steps in to say what Jess can't say about how "difficult" the bratty student, Brianna, is:

[Winston] Your daughter sucks.  She is a demon seed, she is the spawn of Satan, and I do believe I speak for the entire human race when I say that people like her should not be building robots.

[Brianna's Mother #2] Who are you?

Applause!  I can't believe Jess didn't give him five for that.  Who cares about being professional; that girl is horrible!  She's obviously smart, so why does she need to act like an asshole?  Anyway, this is one of my favorite moments in New Girl so far.  It's right up there with the awkward threesome with Remy.

The last good thing Winston did in this episode was snatch his "good scissors" (what are they doing laying around for children to get??) from Nathaniel:

 Eh! Get my scissors outta your mouth! What is wrong with you??

No wonder the kids in class didn't like him.  I was happy that this boy, though, seemed to be free from being the class target, and Jess had become the point of ridicule.  I didn't care much for the youtube video Brianna had made of her, but I loved that Jess got further revenge on Brianna by making her sing with her in front of the class.  That'll teach her!  I hope that girl doesn't pop up in any more episodes, even though I want to see more of Jess at her job.  I feel like someone as child-like as her would have some interesting adventures with her students.

Oh, and Nick walking around with the cactus plant he had abused in his dazed-out, happy mode was wonderful.  He was even sleeping with it.  I kinda want him to keep that mangled plant for while.

Great episode.  The Valentine's Day one set my expectations low this time, so it was nice to be blown away for a change.  I knew this show couldn't disappoint me for too long!