Review: Happy! “Five Chicken Fingers and a Gun”

The miracle of life.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Amanda is finally giving birth to the disgusting brood of wishies that she’s been forced to carry for most of the season. While Orcas watches on, she delivers the child, which is actually a clutch of eggs that falls unceremoniously to the floor. With her sanity restored and her uterus empty, Amanda doesn’t let a minute pass without trying to take the power back. She grabs a nearby oxygen tank, lights it on fire, and uses it to burn the wishie eggs and set fire to the wishie onlookers.

Orcas escapes, but runs into Nick, Happy and Meredith in the hospital hallway. Nick is ready to go to town, but, Orcas uses his unholy powers to force the nearby hospital staff to take bullets for him. His power, Merry explains, is to make people kill themselves, and he can do that in such a way to defend himself. He’s just about to make Merry kill herself when Happy arrives and saves the day using a new power, his ability to make people submit to their lust for each other and have sex.

The team gets away and is able to get back home, while Orcas reorients himself and meets up with Sonny once more. Sonny, who has lost the wishies which made his career, is forlorn, but Orcas inspires him to get back on his feet as his men do a hostile takeover of Sonny’s network. Meredith tries to get in touch with some of her contacts but gets knocked out in her investigation by a mysterious assailant. She wakes up tied to a chair as a fortune telling women stands over her. She knows about Orcas and burns Merry’s hand as an induction into the “Blue Feather”, some kind of mystical group that hunts down evil.

Nick, meanwhile, confronts Smoothie in Hailey’s high school gym but holds off on killing him because he needs to find out her location. Amanda doesn’t have such restraint however and starts beating the crap out of Smoothie. This is satisfying but ineffective. Smoothie then takes the two of them to a warehouse and has Amanda inject Nick with something, all the while Orcas meets Hailey in her hotel room.

Our Take:

Now that’s what I’m talking about! With only a few episodes left, Happy! is coming out guns blazing. All the pieces are in place, all the dominoes are in order, and now we get to watch them all fall down in a blaze of glory. This week’s episode is a joyous, violent, over-the-top massacre that delivers on some great character moments and exciting setpieces. With the focus moved away from Sonny and his weirdness, Orcas has taken the mantle of villainy in this show as his own, and he’s proving to be a much more exciting villain than Sonny ever was. With Nick going full throttle and Amanda back in action, we’re getting the same kind of action we got in the first season but better, since now Amanda is taking part in the carnage.

“Pregnant” Amanda was starting to wear her welcome for me. Her insanity was curious, but somewhat annoying because of how much it muddied up Nick’s efforts. But Amanda comes back strong as she burns her own disgusting brood with an oxygen tank flamethrower. This cements her from here on as another ultraviolent badass that can keep up with Nick, which makes her that much more fun in this show.

Happy is no longer just a bystander to the plot now, but an active agent which adds a new dimension to this team that the show is assembling. Happy’s ability to inspired carnal lust in anyone in the room is a good payoff to his “Virginity loss” plot. It adds some sense of satisfaction to that plotline which was previously missing from those episodes. And it also makes Happy feel like a character who has some use other than just offering Nick advice and making him feel bad about himself.

Everything just works in this episode. From Orcas, who is becoming one of my favorite television villains, to the fantastic action sequences, there’s just so much to love. Rule of cool is law in this show, and it’s working so much better than the middle episodes of this season in grabbing viewer interest. I don’t think there will be an amazing explosion of the plot at the end of the season to elevate this story into something higher, but that’s just fine with me. I think it’s better for a show to do what it does well than to fail at something it’s not.