Review: Bob’s Burgers “Mission Impossi-Bob”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Teddy gets stuck in a safe, Bob goes to help him out, the rest of the family tries to make a big burger for some customers.

OUR TAKE

Bob’s Burgers is back to serve up an order for the year of [CURRENT YEAR]! And hey, one part of it involves Bob, and another part involves a giant Burger! Can you think of a more on brand way to kick off the new year?! Well, maybe if they started making burgers OUT of Bob, but that seems like a series finale kind of plot (and a neat call back to the first episode!). But no, we’ve got another pretty typical episode of the show for you this week. The main plot, and what the title is referring to, involves Bob going to get Teddy out of a bad situation before Teddy’s client gets back so that Teddy looks like a competent repairman, which is more rare than it should be for someone who makes their whole career around that. But it’s also nice to get another episode reaffirming Bob and Teddy’s friendship and what one will go through to help the other. Teddy has always proved himself to be a kind and trustworthy guy, so working with an apparently not very trusting client is rather fitting…which makes me wish that had been the focus of the episode instead, actually.

I guess that’s the real kinda shame of this episode, that it could’ve been more, but for whatever reason it’s not. I’m not sure the timing matches up with this theory, but maybe they had this episode more about Teddy trying to win over this client who is so distrusting he leaves traps out for other repairmen to fall for like leaving food or money out, but Teddy ignores them all because he’s genuinely just that good of a guy. And maybe Bob was involved with that plot in some way to help Teddy in a bigger way, but then the writer’s strike happened and they had to rush to fill up the runtime with something, so they added the B plot with the family making the Beef-Hemoth for a bunch of customers all of a sudden. Or maybe I’m just overthinking this and this was how it was meant to go all along, and maybe I’m just a bit spoiled for good Bob’s Burgers episodes after that really good Rudy episode we got early on in the season. Regardless of my expectations though, this is still a plenty solid episode, and I expect the same for the next…whenever that comes out.