Linda Belcher is a ridiculous human. This is true of all the Belchers, to varying extents, including her theoretically more sensible spouse—you know, the one who spends his entire B plot trying to win over a hardware store owner he doesn’t know—but Linda has the same non-existent impulse control as her kids without the excuse of being, well, a kid. So when Linda really cares about something, as she does in tonight’s “PTA It Ain’t So,” she does so with a glee matched only by her disdain for those who would stand in her way. I’d call her childish, but really the better word is earnest. What she’s doing with the PTA matters to her, so it’s all the more crushing when she encounters the petty opposition of Colleen Caviello or, as seen tonight, the sweeping corruption of Joanne. In the case of Colleen, Bob’s Burgers is dusting off a character first introduced in a side story about baked ziti way back in the first season and only seen once since, and even then only briefly. The PTA hasn’t been important to Linda for most of the show’s run, but it was established way back then that it could matter to her as the plot requires.
Because I’m working on being a marginally less ridiculous human, I have no problem with the show not bothering to gradually, painstakingly develop Linda’s relationship with the PTA over the course of the past nine seasons, as a lot of what we see in this episode is so perfectly her. A fundraiser theme like Surfin’ PTA, complete with shark and sand, is exactly the kind of thing Linda would propose, as the mildly chagrined kids observe. It’s fun to see her match wits properly with Colleen, who is basically her own version of Jimmy Pesto, an endlessly spiteful adversary with no clear reason for disliking Linda as much as she does. It makes sense that she would borderline worship Joanne, given the remarkable sway the latter holds over the rest of the PTA. This all works, and the tale of Linda slowly realizing what Joanne is really up to and coming up with a wonderfully dramatic plan to expose her is a good story to tell in this context.
What “PTA It Ain’t So” lacks, though, is that extra something worth saying or revealing about Linda. We don’t learn in any greater detail why the PTA matters so much to her. So much of the episode is given over to detailing just how corrupt Joanne is, to the point that the conclusion ends up feeling a bit rushed. The episode is true to everything we know about Linda in depicting her as so completely slow on the uptake, but this does mean a lot of time is spent with the audience several steps ahead of Linda. The first half of the episode is stronger in this department, as it’s largely carried along by the always welcome musical interlude. But once Linda sees all the supposed fundraiser items in the trunk of Joanne’s car and at last figures out what she’s up to, the episode gets a bit fuzzier. Linda’s dream sequence in which Joanne reveals herself first as Satan and then inexplicably as Linda herself is a promising start, especially when by Linda immediately going back to sleep once Bob starts sharing his own, bird-related shenanigans.
It’s what follows that feels a little undercooked. Linda confronts Joanne about stealing from the PTA, Joanne gives a sob story about how hard she works in a thankless unpaid role, and Linda is uneasy but basically fine with this until she discovers the real, much bigger scam Joanne is pulling with her and her husband’s company, at which point she resolves to expose her. None of this feels strictly necessary when the episode has already established Joanne as corrupt. I guess what she’s doing with the marked-up science equipment is worse, in that it’s actually misusing funds as opposed to more softly abusing power to get free stuff, but I can’t believe Bob’s Burgers expects me to parse the minutiae of PTA governance like this. The episode has already established to the audience’s satisfaction that Joanne is bad, so what the next phase of the episode is instead concerned with is convincing Linda she’s sufficiently bad that she ought to do something.
There’s an opportunity there for some character development for Linda, especially with the episode’s evenetual reveal that Joanne put Linda up for the gig because she almost correctly assumed she was too incompetent to work out what was going on. But that would probably require Linda to talk with someone else about this. A properly awake Bob would be an obvious candidate, even if he’s busy with his ongoing parrot fiasco, or maybe an initial detente with Colleen, or perhaps the episode could have looked at the teacher side of the PTA and looped in, say, Mr. Frond. (Who I suppose isn’t technically a teacher, but close enough for the sake of the hypothetical.) It doesn’t really matter who Linda might bring her concerns to, as the real point is Linda’s entire arc is both too internal and too dry work properly. She changes her mind not because she realizes anything about herself or how she relates to others, which would open up new character beats and thus new jokes to tell, but rather simply because she uncovers a different scam than the one she already has. Linda stories aren’t easy to tell, but that feels like an unnecessarily missed opportunity.
