Review: Amazing World of Gumball ‘The Plan’

 Spoilers Below

I’m back with my second time ever watching The Amazing World of Gumball. Last week I was very pleasantly surprised, so let’s see if they can continue to make a fan out of me.

The episode opens up with Gumball, Darwin, and Anais outside of their house. Gumball and Darwin are furiously looking through the garbage for the weapons for Gumball’s toy barbarian. Anais questions if they’re really that important, which Gumball insists that they are. While digging through the garbage, they find a letter addressed to their mom. It reads, “Here’s another gift, because your beauty and happiness are the most important things in my world.” The letter is signed ‘Daniel Leonard’. This romantic letter leads them to the conclusion that someone is trying to steal their mom away. You have to admit, Daniel Leonard does sound like one smooth cat.

Their mom comes outside and is appalled at the mess they’ve made. When she confronts them, she has her index fingers over her eyes to create the illusion of an angry expression. They ask her what she’s doing, and she replies “If I had to pull a real frown every time you guys misbehaved, I’d be more wrinkly than a granny in a bath.” When she asks them what they’re doing, they hesitantly tell her that they’re recycling. It turns out that their mom is pretty gullible, because she completely buys it.

As soon as she walks away, Gumball goes back into panic mode and faints a few times. When he finally pulls himself together, he hatches – what he believes to be – an ingenious plan to prevent this mysterious suitor from wooing their mom. First, Darwin will call the house posing as her boss, telling her that there’s an emergency at work and that she has to come in. Then, as soon as she leaves, Gumball will hack into her e-mail account and send Daniel Leonard a message asking him to meet her in the park that night. The next step is to take her clothes so that Gumball can dress up as her. Once they all get to the park, Anais and Darwin will find Leonard and pretend to be survivors of their mother’s carnivorous wrath. They’ll warn Daniel Leonard that he’s in danger, and then Gumball – disguised as his mother – will burst out of hiding, attack Leonard, and scare him off for good. Anais says that the plan could work, but that they have to make sure it’s foolproof.

They proceed to imagine and act out every possible flaw in their plan. As they play out the plan in a hypothetical world, things continue to go wrong. They iron out all the wrinkles while taking full advantage of all of the humorous possibilities of the space-time continuum. At one point, hypothetical past Gumball battles hypothetical future Gumball over whether or not to bother changing the subject line of their e-mail invitation, which read ‘Fake e-mail to Daniel Leonard’. Needless to say, they decided that that would be a huge flaw in their plan. Eventually, after many run throughs, they deemed their plan foolproof. It was time to actually execute it.
We cut to Gumball, Darwin, and Anais running down the street. All of a sudden, they come to a screeching halt and look up at a billboard for Daniel Leonard Anti-Aging Products. They quickly realize that Daniel Leonard isn’t a suitor trying to take their mom from them, but rather a brand of cosmetics that she uses to fight the stress-induced wrinkles she referred to earlier in the episode.

I thought it’d be hard for them to top last week’s episode being so chock full of great internet humor, but this episode did the job. I’m a sucker for a good time travel sequence, and Gumball’s battle with himself was really funny. His facial expressions are always good for a chuckle. I loved how they went over the plan so many times; repeatedly finding things wrong with it and having to come up with new ways to perfect it. Anais adds a very entertaining dynamic to the show. This was my second episode, and my first time meeting her. She was a bit of a know-it-all, but it was cool to see that they didn’t go the bratty little sister antagonist route with her. An entire episode based on the overactive imaginations of three kids seems to work like a charm, so I don’t have to devise and act out an entire plan to know that I’m giving it an