Wilfred: "Acceptance"

Season 1, Episode 4

The moral queasiness of dog-rape

“Happiness can only exist in acceptance.”

George Orwell

Last week I suggested that a lot more of Wilfred’s actions are taking place in Ryan’s head than what the show is explicitly telling us, that Ryan is playing these mind games with himself for whatever particular reason. (Let’s not forget that he did try to commit suicide; mentally speaking, he’s got to be very unstable.) While I was excited for this development last week, “Acceptance” showed that there are limits to how deep we should be willing to go into Ryan’s mind, and limit that was reached tonight with dog-rape.

I hate to be crass about this, and I promise that unlike this show, I’m not doing it for shock value. But the show tonight was quite blatant about this fact, and it kind of killed a good third of the episode for me. While I laughed quite heartily at the idea of Ed Helm’s character performing bestiality with Wilfred (his face while playing with the peanut butter in the dog toy was priceless), but when the show begin to put a more human face on it by having the Wilfred-in-Ryan’s mind begin to act out all of the classic signs of a molestation victim. I supposed it was meant to be an extended bit of dark humor, but it just ended up being sickening and unfunny, like so many episodes of Law & Order: SVU.

What makes this all the worse, of course, is the fact that this bestiality/dog-rape was all in Ryan’s mind. I get that he’s a troubled young man, and I understand that when most humans see creepy people act creepy around kids or animals, we tend to assume the worst, so it’s not really his assumptions of bestiality that troubles me. Rather, it’s how far he took the mental imaging in his mind, with the images shown only tempered by FX’s Standards and Practices Department. If we are supposed to connect with Ryan as a character – something essential for all main characters on a television show, even on comedies – then it doesn’t help that we see him as someone who imagines bestiality in the most explicit terms.  

There were of course other bits of plot tonight, but they seemed to get lost, both because of how much weight the episode gave to the bestiality gag, and because the rest of the plot wasn’t developed as fully, mostly since it all seemed like setup for all the dog-rape jokes. Ryan’s attempts to reconnect with his sister had promise, and I would like to think that if the episode had followed through with it, by throwing Wilfred into the mix and not giving it some half-assed, status quo saving conclusion, things would have been a good deal funnier, and we might have learned something more useful about Ryan. (I was also really bugged that Kristen’s only defining characteristic was that she was a bitch. For a show that only has two female leads, making one of them a nag just feels really misogynistic.)

The other telling detail about this episode is that I got the biggest laughs from the idea of Ryan and Wilfred (and Bear!) creating a band together, mostly because it allowed the two to bounce off of one another without the need for shock gags. (It also helps that Bear in a way served in the same function that Spencer did last week by adding “someone new” to the mix.) Wilfred can be a very funny, very thought-provoking show, and I get the sense that this episode was attempting to reach those same heights. But what the show can’t afford to do in its quest to reach those goals is deal with something that’s such a black hole in terms of plot, humor, and morality.

Quotes, Etc:

“Ryan, my anal glands need to be expressed. It’s my constitutional right.”

“Kristen’s always busting balls. Why doesn’t she try licking them?”

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. That’s pretty good, I just came up with that. You should write that down.”

“How can I be racist? I’m capable of seeing color.”

“You’re right. I never noticed that before, but it is too big for his body! LOL!”

“…and a phone, I think.”

“…and it’s for poor people, so no one will care if you don’t try that hard.”

“Well it doesn’t get much more personal that I ‘play bass like a busted vagina.’”