It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’s 15th season ends with a corpse, naturally
A too-short and inconsistent season yet makes room for another fine, improbably moving ending
TV Reviews Charlie Kelly
“As soon as I figure out who or what I am, you will never see me again!”
The Gang will never end. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia has to, some day, I suppose. But The Gang, for all the narrative feints and come-to-naught hints about “things never being the same again,” will never disband, not really.
Dennis left for a while, engineering a big blow-off speech that suggested he had, finally and irrevocably, seen through to the heart of The Gang’s destructive dysfunction. Mac redeemed his fate as The Gang’s most self-deluded member with a shockingly realized public expression of his identity. And, at the end of “The Gang Carries A Corpse Up a Mountain,” Charlie has the sort of epiphany that, were change in the show’s world actually possible, would, just maybe, lift Charlie Kelly out of his squalid existence in search of a better one that he finally realizes he deserves.
These last two episodes of this choppy and truncated Season 15 conclude The Gang’s sojourn in Ireland with some typical Sunny shenanigans. Repeated desecration of a corpse, unspeakable soups, hints of pedophilia, a soupçon of Dee-devouring quicksand, that sort of thing. We find out that The Gang’s traditional mockery of Mac was behind his destabilizing identity crisis. Sick of Mac parading his Irishness in anticipation of their trip to the Emerald Isle, they bribed Mac’s mom with “a couple of loosies” to lie that Mac is Dutch. (“Your mom does not like you, dude,” Dennis notes.)
Thus Mac’s quest for an external source of validation continues, as his hasty decision to hurl himself into his Catholicism merely allies him with the friendly student priest, Gus, whose reassuring talk of God’s accepting nature stems from his own predilection for “the wee lads.” “God. Dammit,” Mac pronounces in recognition that, once more, his search for an all-encompassing, all-accepting outside entity that will tell him who he is has come to crushing disillusionment. (Also, his dad’s real name is not “Luther Vandross,” sadly.)
Shitty parenting plays into the wrap-up of Dennis’ episodes-long episode of fast-moving COVID and possible possession by an Irish murder-ghost, as he, plotting how best to transfer Charlie’s affections back to Frank, spies a “murder-hole” in his rented castle. “The sickness and anger inside of you is diabolical,” Frank muses in admiration at Dennis’ plan to dump boiling oil on Shelly Kelly. Dennis’ own little moment of clarity comes in the dead-eyed response to his father/not-father, “I suppose all of your years of neglect and misdeeds have allowed me to harness the darkness inside of me and release it, without conscience.”
Season 15's breakneck eventfulness has included some only partially realized twists, and the whole “Dennis being possessed” angle never worked entirely. Dennis’ self-aggrandizing sociopathy and terrifying fragility have been well established as the result of—well, Dennis lays it out pretty succinctly in that quote. Throwing a supernatural haunting gag on top of his madness is a hat on an already unsettling hat, even if Glenn Howerton makes Dennis’ repeated assertions that his hot oil plan “also happens to be the castle’s preference for how this is all gonna go down,” archly funny.
Dee gets shunted off into a literal narrative quagmire in the penultimate episode, fittingly titled, “Dee Gets Stuck In A Bog.” Visiting Dennis in an Irish hospital after the axe-happy cliffhanger last time out, Dee meets a hunky doctor and, setting out on an ill-advised turf-harvesting expedition, indeed stumbles into some sucking muck while attempting to send her date a selfie. (Dennis, as it turns out, was too COVID-weak to even lift the axe we saw him with, crapping himself as he passed out at Dee’s feet.)
Dee’s position as the most cruelly and casually discarded of The Gang is part of the joke, naturally. (The guys all confess that they were separately contemplating throwing Dee off the cliff in “The Gang Carries A Corpse Up A Mountain.”) Still, this latest humiliation is telegraphed from far, far away by the setup, with the seventh episode seeing Colm Meaney’s Shelley tell Charlie about the Kelly curse, involving “a gruesome woman covered in filth with long stringy hair, horribly shrieking in the night.”
