Review: Bob’s Burgers “Late Afternoon in the Garden of Bob and Louise”

Spoilers Below

Bob really, really wants to garden for his restaurant, he heads over to Cynthia’s to see what’s going down. Bob ends up making a deal with her in getting accepted into the community garden in exchange for having her son Logan take on a part-time job that can be used as part of an essay.

Louise is FURIOUS that Logan is working here, but she tries to be on her best behavior so that her dad can love being a gardener. With dad taking part in gardening, Louise is doing everything she can to convince her mother that Logan is bad news despite the fact that Gene likes him and Tina is using him for intel. Cynthia shows up to the restaurant and now Lin is on the Louise bandwagon of hating Logan and Cynthia. Bob returns to the restaurant to find Linda and Cynthia fighting and Louise getting ready to destroy Logan. As Cynthia and Logan leave, Bob names Logan employee of the month in exchange for his continued participation in the garden which causes Louise to quit the restaurant.

Louise prepares for war, and loads up on some spit balls. She traverses down a vent in the restaurant so that she can attack Logan from a distance RIGHT in front of his friends and adoring mother. Eventually, she gains the attention of Bob, but really it was just a distraction so that Louise can walk in behind Bob, grab his shears, and head for Bob’s garden. It’s here that Bob realizes that he’s thinking of his plants as his children moreso than he’s thinking about his actual children and that he needs to get his priorities in order.

A slightly overused plot device is heavily covered up by the sweetness that this show eschews in mounds, and I mean mounds. Bob making baby talk with plants has to be the funniest thing I’ve seen all year by an animated series, and Jon Benjamin has one of the better baby talk voices out there. It’s almost this high-squeaky sound almost like how a mouse would convey emotion that would melt even the most hardened of criminals. We see Louise complain a lot in this show, but when she does it’s pretty comical. But not quite as funny as Tina when she’s constantly vying for info from the high school boys, ”Follow up questions, do the showers steam up? I’m asking for a friend.”

I’ve said time and again, that Tina is at her best when she isn’t the focal point and instead just throws in jabs as you are walking with the run-time of the episode.  A rather hysterical episode.