Review: Bob’s Burgers ‘Adventures in Chinchilla-sitting’

 

Spoilers Below:

Ah, trivia night; a fun time to have a few beers and a few laughs with a few friends. Unless you’re humiliated by not knowing the answers. Or, in my case not knowing one answer. This is a true story: A few years ago, a group of friends and I attended a local bar’s trivia night and cleverly named ourselves “When I Think About Me, I Touch Yourself,” a spoof of the famous song “I Touch Myself.” Lo and behold, during the music segment of the game, one of the songs we had to identify was this very track. You’d think this would be quite the stroke of luck. Unfortunately, no one on the team actually knew who sang it. We we’re stumped, and had to sit through the host announcing that our team didn’t know who sang the song of which our name was a spoof. Of course to this day, I will now never forget that the song is by The Divinyls.

But back to Bob’s Burgers.

Linda and Bob went out on a date night, leaving Tina to babysit Gene, Louise, and Louise’s class’s pet chinchilla. The animal got loose, and the crew had to track it down, with some help from Tammy and jealous classmate Wayne. In the end, Louise let Wayne watch the chinchilla instead, in a rare display of sympathy from the youngest Belcher.

Meanwhile, Bob and Linda struggled at their bar trivia date night, until Linda stole a copy of the answer sheet. They were eventually caught, but still had a pleasant night out together.

In Case You Missed It:

1) Next door store: Lady and the Clamp – Hardware for Her

2) Burger of the Day: The Six Scallion Dollar Man Burger.

3) Previous name of Bob & Louise’s trivia team: Albert Beerstein. Current name: The Date Knights of the Round Table.

4) Who the hell came up with Princess Little-Piddles?

5) Louise: “Why is the front door open?” / Gene: “Maybe God closed a window?”

6) The song Teddy was singing in his car: “IIIIIIII…wish my radio worked.”

7) Gene to Tammy: “You’re in eighth grade? I thought you were someone’s mom.”

“Adventures in Chinchilla-sitting” is an interesting specimen. It had so many things that really seemed to work, yet the episode as a whole doesn’t feel like an obvious success.

Take the plot. On paper, a kid-centric main plotline with Tina in charge and Louise running the show seems like a sure-fire winner. Tina is always great in a semi-confident, semi-powerful, and semi-responsible role, right? Jenny Slate’s Tammy and Andy Richter’s Wayne characters were welcome additions to the group too. And Yet I kind of feel like the chinchilla (and to a less extent: Louise) was the leader, and everyone else was just along for the ride. Especially when it came to the even more minor returing characters, like the security guard and Tina’s older boy crush. They moved around from place to place in pursuit of the class pet, yet there didn’t seem to be too much urgency on anyone’s part, and honestly, as a viewer, I didn’t care whether they caught it or not. In fact, part of me wanted to see the little guy get splattered.

Going back to characters, the only one in the main story that was especially good was Gene. His comments above (#7 was one of the biggest single laughs I can recall this season) were entertaining from start to finish, and contained his usual mix of overly-adult statements and silly kid comments, like the Gene/Jean jacket gag or him pretending to be a pizza guy.

Oh, and I was glad to hear Doug Benson as Dave, because he’s awesome.

As for the parents’ plot, it’s always amusing to see Bob and Linda together in the real world, freaking out all the squares and just trying to have fun. However, I would have liked to see their story merge with the kids’ sometime before the last minute of the episode. I feel like they could have crossed paths earlier, or maybe have a few near misses before each party arrived home.

I’m pointing out these flaws not to belittle the episode overall, but merely trying to explain why it wasn’t as big of a success as it could have been. I mean, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster was built with good intentions, right? It just ended up being a bit too stitched together, a bit simple at times, and not as pleasant to view as one would hope. But still a good achievement!

This episode was a hell of a lot funnier than the creature though. So, you know, bonus points.