Review: Victor and Valentino “Old Man Teo”
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
It’s Senior Day at the Nursing Home and every one of the kids is being paired up with an old person. Valentino is eager to please as she chooses to work with the meanest old person in the group, Teo, who turns out to be a former god.
OUR TAKE
Okay, yeah, that’s more like it, something far more mundane and well meaning turning into a crazy weird outing without any unfortunate moral implications! I mean, I guess you could count giving old people who are clearly off their rocker access to dangerous equipment just because you want them to like you, though I guess you could say that worked out in the end since that turned out to be the right call anyway. Besides, he’s a former god! Or at least he seems to be? A cursory google search of mayan gods didn’t seem to turn up anything about someone like him, which is odd because I figured this would be something that would have done research for this sort of episode and made use of an actual mythical figure. Alas, no such luck, so this might be a totally fictitious god made for this episode OR I’m culturally ignorant and not looking in the right places for where Teo might be in mythology. But it luckily doesn’t get in the way of me enjoying this episode for the RIGHT reasons. It’s a story about appreciating and respecting our elders, which is not something that always happens once they’re so old that they’re put in a nursing home.
Teo is shown as the most cranky and least friendly old people in that home, and we soon learn that this is because he is demeaned and condescended to by the orderlies within the home. This is unfortunately an all too common thing for residents of these facilities when they get to a certain age, as even if they were respected or even feared in the prime of their lives, their old age has left them without influence, and often also basic faculties that they need to take care of themselves. This leaves them open to abuse or neglect by those in charge who may not really care about taking care of them. I mean, I don’t think that’s really the case here, since Teo seems to be pretty well taken care of and the only thing that he’s not allowed to do is wear his giant hat that has fireworks in it. But he’s also not given the same level of reverence that he’s used to which Valentino, who is apparently a people pleaser, is more than happy to help him reclaim. Hopefully we can see Teo more in future episodes, since I think he has a lot more story potential to him.
