Review: Regular Show “Ships in the Saddle”

Skips is left alone at the park when everyone has other plans. See what Skips does after the jump!

Spoilers.

You gotta feel for Skips. This man is immortal, yet has problems finding dudes to hang with. He has a whole set up for cards at his place, but he has to put it all away because no one was able to hang. Skips then lifts weights, grabs a can of sardines out of the fridge, and gets dissed by the movie on TV. Elsewhere, Mordecai and Rigby see Skips outside, and he is pretty tired of being alone. Skips tells Mordecai that he’s ready to date again, and calls his dudes from school, Gary, Techmo, and Reginald. They go to a bar, where Gary and Techmo show Skips that being immortal and magic makes picking up women very easy. This leaves Skips and Reginald. Reginald gets the ball rolling with two more girls, but Skips ends up saying that their dresses look like diapers.

Back at Skips’s place, Mordecai and Rigby are trying to throw cards into a trash can, when Gary’s magical El Camino drops Skips off without a woman. Skips isn’t a club guy, so, Mordecai and Rigby set up a dating profile for Skips, which gets 85,000 views and a spot on the front page of the site within seconds. Skips is selected to be a contestant on It’s a Date, but Skips tries to say he isn’t that type of guy. Rigby shuts him up quick by asking him if he wants to spend the next 200 years shuffling cards. They go to the mall, and get Skips all dressed up. He even gets his hair done. They get back to the house, and Skips is having problems with the questions section of the show, which gives Mordecai an idea.

At the show, the host introduces the date, Gina Albright. The other contestants on the show are a centaur looking scumbag who bears a striking resemblence to Riff Raff named Jimmy Jams, T-Shirt Guy, and Skips, with Rigby as a ventriloquist’s dummy. With each question, Gina is getting increasingly more creeped out by the first two contestants, but wooed by Rigby sweet talking Gina in place of Skips. This leads Rigby and T-Shirt Guy into an argument. which drives T-Shirt Guy to start shooting everywhere with his t-shirt gun. This causes the entire set to be destroyed, and Gina to be saved repeatedly by Skips. Skips comes clean about being a park groundskeeper, and goes to leave. Gina stops him, and she chooses Skips to go on a trip to go to Costa Rica with. Skips comes back, and after a montage of Skips saving Gina, he says she was too high maintenance. The good news is, however, that Skips is back in the saddle again.

Skips is back, baby! Skips deserves a good episode, especially having to deal with that god awful Skips comic mini-series. I think this is a seismic change to the show as well, as Skips hasn’t dated since Mona back when he was in school. Way to go, Skips! It was good to see Rigby take the selfless route, here, because it was another sign of growth for the show. It seems that whenever Skips and love interest are involved in the same sentence, the other immortals are involved. I know they were supposed to be wingmen, but they absolutely sucked at it. This is the second week in a row where Mordecai and Rigby came to the rescue. I sense a theme here.

That theme is growth. There was such a stagnate period in the show. The transition from the Margaret era to the CJ era was so bad that I was thinking the show was going to be cancelled. Then they actually got Mordecai and CJ together, and brought the show something really new and fresh.. As much as I liked seeing Mordecai and Rigby kick the shit out of each other early on, there are actually other things you can do so you can have a show last as long as Regular Show. Putting a character like Skips in a situation where he seems rather weak, means that something huge is going to happen. It also seems like that we will be getting a new lady friend coming to the park though I just hope the introduction was better than what we got for CJ. It also looks like the producers are laying the groundwork towards Rigby getting with Eileen. It’s about time.

This was a great gateway episode, meaning that I feel that something really big is going to come from this start. I’m curious to see where this goes, because Skips deserves a killer story arc.