What Modern Family does over other sitcoms is blending heart with comedy. Sure, other shows can make you feel happy for the characters, but none so often as Modern Family, and no other show can get away with the sappy speech at the end to sum up how happy these families really are.
This episode didn't really do that. There was a hint of it at the end with Jay and Gloria, but it was squashed right away. The lack of outright heart is what made this episode one of the better entries to season 2. Cam and Mitchell got themselves overworked about Lilly's preschool and screwed themselves over, Phil's big mouth combined with Hailey's ingenuity ended up disappointing the poor teen driver, and Jay and Manny try to simultaneously avoid and validate Gloria's killer instincts.
In a rarity, Cam and Mitchell had the least interesting plots. We already saw the two of them freak out about daycare last season, so we already knew Mitchell wanted Lilly to be the best damn 1-year-old possible. It also was just a tad bit predictable that they would royally mess up their chances at Billingsley, so I was ready to throw in the towel on these two for the episode.
I was right in that they crashed and burned, but I had no idea it would go so wonderfully horrible, and it made me believe in them again. How do you compete with a black baby with interracial lesbian mothers? Why, by being Cherokee, of course. That is, 1/16th Cherokee. For the record, Lilly looked much cuter than the other baby, so she should have won the spot for that alone, but having Cameron keep digging them such a horrible hole was worth the loss of Billingsley.
Claire, meanwhile, missed human interaction with her family members, and made them all quit their phones, gameboys, and computers. The second Phil mentioned "contest," it was apparent things would go badly, but things never go like you think they will in the Dunphy household. It was no surprise that Luke and Alex would be the first ones to go, but I was shocked when Claire fell next. I knew Phil was competitive, but I also remember him infamously getting so depressed that he didn't get an iPad last season. That plus the fact Claire was the one who initiated the contest caught me by surprise.
I knew Hailey was up to something with the marker and soap line, but I wasn't exactly sure what until she was talking loud enough for Claire and Phil to hear. This is the girl who let loose a scorpion to scare away an animal trainer who was hitting on her boyfriend. She's not that dumb, and being a teenage girl, she's a natural actress, and with Phil frazzled by fantasy football and Claire excited over not having to buy another car, she easily pulled one over on them. The whole storyline was pretty giggle-worthy, but seeing Claire and Phil dumbstruck multiple times topped them all.
The best story belonged to Jay, Gloria, and Manny. They kind of tricked us, starting the episode thinking it would end up being a contest of loudness: the dog vs. the "parrot." Instead, we got a kidnapping, with a side of suspected murder. Gloria rocked this episode. Of course the smother-mother Colombian who forces her husband to kiss his son of 30-odd years would be a murderer.
I don't know where she was better: kililng the rat in the driveway in all white, or in the garage's serial-killer lighting. Jay and Manny were right to be scared of her: you don't question the woman with the shovel.
As I said before, the closest we got to a morals speech was Jay admitting to Gloria that he uses her roots as a source of suspicion and rude humor too often and offers to visit her home village. But just like a rat in the driveway, she smashed and chopped the head off of that. "I got into two car accidents, both with goats! One of them was hurt pretty badly, but fortunately I had a shovel in the trunk."
I was actually very glad and impressed that they got some good development in for Gloria. A major point for last season, at least the beginning of it, was Gloria marrying Jay. Both Jay's ex-wife and Claire had their doubts about her, but as the season went on, and we learned bits and pieces of her history, she became more than a stereotype.
She's been doing very well this season, with chastising Jay for not getting to know his employees, and for letting her mothering instinct rear its ugly head (with a very hypnotic chocolate-milk-stirring scene, I'll have to add). But this episode not only expanded on Gloria, it let Sofia Vergara be something other than a touchy-feely Latina bombshell. She got to be Frida Kreuger, and she pulled it off beautifully. She can terrify like its nobody's business.
Moments of note:
-Cam and Mitchell's catalog of the other parent's physical attributes.
- "Yay! YAAAYYYYY!"
-Luke dipping his jaw in his cereal. Then building, and destroying, Dunphy towers, cut corners and all.
-"Don't fall for it Claire, she's just making up words." To be fair, I don't remember the difference between a gamete and a zygote either (I think one of them is one cell and the other is multiple cells?)
-Of course the lesbians' black baby is named Jaffar.
-"Don't normal kids drink soda?""Who knows what they do?"
-"I've had like 5 of these today. I think I have a problem."
-"We've been Shawshanked."
-The black receptionist's reaction to Cam's ghetto talk.
-"My white man name is Tucker."
-"...which, as you recall, is corn...""What if I was a single dad?"
-"The dog is happy, Manny can sleep, and we have peekles!"
-"Such bad parenting!"
GRADE: A
While it doesn't usually phase me that an episode of Modern Family gets emotional, it's also refreshing to have everything fall apart, too. But I guess that could be the unspoken moral of the episode? Things can also just not work out? At any rate, seeing everyone, the characters, that is, not the actors, off their game made this a great episode.
MVP Sofia Vergara gets a chance to be more than just Latin and sexy to play for laughs. She kills. Literally.
Runner-up would have been Ed O'Neill for Jay ("You Rat!") but Eric Stonestreet stole it out of his hands when he suddenly became a Native American.
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