Last year’s Halloween episode of Happy Endings felt like a breakthrough for the show. It had built up some critical steam before then, sure, but that was a great early episode to show potential fans to try and get them into the series. So when “Sabado Free-Gante” opened with the gang in a ridiculous group costume (Jackson 5 marionettes, controlled by Brad as Joe Jackson) as just a fun throwaway joke, I was surprised. I guess we can’t expect an episode devoted to Halloween every year. Or maybe last year was successful enough that the writers don’t want to try and top it, often a recipe for misery.
No matter. “Sabado Free-Gante” was a good time nonetheless, although I worry that the Alex/Dave romance is going to burn out on laughs very quickly. The joke is simple—they’re both incredibly enthused about being back together and moving very quickly toward another attempt at a wedding. Last week was casual sex, this week they’re moving in together, so we should have a repeat of the pilot episode by around mid-November, right?
But of course, they’re secretly terrified, so they torture poor Rachael Harris (playing a type-A real estate agent, a real departure for her) by objecting to every place she shows them on increasingly ridiculous grounds. They want a place close to a hardware store, but far from a software store. And no wi-fi, they want dialup, which Alex does a killer impression of. It’s funny enough, but Alex and Dave together can be a little tough to take. They’re both very high-energy, very silly, and kinda vacant, which means they can play well off of the ensemble, but paired together, things get grating fast. These two episodes went fine, but either this saga needs to end quickly, or we need something different for the next few weeks. My guess is the former, though. That final look Alex and Dave exchanged did not suggest good times ahead for this couple.
Much better was the pairing of Max and Brad, always a winner in my book. With Brad now officially unemployed, he and Jane have to cut back, so Max teaches him how to live like a hobo, which is nice and silly, although I wonder about this whole unemployment storyline. I guess it’s supposedly attached to the recession, but Brad can just go out and get a job, as we saw last week, so it’s really just because Jane thinks it’s good for him not to work. Whatever, I shouldn’t think too hard about these things. Happy Endings isn’t the kind of show where you really worry about how the characters are paying for things. Max mentions that Dave paid pretty much all his rent, which, sure, but with Dave out of the apartment, Max will just… figure something else out, and it’ll either be a funny weird plot, or never mentioned again.