TV-Reviewed

I haven’t been too shy lately about how bad My Name is Earl has gotten. It’d be nice to tell you that this episode of Earl got the show back on track, but unfortunately if I did that I’d be lying; while a slight improvement over the last episode it still adds more of that bad taste that we’re starting to expect from My Name is Earl.

This episode feels like another cop-out for Earl as a character. I don’t see the point in episode where Earl isn’t doing a new deed, just thinking about deeds that he’s done in the past. The fact that Earl has done things on his list that we haven’t seen brings up new questions like how many deeds does he actually left and how many exactly are there.

Jason Lee as Earl Hickey

The deed this week had Earl helping his friend Raynard, because due to him not having a place to stay, Raynard ended up living in the jungle. Earl sets out on a journey to get Raynard’s life back on track by trying to give him a job and a place to stay. None of this works out; due to Raynard being out in the jungle for so long he’s lost a lot of the social aspects in his life.

The first half of this episode wasn’t so bad and I have to give most of the credit to Ewen Bremner, who was the most delightful thing in the episode. The accent combined with the character in the beginning was pretty funny. The problem with Raynard was once the episode shifted to him being in the jungle, everything just stopped being funny. It’s unfortunate too, because it would have been nice to see Raynard in future episodes, hopefully we still do.

At least Randy was back to his normal dumb self, and his lines gave a chuckle or two. There just didn’t seem to be any kind of meaning to this episode. In the synopsis for the episode it said Raynard gives Earl a new way to look at life, but it didn’t come off that way. The last two episodes haven’t done anything for Earl as a character. That’s why this episode and this season have failed, because of the lack of character development.

At this point “bad episodes” aren’t surprising. Never before have I seen a show take such a dive in one season. All we can do now is hope that the next episode will be better, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you.

Rating: 5.0