Review: Central Park “Dog Spray Afternoon”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

In her latest effort to mire Central Park in the mud of New Yorker’s minds, Bitsy hires a one man tag team to come in and spray paint ‘shart’ all over the park. Owen has to meet with his tagger informant, but he still can’t learn the tagger’s identity. Once Molly helps him to put the pieces together, they decide to hold a stakeout in order to catch the villainous graffiti artist in the act.

Meanwhile, Paige is hot on the trail of tracking down the shell corporation behind Mayor Whitebottom’s real estate deals – with a little help from the narrator. And when Shampagne’s doggy therapist recommends outside movement therapy, Helen enlists Cole to take the fluffy fur ball on his daily walk. She plots to kill the pup, but in the end, winds up saving both Cole and the dog.

Our Take:

In the fifth episode of Central Park, things are starting to heat up. After a brief sidebar in last week’s episode, which saw Molly chasing after her crush and Paige chasing after a rat colony, Dog Spray Afternoon returns the focus to the overarching season plot of Bitsy’s schemes to overthrow Owen and take Central Park for herself.

The main story this week revolves around Owen’s quest to unmask the mysterious graffiti tagger. It’s an enjoyable series of events that all hinge around Owen being at his funniest when he’s getting passionate about his park. Seeing him meet with his ‘graffiti informant’ was definitely a highlight, and the way it ended so casually was great. Hope the math went okay! Molly gets to tag along with her dad on this one, and I was interested to see how their dynamic would play out, since they haven’t really spent much screen time together with just the two of them. I didn’t quite think they played off each other as well as, say, Cole and Paige, but the stakeout was cute. (They make great giggling bushes!)

The rest of the episode is filled with a pretty impressive number of little B-plots, like Paige’s hunt for the Mayor’s dirt, Cole’s miraculous good fortune, and Birdie’s spoilers. My favorite of these was probably Helen and her spotlight stealing song “If There’s A Will”. Her mix of outright villainy and maid with a soft side is sweet to see. I’m not sure anyone else could’ve pulled off a violin/hip-hop track like she did.

If I had one major complaint, it would be that Birdie’s intro spoiler song tried to get a bit too cute. It always feels kind of weird to me when a narrator teases all the exciting stuff but can’t get too specific yet, when the stuff itself is happening in this very episode. It’s like… delaying the good stuff to tell us that the good stuff is coming? But I actually felt a lot better about the spoiler song once it actually figured into the plot. Having the narrator just giveaway crucial plot information to Paige is a really wild thing to do, but I kind of like it? It just shows that anything goes in Central Park.