Review: China IL ”Life Coaches”

 

Spoilers Below

Pony, Steve, BC, and Frank decide to be each other’s life coaches. Steve convinces Pony to see a therapist then she pays it forward by helping Frank rid of his hoarding ways so as to be cooler than his brother, BC convinces Steve that he should shit in potted plants to fight back against the Easter Bunny to which Frank thinks sounds insane, and we still have to find out what happened at the onset of the episode when the four can be seen dumping a body in the lake.

Well, all hell breaks loose when the Easter Bunny that BC was trying to defend the school against, arrives and causes all sorts of havoc in and around campus. It interrupts everything, from Steve’s class to Frank’s pitch meeting with the History Channel, until its eventual demise at the hands of Pony while she’s locked up in the crazy house. It’s here we learn that Pony had repressed feelings about the passing of her husband, so she re-joins the other guys in helping dump the body of the now-dead Easter Bunny into the lake where all good end well, right? Nope…

Meanwhile, the Dean wants to beat The Mayor at checkers, so he teams up with Leonard to try and find a brain that’s really good at playing the game so that he can win and Leonard can win a bet. Eventually, The Dean rounds up all of the brains including The Mayor’s so a win looks like a sure-fire thing. But, when Jesus shows up looking for his pal the Easter bunny, he rewards humanity’s honesty with holy food that sets everyone right, and The Dean once again goes home with a loss.

Our Take

This week’s episode of China IL was a bit all over the place, even for this show which I always thought was a series that could control its chaos. You can tell that even writer Brad Neely was trying to help viewers stay in focus with his wheel of faces, but I’m not sure it really worked because after a while we just started skipping around a bit and it was a bit difficult to keep up. That said, BC constantly talking about shitting in the potted plants and the Easter Bunny going ballistic did a lot to help out the episode as a whole. Moreover, I think Frank’s pitch for The History Channel is one of the most insane things I’ve ever seen on Adult Swim.

Unfortunately, the checkers’ bit with The Dean was kind of lame as hell. Was it funny seeing Leonard Cakes take on a huge science experiment? Yes…it always is. But, I just didn’t care enough about The Dean winning at fucking checkers to really invest a lot of meaning into it. And with the amount of crazy shit going on in the A-plot, I would’ve like to have even seen this bit 86’d in favor of letting the other story kind of gel and settle a bit rather than the constant all-over-the-place direction we got in the end.

On a side note, why am I JUST noticing that Adult Swim censors the words ‘shit’ and ‘God Damn It’ from their broadcasts? FX and TBS certainly don’t do the same for their respected animated shows, I’m wondering why this show/Adult Swim is doing it?