That The Waitress once more happens into Dee’s orbit just in time to torture Dee with the promise of a rescue (only if Dee remembers The Waitress’ name) is funny enough. (Kaitlin Olson and Mary Elizabeth Ellis make mutual seething hatred reliably hilarious.) While I get that Ellis is (literally) part of the Sunny family, however, and that shooting in Dublin last year no doubt made for a nice trip, The Waitress’ inclusion as Dee’s cross-Atlantic nemesis sticks out as sloppily convenient. That The Gang can ruin this poor woman’s life even outside of Philly makes for an explosively funny showdown, though, as Dee, taken to task for leaving The Waitress stuck in the same bog, ultimately asserts her right as an American to do whatever she wants. (“Get her, bitch,” Mac urges the furious Dee, in a moment of rare intra-Gang solidarity of awfulness.)
The heart of this season, especially once The Gang hits Irish soil, is Charlie and Frank’s relationship, though. Unlike Mac’s painful reminder that his friends are monsters, it does appear that the very Irish Shelly Kelly is, indeed, Charlie’s birth father. And if we do discover that Shelly has some pretty deep-seated misogyny as part of his world view, the inevitable dissolution of the Charlie-Shelley relationship comes not from any suggestion that Shelley is otherwise a conveniently disqualifying weirdo.
Instead, it’s Shelley’s corpse The Gang effortfully and disastrously hauls up an Irish mountain in the season finale, the cheesemaker’s lungs having given out thanks, possibly, to some Gang-transmitted COVID. I get that It’s Always Sunny’s take on the ongoing pandemic would involve some truly irresponsible ugly Americanism, but the season’s loosey-goosey manner of dealing with all the cross-infecting and quick recovery involved is also uncharacteristically lazy.
That said, it’s in Shelley’s fate that “The Gang Carries A Corpse Up A Mountain” finds another genuinely affecting and thought-provoking way to examine the unbreakable bonds that hold The Gang together. First taken aback by Charlie’s pride at the “ruse” he’s used to gather everyone at the base of a picturesquely steep Irish mountain (“What ruse? Asking us to go on a hike with your dad and us saying yes?,” asks Dee), The Gang gets the real shock when Charlie revels Shelley’s dead body, encased in a duffel bag.
Like much of this season, Shelley’s demise (speculated as either the unvaccinated Dennis or the bogus Trump cure-taking Frank’s fault) drops gracelessly into the narrative flow. Chalking it up to COVID hardships and/or the cast’s various other gigs is one excuse for this season’s unevenness, even if that doesn’t make this short season any more assured. Still, The Gang’s eventful trip hauling Shelley’s corpse up for what Charlie assures them is the Kelly (men’s) tradition of being hurled off a cliff into the sea makes for illuminatingly funny chaos.
Frank, desperately smarting over Charlie’s abandonment, has come prepared with hiking gear, including a canteen full of urine “in case things go bad.” Dee is pissed that Charlie’s successful appeal to the guys (“Bros before hos,” he intones, solemnly) is nonsensical as well as sexist in the situation, but only abandons the slog once Dennis reveals that he dumped that boiling oil on Dee’s doctor date instead. (“You weren’t there to enjoy him, so I enjoyed him—as per the castle’s wishes,” Dennis explains.) Dennis, it turns out, has been hanging from Shelley’s canvas-wrapped body instead of helping to carry it, and likewise leaves in a huff, his “Vitruvian” back a shambles.
