Review: Victor and Valentino “Los Pajaros”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

It’s Huitzi’s birthday and everyone is giving the bird extravagant presents, all except for Valentino, who doesn’t understand why a bird, even Chata’s pet, is getting so many things it’ll never be able to use. So instead, he decides to take one of the presents and trade it in for something he wants. Shortly after, numerous birds in town begin to target him, forcing him to make amends and turn in his own gift to Huitzi, finally stopping the attacks.

OUR TAKE

Let it never be said that this show doesn’t know its film references, since, as the title implies, this is a bit of a parody of the famous Alfred Hitchcock movie “The Birds”, with numerous callbacks and shot for shot references to the film, which is iconic in classic film canon. Though the main focus of the episode is really between Valentino and Huitzi, two characters who don’t really have a lot going on between them specifically but are connected to the rest of the main cast by association. Huitzi is the cute pet character of the show, not having any lines for himself and mainly expressing himself by pecking at the titular duo, but he is a faithful companion to Chata and supplements the comedy nicely. It’s also implied that, like Chata, he has some connection to the supernatural, which would make sense considering that so many of the more spiritual kerfuffles in this show are connected to animals.

Then there’s Valentino, who is typically the conscious and the brains between him and Victor, but on his own, he’s a bit of a smart alec and overly logical, which shows here when he tries to find some sort of logic in giving presents to a bird and not bothering to understand the cultural significance of that gesture. I’m not very familiar with how this relates to actual Mexican culture, but the message of the episode seems to point more towards being kind and respectful of forces you may not fully understand, lest you be attacked by swarms of birds and covered in gallons of bird poop. It shows that, for one, Valentino can have episodes that he carries without Victor being the instigator who he needs to reign in, with his own flaws and shortcomings that can be fleshed out and poked at.

When you have a main duo, it can be easy to get wrapped up in focusing on that dynamic instead of working on the two of them as individual characters that have their own ways of thinking that have ways to grow and learn from than simply interacting between the two of them. In fact, tomorrow’s episode does the same for Victor as he takes the reins for a situation that could really only happen for him and his personality, furthermore showing that this series has a fully fleshed out cast in its arsenal. With several episode left to cover in this month long dump of them throughout October, I can certainly hope they’re up to at least this standard.