My Name is Earl has been disappointing this season. It borders from being okay to barely being good this season. Most of this episode revolves around the memory of Earl and Joy’s marriage and in the process, it ends up feeling like the writers are trying to rewrite My Name Is Earl history.
Earl comes into the Crab Shack to fix a dent that he put in the counter years ago. It’s not really made clear whether this was on his list, but we’ll assume it was. This triggers Earl’s memories of Earl and Joy’s marriage. It’s weird because up until this episode, I think the majority of us always assumed that while Earl was scum, that it was mostly due to Joy’s cheating and lying that the marriage broke apart. This episode shows that Earl was a horrible husband. He did the worst things like swapping his dirty corn for her clean one and just basically being inconsiderate and rude; it was definitely odd to see a different side of their marriage where Earl was that bad.
While Earl was made to look like a horrible husband, this episode made Joy look like a good wife; she cooked, cleaned and took care of the children, while Earl did nothing. One thing that Joy apparently took pride of was a piece of cake that Earl gave her for an anniversary. Unfortunately, during one Randy and Earl’s drunken night, Randy eats the cake, which really upsets Joy. So Randy throws a party and mistakenly invites every person that Joy’s had sex with, which includes Earl’s cousin.
Jason Lee as Earl, Jaime Pressly as Joy
It was cool to see Jason Priestley back on TV, since the last time I remember seeing him on camera was in the short-lived series, Tru Calling. Jason does well with what he’s given and it would be cool to see Earl’s cousin in a future episode, but he just doesn’t work out too well in this episode.
The problem with this episode was the way the writers tried to add back story or fill in things with Earl and Joy’s marriage. We really didn’t need this and the only thing that this episode did was make us feel like Earl deserved to be cheated on and that Joy was a better wife then he deserved. Also it seems like Jason Lee can play the present Earl, but lacks the same effect when he plays Earl from the past; he used to have it nailed down, but now when we see old Earl it doesn’t feel like he’s that much different from new Earl. Randy had a couple of funny lines, but none of them were particularly memorable.
The secondary storyline had Earl, Patty, Kenny, and Darnell trapped in an elevator trying to avoid killer bees. There were problems here, and the first one was Darnell and Catalina meeting. I could have swore that they had met before or after Earl and Joy got married. The biggest thing that annoyed me about this episode was the way they rewrote how Catalina started jumping at club Chubby’s. Supposedly she got the idea from Darnell, even though in the episode “Jump for Joy” I thought they gave a different reason.
This episode failed on numerous levels and there were very few moments where I even laughed. This seemed just like a filler episode and if Earl is going to do one thing off his list. I’m sure we’d prefer that it wasn’t fixing a dent in the bar.
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