The climactic confrontation, at least, delivers the goods. Bringing in Mr. Branca and his band The Bleach Boys as the backdrop to Linda and Joanne’s showdown is a perfectly silly touch, as is having Colleen reveal herself as the shark waiter for no reason other than it would be dramatic. Which it absolutely is. It’s in this scene that we are told things about Linda that the rest of the episode could have shown us, as she admits she wasn’t sure if she was up to the job and had more than her fair share of mixups of commas and periods in the finance spreadsheet. Given her basically dictatorial power, Joanne is perhaps swept away a tad too quickly here, but her full-on villainous breakdown sells that well enough. Besides, I’m always willing to judge a Bob’s Burgers moment by the punchline, and here the payoff is pretty good, with everyone voting out Joanne but no one wanting to take on cleaning up all the sand. That moment is beautifully handled, with the pauses just long and awkward enough to feel both funny and relatable.
“Say It Ain’t PTA” is one of the more throwaway Bob’s Burgers episodes, content to take a moderately off-kilter scenario and play it out for 22 minutes. Until the fundraiser, Linda is more along for the ride than doing anything to drive the action, and that’s just less interesting than stories where the characters make more active choices—usually bad ones—and have to deal with those consequences. Maybe this is the danger of putting the kids and Bob off in an entirely separate plot: There’s no one around for Linda to bounce off of when she’s having her non-nighttime crises of conscience. Instead, the episode stays inside Linda’s head, and that proves not nearly as funny—or as enervating, as the case might be—as it ought to be.
Stray observations
- Teddy believing the guy at the hardware store who calls him “Todd” is doing it as a friendly nickname is a real contender for saddest Teddy moment. I mean, it’s not going to win, as this is Teddy we’re talking about, but that’s rough.
- Comedian Jaime Moyer takes over as the voice of Colleen in this episode, but you’re never going to convince me that the voice actor is anyone other than Jamie Moyer, extremely long-tenured baseball guy who somehow both pitched for the Colorado Rockies this decade and turns 60 in a few years. Honestly, I’m just glad the show’s casting gave me an excuse to remember Jamie Moyer.
24 Comments
The B-plot definitely came out on top this week. Any story that revolves around Bob unintentionally making things worse out of the most trivial of situations never fails to make me laugh, and this one was no exception.“You sent a bouquet of birds of paradise to a guy who just lost his bird? Is that some kind of sick prank?”“That’s what they sent? I just told them to pick out the most expensive flowers from their cheap section.”
As someone in a similar field with Joanne (event manager/production manager), I did find myself nodding in agreement with her rant at the fundraiser. “You couldn’t pull this off! I have to send so many emails. And none of you read them! And none of you are going to clean up!”It is an under appreciated job, where you get questioned all the time by people who think they can do better. Doesn’t justify theft, but I sympathize.
I get what you’re saying. That said, as someone who works under someone who is very much like Joanne, in my experience Joannes love their power (and abuse thereof) and would die before they would let anyone else try to “pull this off”. How can anyone feel Joanne’s pain if Joanne won’t step down and let them experience that pain?
Just wanted to let you know the episode title is misstated at the start of the last paragraph: it’s “PTA It Ain’t So”
Yeah this episode felt off-kilter for me as well. The PTA plot didn’t have much heft to it, even when new stuff kept getting added. It really did need another person for Linda to bounce off of, like Bob. Still had some laughs though from her goofy enthusiasm to do things she cannot do well.
“Into the Spider Hearse Exterminators” is a very good Spider Man pun. There’s also the candle store “John’s Wick”.
Linda calling Bob that she’s too busy and he’ll have to “flip his own meat”, that’s a euphemism for masturbation, right?Belcher kids being kids, their lost parrot poster is a weird work of art. Oddly, it’s Tina, not Gene, who insisted to make the fart cloud bigger.