Mac bails after the reveal about his mom’s lie, stomping away determined to get yet another shamrock thigh tattoo. (Dennis screeching, “Don’t you dare get another shamrock tattoo, you son of a bitch!,” is Glenn Howerton at his vein-throbbing, enraged best.) That just leaves Frank, at least until Charlie drinks from the wrong canteens. (Frank got confused, leaving neither of his water bottles unsoiled.) Before then, the tentative rapprochement between the two allows us another glimpse of their uniquely co-dependent—yet still improbably affecting—relationship, as Frank manages a sincere-sounding, “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry I’m not your real dad.” Charlie agrees, sadly, at least until he drinks from those canteens and explodes, “Why is it always something crazy with you?!”
Continuing on up the ruggedly endless mountain path alone, Charlie drags his actual father’s now-battered body (“Can we please not make dropping my dad a thing?,” Charlie asks in vain at one point) until, with a cold Irish rainstorm pelting his lonely, incremental progress, he collapses. “I’m sorry, dad, I can’t do it,” the exhausted Charlie apologizes, before everything pent up inside this 40-year-old feral and neglected manchild erupts in tearful agony:
This isn’t fair! I shouldn’t have to carry you up this hill. You never carried me up a hill. You never picked me up from school. You didn’t read me bedtime stories, you didn’t carry me on your shoulders, you never bounced me on—You weren’t there!! And I needed you! You were supposed to carry me! You were supposed to carry me.
A lot’s been made about It’s Always Sunny’s unprecedented longevity, and how, despite the occasional misstep, its astoundingly consistent quality. As time’s gone on, the extreme difficulty built into Sunny’s singularly dark and bitter formula has only made that consistency more impressive. Especially as the creators’ naturally seek to flesh out their characters without unbalancing Sunny’s world through encroaching growth or sentimentality. Dennis’ departure, Mac’s dance—they were so affecting because of how perilously close the show came to tipping over into unrecoverable humanity.
The Gang are human. They are us, as much as we’d like to deny it. Self-interest, cruelty, ignorance (willful or actual), bigotry—The Gang, at its worst (and Sunny’s best) reflects ourselves back to us, even as we try to squirm away from the merciless truth. The Gang has to be human for the show to continue, but their squalid group humanity can never actually improve itself. And so we watch Charlie, finally, confront a person whose own blinkered insufficiency left Charlie Kelly the illiterate, abandoned, dangerously needy and thoroughly unloved creature crying out to the Irish heavens.
And we cry. (Well, I cried—I don’t know what stone you people might be made of.) Shelley Kelly told his son a tale of a Kelly who died from eating stones in his guileless village idiocy, and if Charlie Kelly hasn’t died from eating cat food, or huffing glue, or any of the other death-defying calamities that make up his daily existence, then I suspect it’s because Charlie’s unthinkably hard and lonely life has turned him into the world’s holy fool.
And so we cry along with Charlie as he, alone on a mountain far from Philadelphia, tells a dead man the things Charlie Kelly needs so badly to tell everybody in his life, but never will. After all, The Gang comes roaring to his rescue, don’t they? In a borrowed pickup truck blasting “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Dee, Dennis, Mac, and Frank, having soured on their own futile attempts at expatriate reinvention, realize that The Gang is, in the end, all they have. Or will ever have.
It’s a crushingly triumphant mockery of love and friendship, as the five dutifully hurl Shelley’s body over a cliff—onto the low tide-exposed and jagged rocks far below. “It’ll be a Stand By Me situation,” Mac rationalizes, upon spotting the innocent children about to discover a very abused dead Irishman as part of their beach day. Charlie, too, rationalizes (although not without clarity) that Shelley “was a deadbeat,” and The Gang marches back to Philly, chanting “USA! USA!” The Gang is The Gang, and they will always, always have each other.
Stray observations
- Mac’s perpetual, heartbreakingly pathetic need for love and acceptance is summed up in his pretzel-logic explanation to Gus about his desire to enter the priesthood, describing his current dilemma as, “When God took away my Irish identity and made me Dutch to smite me for the urges that he gave me when I made the original sin of being born.”
