Review: Duncanville “Party Like a Rocket Star”

 

Overview (Spoilers Below):

When Jack and Annie discover that Kimberly and her friend Claire haven’t been invited to a middle school party of popular kids, they take it into their own hands to give their daughter the gift of popularity that they experienced.

Meanwhile, Duncan and his friends try to create a video that goes viral in order to become rich and famous. It doesn’t quite go as expected though, and in the end neither Duncan nor Kimberly wind up with the ending they thought they wanted.

Our Take:

This episode of Duncanville had a decent enough plot and shifted the focus around to a number of characters, but it didn’t quite pack the punch of the previous episodes in the show’s second season. Party Like a Rocket Star has a handful of decent moments, but for the most part I found it pretty unfunny — which is an unpardonable sin when it comes to late night animated comedies.

The inciting incident to the main plot is interesting enough: Kimberly’s parents weasel out the fact that their daughter in an ‘unpop’ thanks to her friend Claire’s admission that the two of them pretend to be out of town at music festivals whenever they don’t get invited to a party. It’s a situation that could go a number of ways, but the episode handles things in the most basic, by-the-book way, having Jack and Annie redirect the party to their own house where Kimberly has fun and then stops having fun as the party gets out of control.

Duncan’s B-plot is perhaps even more underwhelming, as it consists of he and his crew trying a number of pranks and pratfalls to go viral, none of which really feel current or exciting. Mia is around as the voice of reason, but there’s no real resistance or conflict, just Duncan and company trying a bunch of dumb stunts until they combine soda with breath mints and make a rocket go bang.

Jing has a little plot of her own this week. She hangs out with her unimaginative little friend from across the street, but again, there’s just nothing here that stood out or came across as laugh out loud funny. It’s nice to see a friend for Kimberly on screen, but Claire is all one-note and her final breakdown is easy to spot coming from a mile away. One of the things that comedy needs is the unexpected, and unfortunately Party Like a Rocket Star did not deliver on that front. (And what was up with that Toxic song choice for the party? It felt so out of place!)