They see me rollin.
They hatin.
(Someone had to say it.)
“I’m terrified of motorcycles, but sometimes you have to do things to show the world you’re still a man. Same reason I got that henna tattoo – Japanese symbol for courage.”
– Phil Dunphy
In a clever, well-written episode, the whole family hosts a garage sale to raise funds for a charity Luke and Manny are donating to at school.
The Dunphys
Phil rolls down the driveway in his big blue Street Strider. The rest of the family grimaces. “What’s your beef with my Street Strider?” Phil asks. It’s one of the only moments when Phil doesn’t care about his coolness factor: He just wants to ride.
Claire just wants a sexy husband on a motorcycle like any married woman does, so she persuades Phil to take Jay’s motorcycle out for a ride and, hopefully, buy it.
Phil is deathly terrified of motorcycles but does it to appear cool, just like Fonzi. He even recalls old Happy Days episodes to try to take his mind off the very scary ride but ends up tipping over with the bike on top of him. To console himself, he takes videos of himself and emails them to Claire.
He returns and resolves to never ride the motorcycle again, because, as he says, “I’m not a rider, I’m a Strider.”
Claire is convinced that Alex’s boyfriend Michael is gay; Mitchell and Cam confirm it. When Alex confronts Michael about his sexuality, he denies being gay and is upset with Alex for a while. Claire admits she wants Alex to stop dating Michael so she doesn’t get her heart broken later on when he comes out of the closet, but realizes that sometimes, pain is inevitable.
The Tucker-Pritchetts
The weight Cam has lost is equivalent to three children’s bowling balls, as he proudly states, but this means he needs new jeans. But Mitchell knows that when Cam breaks his diet in a couple months, he’ll need his new pants again and then be even more depressed when he has to go out and buy new ones. Mitchell, trying to be the supportive boyfriend, stashes the pants in the car (where Cam finds them) and in the bushes (where Cam also finds them).
Cam explains to Mitchell that if his pants are right there, they’ll act as a safety net and he’ll never lose the weight.
The Pritchetts
Jay hates yard sales, as noted when he snaps at every customer he encounters.
Meanwhile, Manny discovers a box from Colombia and starts to look into it when it’s snatched away by Gloria. She tells him to never look in the box again.
Luke is convinced a head is in the box and when Manny and Luke steal the box, they find Luke was partly right: Inside it is a puppet.
When prodded, Gloria reveals that in a beauty contest, she brought the ugly puppet (named Uncle Grumpy) to show off her skills, but got embarrassed and failed miserably. Of course, she still won the contest, but she says she’s deeply scarred.
After Luke tells her to man up and face her fears, she presents the puppet show to the entire family, who laugh hysterically at a Colombian pregnant woman doing a voice for an unattractive puppet in a red polo. In the middle of her skit, a completely fed up Jay walks out of the house in a red polo, saying that he’s leaving the yard sale.
The irony hits Claire and she says, “Oh my god! She married her puppet!”
Why this episode worked:
Brilliant writing. The cold open had a back-and-forth about Phil signing Haley’s John Mayer poster with her name and an inscription that her body was a wonderland. The segment of Phil on the motorcycle, babbling stream-of-consciousness style, as he crashed worked perfectly. And because Phil was moving, it seemed to be a fresh take on the documentary style. Gloria’s story about taking a puppet to the beauty show was flawless. It was all tight writing with the understated back-and-forths that the show is famous for.
The concept of a yard sale was one that hadn’t been tried before on the show, and tied in well with the theme of facing fears – Phil facing his fear of being uncool, Gloria facing her fear of being ridiculed, Claire facing her fear of her children getting hurt, Cam facing his fear of gaining back weight. I love when the writers smartly sneak those tie-ins into the show. It reinstates the show’s purpose as depicting how the lives of three very different families are always intertwined around the same ideas.
What could have been better:
Relevancy. I wish the Halloween episode was played this week, because watching an episode about a yard sale on Halloween seemed oddly out-of-touch.
And where was Lily? The entire family comes to the sale (besides Haley, who’s at college) but we don’t have Lily’s antics to laugh at? That’s just wrong.
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