Review: The Great North “Arranger-ous Minds Adventure”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Moon and the Junior Janitors get involved with a teacher scandal. Meanwhile, the rest of the family gets involved with a bunch of crabs.

Our Take:

The Tobin family is back from their holiday hiatus to deliver more adventures for the new year. Hopefully, their return won’t leave them too “crabby” after staying up late celebrating the arrival of 2023. The episode involves the family dealing with crabs, so I had to include a crab pun in this review.

The first episode in the new year consists of Moon joining the Junior Janitors with Russell and Quinn. While their job is to clean up the trash during after-school hours, they occasionally spend extra time finding juicy secrets about their teachers. However, they bite off more than they can chew when they discover that Mr. Golovkin (Paul F. Tompkins) might be a serial killer.

The episode features another formula in which the characters assume someone is not themselves based on what they see. They then come to a conclusion in which they misinterpret what that someone was actually doing. In this case, Mr. Golovkin was actually cooking food to fix his relationship with Ms. Anderson. Mr. Golovkin and Ms. Anderson break up because he refuses to move his train set out of his basement, resulting in Moon making a shocking discovery about his teacher and himself.

The formula has been done multiple times in other shows and movies, which has been one of the minor issues of The Great North. However, the show usually compensates for this flaw with amusement and heart, especially considering its topics. Fortunately, “Arranger-ous Minds Adventure” is no exception, as it deals with Mr. Golovkin’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Because of the disorder, his relationship with Ms. Anderson was crumbling, resulting in Moon believing that his obsessive organizing could put him down that same path regarding his crush on Quinn.

The episode offers plenty of amusing moments involving Moon and the Junior Janitors, including the noir flashbacks. However, it also didn’t shy away from representing OCD and the process of overcoming it. While the representation of the disorder is close to being perfect, the writers did a solid job depicting the topic in an earnest and heartfelt light without crossing the line in the comedy.

There’s also a side plot featuring the Tobin family creating a crab calendar to help Wolf and Honeybee win a honeymoon vacation from a calendar competition. Unsurprisingly, it turned out poorly. The side plot delivered the most laughs for me, mainly because they attempted to use real crabs and crab costumes to get the pictures. The Tobins may not have won the contest, but they do win an award for providing solid slapstick comedy.

Overall, “Arranger-ous Minds Adventure” marks a satisfying start to the new year for the show’s third season. There’s certainly a reason to be obsessed with the episode. One of them is the comedy, primarily the Tobins’ crab situation. The other is its fulfilling depiction of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which is not too offensive or cheesy. While the first half suffers a bit from its predictability, the second half does enough to make it one of the better episodes of season three. Let’s hope the rest of them continues to keep us from getting “crabby” during the new year. Sorry, I can’t resist.