Review: China IL ‘Parent’s Day’

Spoilers Below

It’s Parents Day at China IL, and Pony really wants nothing to do with it and really neither does Frank who opts to go with the Dean, Matt Attack,  and BC to meet up with the former Mrs. Cakes aka Suzie. Turns out, Suzie has a new man in her life in the Rock and she more or less has a dungeon where she performs experiments on animals and former celebrities using her ‘T’-serum. One of those experiments is on Steve Urkel who turns into a hulking monster that begins terrorizing the building. Urkel eventually kills the Rock and does a decent amount of damage to the building. BC ends up capturing Urkel and does his best King Kong impression in an attempt to reunite his parents. A live retelling of Family Matters turns violent as Urkel escapes and decides to go bat shit crazy downtown.

Steve decides to hang out with his mom and dad, but things change when Steve decides to be the head of his childhood home after learning that his dad really can’t pay the bills anymore. This causes Steve’s mom to start hitting on her son so Steve decides to try and convince his dad to be a man. The trio decides to go out to dinner in an attempt to do just this, but Steve ends up paying so that doesn’t help and so Steve’s dad offers up his wife to Steve.

Pony has no interest in seeing her parents, but they show up to the school anyway and begin to throw down a massive party with more Latin stereotypes than you can shake a stick at and pretty much the entirety of her family. The Urkel-Hulk shows up to start shit, but Dean takes the same ‘T’-serum that Urkel got and a big fight ensued. Some of that shit gets on Steve’s dad which solves the whole ‘man’ thing, and BC is excited to find his parents working together to take down the monsters. Urkel comes to grips of what he did and kills himself. The Rock shows up and takes Suzie away, and the Cakes go back to being a non-family.

Our Take

Wow, first the Lucas Bros. now China IL do Urkel plots, but I think there’s enough Urkel to go around. In terms of guest stars, this was the season’s most impressive roster thus far. Kate McKinnon continues to show that she might be the best in the current crop of SNL cast as she did a fantastic job in voicing both Mrs. Smith and Suzie. And although it didn’t look like she needed to burst much of an acting muscle voicing Mrs. Smith, Suzie looked like a challenge and she seemed to handle the character’s grunts and hulking personality with ease. The brilliant Bob Balaban (Peep World) voiced Mr. Smith which again doesn’t seem like a character that really took advantage of the sterling reputation of the actor, but valiant effort nonetheless. Pony’s parents played by Danny Trejo (Machete) and Justina Machado (Six Feet Under) seemed like it had such big promise, but I think we needed an episode where we just spend time with them because there was only so much screen time to go around and we had to save some time for the excellent monster battle at the end.

When speaking with Brad Neely, he had mentioned that there were some episodes that he had to do a bit of trimming to get down to run-time, and this week’s episode showed some of that as we really didn’t get a fair shake at messing around with Pony’s family which means I didn’t get the pay off from the humorous build-up. In any case, there was still a whole bunch to like about the episode and as such shouldn’t be missed.