- Frank’s attempt to humiliate Shelley in front of Charlie involves him, yes, shitting in the man’s soup. Charlie, suspicious, makes Frank eat the floating “meatballs” in what is—arguably?—the single grossest gross-out moment in It’s Always Sunny history.
- Frank, explaining his thinking to an aghast Dennis afterward, states, “He had me up against a wall. What was I supposed to do?” “Not eat a poopy!,” exclaims Dennis. This Dennis also could have done without it, honestly.
- Mac has worshipfully memorized Dennis’ evaluation of his “perfect” back, parroting that Dennis’ dorsal side represents, “the symmetry of the Vitruvian Man, and its the foundation of your structural essence.”
- And that’s a wrap on The A.V. Club’s reviews of Season 15 of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. It was most welcome to have The Gang back, even if, again, this won’t go down as the strongest season in Sunny history. (Plus, we got such a small portion.) Come back soon, Gang. We need you. Season grade: B.
42 Comments
Probably the first Ganz-penned episode I thought was just average. The better of the two was “Bog”. The finale felt really weird somehow—-like they’re going too in depth in trying to make the Sunny crew three-dimensional characters, but that really has never been what the show has been about in its classic years. Trying to give Charlie a serious abandonment backstory just doesn’t feel right for this show. Kind of like the finale with Mac’s performance art in front of Luther.
Look at how the writers handled Uncle Jack (probably) molesting Charlie—comically dark and hilarious. Thats how this show has done the little bit of character backstory during its classic years. The finale felt like it was almost a drama and too deep for what Sunny is really about.But “Bog” was fantastic. My favorite episode of the season. Frank sure does like to throw various things in soup, doesn’t he? Cricket makes up for the poor showing earlier with the roller rink episode.
Yeah, I hope the show figures out soon that excessive empathy for the characters kinda ruins it. Their lives are horrific and mutually abusive, which only isn’t a complete bummer to watch because it’s all treated so lightly and most of the time they deserve it.
So far we’ve had moments of self-realization for Dennis (leaves Philly to try and be a father to his kid in ND), Mac (finds his pride), and Charlie (cathartic moment yelling at his deadbeat, dead dad).So will Dee and Frank get similar moments in the coming seasons?
I know Sunny doesn’t have happy endings and it basically goes against the very nature of the show, but man, I felt bad for Charlie. Poor guy meets his real Dad and then he dies. I kinda wish they would have found some way to leave him alive with he and Charlie just being pen pals. The guy deserves a win, dammit.
Did FX give up this season and just toss all the episodes out asap to get things over with?
I loved the episode where charlie finally meet his dad and I cried when I first saw that scene (ok, the second time too).
And then I realized that the show would have to backpedal on this in some way. So yeah .. when I saw that the final episode was named “The Gang Carries a Corpse Up a Mountain”, it wasn’t hard to predict what would happen, even before charlie’s dad did a chekhov by describing this pretty specific mourning ritual. I kept hoping for a subversion of that predictable ending (and even that might not have worked to be honest) but that did not happen. Too bad. I fear that unless the show reinvents itself (and that would be a huge risk), it will be condemned to have very average seasons.
“Get her, bitch banshee,” Mac urges the furious Dee, in a moment of rare intra-Gang solidarity of awfulness.