I loved that Spider Man pun.
Yeah, “Into the Spider-Hearse” got a solid chuckle.
I paused and sent a photo of that one to my dad it was that good.
Bob’s Burgers gets a (sort of) Ripped-From-The-Headlines episode! The timing makes it a curiosity but yeah, it was pretty weak. Loved the kids with the random piece of pipe and getting someone else to deal with it when it got all grody. And good thing Bob got over his fear of pigeons/thinking he was Tippi Hedren, otherwise he would have freaked out seeing one right in his face, even though it was in a box.
Top hat wearing rollerskating fart propelled parrot was my favorite part of the episode..which means it wasn’t their strongest. But still a few good moments. I agree they lingered too long on establishing the antagonist. Lots of missed Linda moments here. Both conclusions felt very rushed.
linda is just a louder peggy hill.
There is a lot of talk in these well written reviews (and thank you for them!) about how hard it is to build a story around Gene. I think Linda is the more problematic character. I really enjoy Linda as a side character adding some jokes and general ridiculousness. But in the few instances where I bounce off a BB episode, it is almost always because she is the main focus. I often find her character grating and unpleasantly over the top when Linda has to carry an episode. John Roberts does a fantastic job bringing that character to life, but a full half hour of her being ridiculous for very flimsy reasons often wears on me.Last night, I just turned the episode off with about ten minutes to go. I don’t remember ever doing that before with a BB episode. Part of it was me-I had just returned from a long road trip a few hours before, and I was cranky. I am sure I will like it better with a later viewing down the road. But I also found this one to be a throw away-not very funny, and pretty hard to watch.
Put these balls in your mouth, Colleen!I agree that it would have been at least somewhat interesting to see Linda actually interacting with Colleen after all their bad-blood. I was honestly surprised to see how ethical Linda was when it came to spending PTA funds, even early on. Linda’s morality, as with the rest of the Belcher’s is–permeable–it absolutely depends on the circumstances, which, I guess, is why we love them so much. In the end, though, they all always do the right thing, which is also why we love them so much!
Definitely a throwaway, but the callbacks in the end credits paid off. And even a throwaway BB is worth a half-hour of my time on a Sunday evening because there’ll be at least one or two genuine guffaws.
Teddy’s “Not great, Bob!” in the beginning of the episode when Bob asked him how the dishwasher repair was going was a direct shout-out to Mad Men, right?
Honestly, the parrot showing up in the credits was one of my favorite moments in an overall enjoyable episode. The fact that Bob is only willing to buy the pipe for the kids if it counts as everyone’s birthday present for the year was my second favorite.
I don’t mind Linda idolizing another unworthy icon. What she learns usually is that she had the qualities she imagines they possess already, and in this case it was mostly about getting one over on Colleen at first. Sometimes there is just that one person that pushes all your buttons.
It really wasn’t fair of the show to stick Linda in a main plot all by herself (without other characters we know and love). The other plot got all the kids, Bob, and even Teddy.
Loved the Linda plot – love me a good murder-mystery… i mean mystery *shifty eyes*
Wha?! I loved this episode, I love Linda-centric episodes, and I love Jessica St Clair! It was a tangent, for sure, but a really entertaining one.
I thought it was weird when Bob told Louise she could “get the pipe.”
You would think that running a restaurant would make somebody perfectly qualified to be a treasurer. I guess this just means that Bob keeps the books as well as cooks?I thought there was another joke to be made at the end about nobody wanting to clean up the sand in the gym since the band was all janitors. At least a line from Mr. Branca.
There were a LOT of little jokes that made me laugh for real, so this episode rose up the ranks for me. “Is the old man you?”
“The perseverance that allowed [Jamie] Moyer to endure the many ups and downs of
his lengthy career, along with his family- and community-mindedness,
show him to have a Hall of Fame make-up as a player and a person, no
matter his final statistics.”https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/2485e17a