Ria

It’s too bad she doesn’t want to lose weight for Gage. Besides impacting her own health and ability to be an active mom for years to come, just what is likely going to happen to Gage growing up in a family with such horrendous eating habits? The whole family has been obese since childhood. Care enough to break the pattern.

So Rose didn’t get a high school diploma because she got mono three weeks before graduation. Anyone think Rose doesn’t know the difference between graduating and a graduation ceremony and she had been recorded as completing high school all along? Unless Mr. Sticklemeyer was just a meanie who flunked her. I still don’t believe Dorothy was so unethical as to change her grade when she clearly got the answer wrong.

This is both sad and disgusting. I started watching this show thinking I’d be rooting for these sisters to lose weight and improve their lives. Not only is this not happening anymore, it’s just gotten gross.

Oh Gawd, my brain started imagining positions. She’s likely sexually active in some way or the other and I’m leaving it at that before images hit my brain.

Boo hoo for Tammy. She’s a mean, selfish, nasty person who heaps abuse on everyone around her, rejects all suggestions to help her and blames everyone else for her problems. If her family cuts her off, she has no one to blame but herself.

That restaurant scene. There are other patrons walking by including children and older people and they are swearing up a storm. I’ve never seen people act this way in public before. At least they were outside but still. Poor Gage. I know he is loved but no child should be subject to this constant fighting, yelling, swearing and name calling.

This is unwatchable. Why are they catering to this selfish nasty person and spending all their time talking about her and to her? And making some poor guy drive 6+ hours there and back to get her? They should have let her sleep in the van all night. This is ridiculous.

Good grief. The woman is 35 years old. If she wants to pout in the van, let her sit there by herself. The entire show has become the family revolving around this one horrible woman-child.

Isn’t she also diabetic? I read that somewhere but it’s seldom mentioned. If true, you cannot eat this way with diabetes. She is risking organ damage, blindness and amputation with the way she eats. She’s also still significantly obese. I’m all for cheering people on when they are trying their best but she’s making choices almost as stupid as Tammy’s. She just comes off better because Tammy is such a mess, if it were just her and Chris, she would kind of be the mess.

These sisters continue to make stupid choices. Amy is just going to gain a lot of weight back instead of focusing on her health and having another child a year or two down the road. Amy can barely handle one kid. She doesn’t work but can’t find time to clean and organize her house. Her house doesn’t look any better since the professional cleaners came through. How is she ever going to be able to handle a toddler and an infant?

Supposedly they bought the land while in Miami on their honeymoon (after the honeymoon in the Poconos presumably). How two broke teens with a baby on the way could afford to buy land anywhere is up for grabs.

Even worse was the way Dorothy and Rose treated Blanche when she was accused of having an affair with Gill Kessler. No support or sympathy at all. Dorothy tells her “you live your life a certain way and now you’re paying for it.” What does that mean? “Sluts” deserve public shaming? And Rose responding “how do we know you’re telling the truth about that” when Blanche states they are her best friends. Just ugh. Blanche should have thrown them both out. But instead Blanche ends up blaming herself as if she deserved it all just because she enjoys male company. Horrible messaging all the way around.

Dorothy’s clothes were hit or miss. Some were just awful and/or bizarre. Other times she looked quite elegant. And at least she often just wore sweaters. It’s Rose’s outfits I hated the most. All those dowdy silk dresses. She dressed like Aunt Bee.

They do always do that. I’ve commented on it before. They make an announcement and then walk out of the room. Same as Dr Jonathon Newman telling Rose he has something important he wants to discuss over dinner as he’s walking out the door. Rose thinks it’s a proposal (why?) but he apparently decided in the middle of his enjoyable evening at the house that he can’t see her anymore.

I don’t know how Rose ever kept her job as a product tester or got promoted to associate producer. What did Enrique think when she turned in reports about staring at lightbulbs for hours with her hand in a bucket of water? How did she become an associate producer suggesting topics like “who’s in charge of cheese?” Or “Lincoln: statesman or gas guzzler?” I don’t even understand how she was qualified as a grief counselor. The only job she had that made sense was as a waitress. And I still wonder how often she messed up the orders. The woman had trouble understanding basic English at times.

