TV Verdict

Now that’s more like it. Not only was this one the best episodes of the season, rivaled only by “Darnell Outed”, but it fills in one of the longest-running holes in this show’s canon: Where did Crabman come from? Since the first season, fans have been wondering just what Darnell did to end up in the Witness Protection Program in Camden. We finally learned the whole story, courtesy of a great guest star turn from Danny Glover as Crabman’s dad. We also got a wonderfully random appearance by TV’s Tim Stack, who showed up just to fall off his barstool. Which is to say, this episode had everything one could ever want.

It was especially satisfying to learn the real story behind Crabman. As the episode begins, Darnell’s father Thomas shows up to the trailer where Earl and Randy are staying and demands to see him. Earl initially denies that he knows who Darnell is, even as he holds a picture of the two of them together, so Thomas takes more drastic measures. He chains Earl and Randy to a briefcase with a bomb and threatens to blow them up if they don’t reveal Crabman’s whereabouts. Specifically, he threatens to leave Earl’s neighbors picking his remains out of their azaleas. Earl can only stammer out one important question: “What are azaleas?” That confusion straightened out, Thomas is impressed with the courage Earl and Randy show in refusing to spill the beans, and he reveals that he and Crabman had a falling out years earlier over typical father-son issues. You know, father can’t comfort son with a broken arm because he’s assassinating a left-wing leader in a foreign country, or he forgot to buy his son a birthday gift because he’s too busy torturing a left-wing activist in another foreign country-that sort of thing. He asks Earl and Randy to take a greeting card to Crabman’s new secret home in the suburbs, where Crabman and Joy are still struggling to fit in. They, however, are unaware that Thomas secreted a tracking chip in the card. After he drugs everyone but Darnell, Thomas pleads with his son to pull off one last job to save himself. Back in his days as Harry Monroe, Crabman wasn’t just any spy but the best in the business, having learned the ropes from his dad. Unfortunately, he was once entrusted with the job of dispatching the dangerous left-wing king of an obscure but oil-rich nation and he refused, because the dangerous left-wing king was all of nine years old (although to be fair, he did live much longer than his father). When Crabman instead blew the whistle on his father’s activities, he was put in the WPP and has been on the run ever since. Now he has the chance to return to normalcy by embarking on one last job to clean the slate and walk away.

So yes, this was a dense, plot-heavy episode. The difference is that not only was it howlingly funny, but the humor came entirely from the plot, instead of being incidental to it, as has been the case a few times this season. The jokes about Mr. Monroe’s years as superspy were hilarious, especially when he interrogated a captured Angolan Freedom Fighter about where he could find a Walgreens to buy a birthday card. All of Crabman’s conflicting explanations about what supposedly happened to his father (particularly the “Canadian/American War”) were perfectly fitting to his personality; Crabman, after all, is by far the smartest person on the show and figured out how to best deal with his less-than-brilliant friends years ago. The scenes of poor Joy pretending to be as rich as her neighbors by dressing up as a Mexican gardener (complete with sombrero and mustache) were a perfect continuation of last week’s storyline, about Joy’s desperate insecurity to fit into her new neighborhood.

By far the best part, though, was the sequence chronicling the Monroes’ last mission. The beauty of it is that we never really saw the whole mission. Instead, we only saw little glimpses through Earl’s eyes, since he was brought along as insurance but kept drugged most of the time. Apparently, this secret mission involved stealing an artifact, trading it to a merchant who will use it to decorate P. Diddy’s Bentley, being buried alive, escaping, threatening some terrorist’s 18th wife (who was actually Darnell in disguise), and stopping an anthrax bomb. Also, taking the time to find Thomas’s contact lens, but that was more incidental, really. This whole segment was perfectly shot and edited and was such a masterpiece of comic timing that it actually rewards repeated viewings. I rewatched it several times last night and found new bits to laugh at each time. Coupled with Glover’s appropriately world-weary performance, it made for the perfect conclusion to this arc that finally brought the Turners back to Camden, where they belong. Well-done, crew, well-done.