Cougar Town: "Free Fallin'"

Season 2, Episode 20

A comedic look at moral ambiguity

If there was one common thread among the three storylines tonight, it was “Who’s the bad guy here?”. Often many shows will present a narrative with a clear good guy-bad guy dynamic, where the viewer is clearly supposed to blame one party for the troubles of the other. Comedies –especially comedies of the 90s – are guiltier of this than just about any other type of television, mostly because their shorter running time usually doesn’t allow for a deeper look at morality. Yet as comedies have become more “grown up” in the past decade or so, they have begun to make room for such discussions, and that is what “Free Fallin’” is all about.

Take the Jules/Travis plot for instance. Our first instinct when we learn that Travis dropped out of school, and then later connived his mom into letting him avoid his responsibilities is to cast him off as a little shit. And he definitely is, but as the show also reminds us, part of the reason that he is this way is because Jules was never as strong of a parent in the past as she needed to be, so Travis is accustomed to always having a fallback position at home. So even though it’s a strong growing moment for her character, there is also a brief taste of hypocrisy to Jules’ actions when she finally decides to brining some tough parenting down on Travis’ head.

And of course this theme would make it into the story involving the two characters who lead the most morally grey lives, Bobby and Laurie. Though Bobby is totally justified in his stance that selling out Penny Can to Roger Frank (and by extension, Lou Diamond Phillips) would be a crime against the game he loves so much, Laurie and Andy – who also hate that the game is losing its original touches – are more realistic in their views, most specifically to the fact that Bobby really needs the money. He started marketing Penny Can in order to make money in the first place, so why should selling out just a bit more be any different?

Surprisingly, the theme even made it into tonight’s light C-plot, which was mostly focused on Grayson and Ellie fighting the surreal presence of some creepy neighborhood kids. But between their original destruction of some relatively harmless sidewalk art to their mean-spirited jabs at Tom, the two of them once again seemed to fall into the petty (yet admittedly funny) antics that often overcome at least one member of the Cul de Sac Crew every week. But even Tom and the kids weren’t fully morally absconded here, and the kids tried to intimidate the adults into getting what they wanted, and Tom sacrificed Grayson and Ellie to the kids that he could keep spending time with them.

Not only was this a thematically linked episode of Cougar Town, but it was also an important one in terms of plot development. Travis continues to follow a path eerily similar to Bobby’s. Jules continues her struggle with over-mothering. And Tom officially joins the Crew. (Yay!) If these are the kinds of things the penultimate episode can bring, I can’t wait to see what the finale has in store for us.

Next Week: An hour long episode wherein the Crew goes to Hawaii.

Quotes, Etc.:

This Week in Title Cards: We Should Have Let the Cougar Live On

“Well, don’t try and stop me if I’m Vogue-ing on top of a cab.”

“Sorry, you can’t eat love.”

“I don’t know what exactly your race is, but I am into it in a big way.”

“Why is my severed head still screaming?”

Really? Another show with a Subway product placement?

“I like that we added the baby, but we probably shouldn’t shoot it.” “That was a baby?”