Review: Mike Tyson Mysteries “Life Is But a Dream”

Spoilers Below

The thing I like about this show is that it pulls no punches (punny, huh?). The viewer knows exactly what they are going to get: Mike pronouncing words funny, Yung He making the majority of the intellectual decisions, Marquess being too pusillanimous and Pigeon acting overtly vulgar.  And that is perfectly fine for the format of the show. In under 15 minutes, the archetypes fit in well with the flow of the story.

The episode starts off with the classic “a character assumes one thing and makes a huge fuss over it, only to be completely wrong” scenario in which Marquess assumes the mystery team is holding an intervention for his alcoholism, when in fact, they were just meeting to discuss their next case. The case in review is for a woman who slipped into a coma and never woke up. The gang makes it to the hospital, to find the woman in a comatose state, the distraught husband, and a step-son who couldn’t care less. Marquess reveals that he can enter other peoples’ mind, and the gang follows him as he attempts to take a margarita break- at a hospital, I might add.

While discussing the plan, Mike takes it upon himself to poison everyone so they can become ghosts and also enter the unconscious mind. In a Disney-esque dreamland, the crew finds the woman up and at ’em and surprisingly, she is particularly lively. A little too lively. She was the coma so that she could have sex with her step-son. Creepy, but the show has this continuously unnerving quality, that follows the humor. Mike and Yung transport out of the world, because they are revived by a doctor; just in time to experience the wife waking up and giving an unnecessarily thorough hug to the step-son.

Our Take

The episode was good, it just left me with a major question? Was the step-son intimate with his step-mother in reality? There is no indication of whether it’s the woman’s fantasy or if she is in a coma reliving the experience. Besides that question which will likely never get answered, there isn’t much to complain about. The imitation of Disney-style art was spot-on. The alcoholic jokes made at Marquess’s expense were funny. Pigeon was his typical rude self with a funny line about entering the woman “the way God intended.”  Mike’s impersonation of a typical white person was definitely the comedic highlight of the episode.

Albeit infused with dark incestual humor, the episode was a step above good, but not quite great. The show works best when each character plays their niche, but having said that, there was no stand-out moment that made this a classic in the show’s current 21 episode lineup.