BubbleCAN Review: Ben’s City ‘Hot Water’
Spoilers Below
In “Hot Water”, Quebec Minister of Environment Henry Wallet is made an offer he has a hard time refusing, after evolving from imbecile Minister to incompetent environmentalist.
Minister Wallet and Ben are conducting a Q&A at a First Nations reserve, in anticipation of an upcoming hydroelectric project.
Although the project is only in the planning stages, the red X’s painted all across the land, people, and dogs, signify the imposing force the government has in order to expand and devour.
Once again, Wallet’s poor communication skills are not making things any easier on the already irritated Aboriginal peoples, and the Minister would be lost without Ben’s aid. He then sells himself by spending time with the natives, through walrus hunting, four-wheeling and playing baseball, all resulting in slapstick results.
On their way home, Ben informs Wallet of issues like global warming, something the inept Minister had never considered.
He then converts into an ill-informed ecologist, who becomes the basis of the humour for the remainder of the episode, including an argument between Wallet and the Minister of Energy, which Ben misinterprets as homosexual pillow talk (later in the episode, we get another sexual misinterpretation involving fluffing in public, with a large, purple hippo).
Meanwhile, Scott is working on a commercial for a new product called the iFound. It’s a device that finds the answer to everything, like the origin of the growth on Scott’s co-worker George’s lip and the setup is brilliant.
Scott proposes hiring Gary Peddle for the iFound ad – an endorser who turns every product into gold. He’s a spot-on parody of Vince Offer, the Sham Wow! guy, although there were no jabs on battering prostitutes. Too excessive?
Two businessmen from Saudi Arabia, with a lucrative hotel project in Dubai (an interior built to scale versions of Times Square, The Grand Canyon, The Amazon, and the greatest tourist attraction know to man; Exit 43 off the 401 in Scarborough), approach Wallet with a bribe to buy up all of Canada’s fresh water supply. Wallet, with his new green outlook, declines, causing the Saudis to hire an independent contractor to build a secret pipeline across the Atlantic. But their first mistake was hiring an independent contractor.
So, with Wallet’s change of heart since the initial plan to build dams and run cables throughout the Aboriginal community, he finds a greener solution – only to become just as big an inconvenience as ever.
