Review: The Great North “You’ve Got Math Adventure”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

It’s group soup night at Maude’s, and everyone is excited about it. Except for Moon and Honeybee, who are staying at home to watch Shark Week. But Honeybee learns more than she bargained for when she answers a phone call from Moon’s principal and learns he’s failing math. She resolves to tutor him until he’s able to pass his make-up test, and along the way they investigate his true parentage. Meanwhile, the rest of the family tries to dissuade a moose from making out with their car.

Our Take:

This week’s episode of The Great North is a fun one! Featuring a rarely seen Honeybee/Moon pairing and keeping the other Tobin family members out of the way in a silly subplot, You’ve Got Math Adventure is an entertaining episode that manages to cover a bit of new territory for the show while retaining its typical comedy.

The main plot sees Honeybee helping Moon through both an external crisis and an internal one. Not only is the ten-year-old failing math, but because the rest of his family is so good at it, he feels like he must be adopted. Honeybee takes him on a journey across town that shows him not only the value of math, but the truth that he really isn’t adopted, despite his family differences. It’s a sweet story, but the show finds room for humor, too, like the drug-addled trucker and Reggie the mailman.

While I give a thumbs up for trying something sort of fresh here, I do think that combining the whole math thing with the paternity search made for a few clunky moments, and as a whole, I felt like the conclusion where Beef just tells Moon that he’s not actually good at math was a little lacking. It would’ve been nice to see Beef being bad at math, rather than just being told about it.

Apart from Honeybee and Moon’s journey of self-discovery, there’s not a whole lot going on in You’ve Got Math Adventure. That’s not to say that Beef and his other kids don’t do anything, just that the thing they do mostly consist of sitting around and watching a moose make out with their vehicle due to its salt residue. It’s a fun little side story that doesn’t take too much time away from the meat of the episode, which I appreciated. Also, Beef’s joke about the animal control hotline leading to a prerecorded clip telling callers an encouraging message of self-reliance was great, maybe my favorite line of the night.

Overall, this episode of The Great North’s second season is a solid one. I liked seeing Honeybee and Moon together, and the two of them make a great team—even if the whole paternity search/math tutoring doesn’t quite fit together as nicely as it could. Plus, the silly subplot was a perfect compliment to the main storyline. And that french maid moose song made the end credits just as enjoyable as the episode itself.