Bubble IE Review: Ends Meet S1 Ep6

Seán Óg looks for love… or something like it…

Overview (Spoilers Below)The sixth episode of Ends Meet centres on Seán Óg’s love life, or lack thereof, and his efforts to do something about it. The opening scene sees Seán Óg being taunted by the school bully for never having kissed anyone – both rites of passage for any average-looking schoolboy. So begins Seán Óg’s quest to lock lips; first trying his luck with some social-media-obsessed girls, and then the cool girls – urged on by his supportive friend who consoles the rejected Seán Óg, advising him to forget about those girls as they are out of his league. That bottom league, apparently, only contains one other person – an unfortunate girl named [S]Melanie. There is also the briefest of hints that Seán Óg’s friend is interested in him romantically – possibly an indication of further topical issues to address in a later episode.
(Side note: To avoid confusion, we point out that Dubliners, ever the champions of linguistic prowess, use the word “meet” to mean “kiss”, as well as for the more traditional meaning understood throughout the rest of the English-speaking world. Something to be mindful of should you ever find yourself engaged in an altercation in a Dublin bar, and are challenged to meet your assailant out back.)
Then, in a classroom scene, the audience is even treated to a little mathematics, but it leads to a gag drawing a tenuous parallel between the prime numbers and Seán Óg’s solitude, so we can forgive the show for its attempts to subtly educate us.
There follows an excellent cutaway daydream scene, where Seán Óg envisions himself in some sort of dystopian future, a lone survivor, alone always, bitter until the very end.
After school, succumbing to peer pressure, Seán Óg relents and approaches Melanie, who seems to be far too sensible for him. Things seem to begin to go well until Seán Óg becomes unkind to Melanie in attempts to avoid the ridicule of a bully who was always going to find fault. Eventually, of course, Melanie is convinced, as is Seán Óg, and indeed, as are we, that this union shows promise – teaching Seán Óg a valuable life lesson about settling for what you can get and convincing yourself that you’re happy.

Our Take:This episode deviated from the norm for this show, in that it included some humour. It remained true to form in choosing one of life’s everyday struggles and addressing it, but rather than simply being a condensed version of a TV soap episode seeking to draw humour from crude animation and familiar accents, it actually included some jokes. Hopefully, the show will persevere with this novel approach since some audiences appreciate humour in a cartoon.
This episode serves as a healthy reminder that being a child and having to deal with kids’ stuff, can be every bit as awful as being an adult and having to deal with grown-ups’ stuff, which seems in keeping with the bleak portrayal of the lives of the show’s characters. That the show deals with the father and son’s lives as partially independent storylines and is willing to have an episode where one of the two main characters is completely absent, is commendable, especially when the episodes are so short. The prolepsis scene worked very well in this episode, and if similar gags become a feature of the show, it will give some scope for humour not held back by harsh reality, which would be most welcome.

 
Score
8/10