I hated that the spin-off took place in a hotel instead of in their cozy house. Plus it had all these people I didn’t care about, ie hotel staff, hotel guests, intruding. I would have continued watching the original show without Dorothy but the spin-off didn’t work for me. Even Two and a Half Men found a way to keep the show at the beach house after Charlie died. Maybe they learned from The Golden Palace. When the house is important to the feeling of the show, don’t ditch it.

I was underwhelmed also. I sat there for almost half an hour watching two people on one side of a desk listen to a guy on the other side giving a long exposition. It just wasn’t interesting to me. I also felt, and not for the first time these past few episodes, that our Loki was playing the side kick to Sylvie. I don’t hate her but she isn’t the reason I was watching.

I most enjoy the early episodes when Jake was young. The family dynamic was most enjoyable then. That was really the best and funniest parts of the show for me, the relationship between the characters. The later seasons substituted funny and warm interactions for smutty low brow sex jokes. Charlie telling Jake he cleaned up his act on the weekends but pop in on a Wednesday and he’d be scarred for life was funny. Alan getting caught masturbating in every room of the house while Charlie had the hots for his date’s 20 year old daughter was just gross. I love the scene in the season 1 episode where Jake lets seagulls into the house and Charlie, armed with chum and wearing a raincoat, enters the bedroom to lure them out of the window. We don’t see a thing, only hearing squeaking and screaming yet I can perfectly picture birds swooping down on Charlie from all angles while he cowers in terror. Or Jake standing in the pouring rain holding his soccer ball or dressed as Ben Franklin with his Tweetie Bird kite because his father and uncle forgot about him. Charlie was actually a pretty good uncle in that episode, getting the costume and attending the play and telling Jake how hard his dad worked. Or Jake’s disastrous dinner at Evelyn’s. “He broke her. He is obviously the Chosen One”. Or Allen falling off the roof and everyone asking “why didn’t you just call the guy?” At its best the show was so much more than cheap sex jokes and smutty themes.

Blanche: If you take away the gruff exterior, the badge and the gun, what do you have? Dorothy: A naked policeman. Blanche: EXACTLY! So very Blanche.

The alimony Allen paid to both wives was absurd. Judith was a healthy young woman who didn’t have to work to support herself at all, who got the house, all expenses paid, child support while Allen still had to pay for Jake’s clothes and school extras and Kandi was 23 and married for 6 months, no children. Allen just lacked the backbone to contest any of this. The show really did Allen no favors as the seasons progressed. They turned him into such a weak spineless mooch he contributed nothing financially to the household and was too cheap to even pay for popcorn at the movies. And he felt no real shame about it. At least Charlie showed some emotional growth at various times.

I was watching a couple of old episodes of The Odd Couple and boy if it didn’t remind me over and over of Charlie and Alan. In many ways Two and a Half Men is just The Odd Couple done in a way that couldn’t be done in 1970.

I read their ranking if the worst villains to appear on the show. There is no doubt in my mind the worst villain is Sophia. Even Rex Huntington’s verbally abusive behavior towards Blanche is nothing compared to the years of verbal and emotional abuse Sophia heaped on all those around her. Funny how the show could have Dorothy trying to get through to Blanche how badly Rex was treating her while not seeing the abusive relationship she has been subjected to by her mother for her entire life.

Sophia’s attempt to convince Dorothy she was going on vacation with new friends was pathetic. I also thought Sophia was mean bordering on outright sociopathic. Her idea of fun was hurting and insulting people. Tricking her roommates into tasting boiling hot liquid, tricking Rose into turning her stiff neck or admitting to burying Rose up to her neck in sand and having kids throw balls at her or pretending she was possessed by Charlie. The list goes on. Not to mention her constant put downs of Dorothy. I thought Estelle did a wonderful job of creating an elderly lady character while she herself was much younger. The look, the walk and the mannerisms were very convincing. But her line delivery was often just wooden and off.

I’ve always through the three chairs and round table was an odd choice. TV shows have been showing groups of 4 or more eating dinner at a table since the ‘50s.

It’s another episode that makes Sophia out as the biggest hypocrite. She’s always lecturing the others on being there for the family while she is having petty decades long feuds with her sister and daughter in law.