Review: Bob’s Burgers “Sauce Side Story”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

It’s Mother’s Day and the Belcher kids are stumped about what to get for Linda. Tina’s card idea is played out and they’re not sure what to do until the family’s old time-y feud is revealed. Apparently there was a fork-stabbing incident and then a wedding dress fiasco and now Linda’s mom’s special sauce recipe is with the other side of the schism. The kids set out to steal is back for Mother’s Day, but wind up solving the feud instead.

Our Take:

This week’s episode of Bob’s Burgers is, aptly, a Mother’s Day ep. Sometimes the holiday specials don’t always air on their respective days, so it’s nice to see it happen when one does line up perfectly like this. And it’s also a good foundation to build upon for a story that explores more of the Belcher lineage than we’ve seen in the past.

We’ve met Bob’s parents before, but I think this might be the farthest back we’ve gone in terms of history. Much like the kids themselves, it’s hard to keep them all straight, but the long and short of it is that one side accidentally stabbed the other side in the hand with a fork, and then the side that got stabbed wore a wedding dress to the other side’s wedding. It all sounds pretty silly when you write it out, which is what it turns out to be in the long run.

Family feuds are easy grounds for stories like this, and I think the overall arc was a little cliche here. The episode started out as an exciting way to get Linda a great Mother’s Day gift but then morphed into a generic feud fiasco. I did really enjoy some of the moments along the way, however.

For starters, Lorraine and Nico are both really fun characters. Nico, especially, just seems so happy to meet cousins and show off his action figures and his love of chicken. It’s nice to see how the younger generation didn’t care about the feud, only friendship. In terms of the jokes, I was dying at Aunt Gayle going undercover as the kid’s mother. Giving Tina mom advice about parting her hair differently and then grounding her for not agreeing is peak Gayle and a hilarious look at why it’s probably a good thing that she doesn’t have human children.

The subplot revolves around Teddy, Bob, and Linda trying to come up with ways to turn his mom’s playing card tattoo into something else and it’s—pretty boring. Really the whole thing is just them drawing different ideas on the chalkboard the whole time. None of the ideas are particularly funny or inventive, too, so this whole B-plot was not what I would’ve liked to see the ep spend time on.

Overall, this episode is a bit of a mixed bag. It definitely had some fun moments, like Gayle and the kids going undercover and meeting Lorraine and Nico, but the family feud storyline feels played out and Teddy’s tattoo stuff was just too slight to amount to anything. At least now we get the possibility of seeing Nico and Lorraine come over for chicken dinner in the future maybe?