I’ve been watching Sunny since season 3, I believe, and watched it become one of the most ingenious and clever sitcoms of all time. I used to download episodes to my old ipod video to watch at school and I will watch Sunny as long as new episodes release.But man am I starting to feel like the gas is running low. There were some great moments this season and on the Irish trip, don’t get me wrong, but now I keep hoping each plot line is leading to an end.The show went from finding their footing, to just non stop classic episode after classic episode, to amazing seasons with some misteps, to now more misteps but with some great moments. And I can’t imagine the next season won’t be worse.They’ve already deconstructed the show and now it’s just back to status quo again. What else if for them to do besides their suffering being shown for our entertainment?So I don’t think it would be wrong for the show to end on a more human note. Unlike a lot of dissenting voices I absolutely loved the Mac dancing scene. And I had similar feelings with Charlie’s speech to his dead father (I almost cried too, Dennis). I don’t mind a show growing and changing, but except for moments that isn’t allowed to really happen here. But the awfulness of the characters and shittiness to each other feels more sad to me when they’re these clearly middle aged people rather than being dumb and young in earlier seasons. I wouldn’t mind more humanity injected in.I know this is an unpopular opinion, people don’t like change and want their shows to just always be the same. But I really wished that Charlie could have gotten a somewhat happy ending. He was so close in this season and they pulled it out from underneath in a kind of haphazard way imo.I’m just tired for these characters. They’re old and I feel it. Except for Dennis as he’s an actual monster, and Frank will always be Frank, I do want the other 3 to escape and maybe have some semblance of happiness in their lives.
It depends on what you mean, they’re old as in they have been on TV a long time and the characters are wearing thin or old as in you think 45 is old?
to me they just literally are starting to look weird and the light surgery is getting more and more apparent. everyone is so smooth.it’s less that ‘45 is old’ and more ‘45 is too old to still be 30′. that’s the problem with writing humans as cartoon characters.
To me it’s get funnier and funnier, because it gets more outlandish that they would act this way in their 40s.
I don’t think 45 is old relatively, I think it’s old for the types of shenanigans they get into. Except for Frank who loved the more mature life but who’s entire character is being the rich old guy who chooses to be like this But the rest feel like they’re being forcibly being put in situations that a middle aged person just probably wouldn’t be doing regardless of their general narcissistic nature and immaturity.
do you want us to call the wahhhhmbualnce?
Yeah, I was expecting this to be a goodbye-to-Charlie episode, as he takes over cheesemongering (monstering?).
I’m hoping they allow him some development after all this, it’ll be a bit too dark if he goes back to squalor. Him and Frank both work great as a duo and there’s potential from this season for their relationship to evolve.
Yeah, I want to say they’ve been more building up that he isn’t quite as stupid as he started out over time? But it’s been a while since I watched the early seasons.
yeah definitely, he’s shown his hidden depths in music and in this season it’s revealed he is perfectly literate with other languages
Fwiw, the way I look at each new sunny season is if it was a brand new show would I want to watch another season and its always yes. I don’t eat member berries
I don’t think of it as “omg it was so much better back in the day” even though I do think that’s true. Looking at it especially in the way you described makes it seem more tired, these middle aged people still acting like drunk 20 year olds, it’s a bit jarring imo at this point when the writing isn’t sharp enough to compensate for it as much.
Rewatched Batman Returns last week, and it was amazing to realize that it’s only DeVito’s second grossest role.
That ship has long since sailed. The naked couch spawning episode was over a decade ago, lol.
As someone who doesn’t like Returns at all, whatever joy I can mine from it is basically positioning it as a dry run for Frank Reynolds.
My first thought was, I can’t believe the season’s already over!My second thought was, I wish it had been better because I waited so, so long…
Well, there was only one really bad episode (roller rink, which some people actually really liked, too!) but I agree, given the super-abbreviated 8 episodes over 4 weeks season, you’d like to have seen more quality if not quantity.
All this! I came in with sky high expectations of mocking everything that made 2020 fucking awful, and I partially got it but then its over in the blink of an eye. I feel like screaming Dennis. I’M A FIVE STAR SHOW!!!
For the second time during this entire shows run, and not from laughter, I cried at the Charlie scene, and it’s what makes me love this show so much. They continue to expand even if it feels like they’re slowing down they always manage to impress. Biases aside, I think they’ve earned theright to try whatever the hell they want. Even if it involves hot oil, murder holes and a relationship with a Castle, Sunny will always have my support.
The first two Ireland episodes were so funny and so well paced that I wonder what happened to these two, which felt awfully thin and underdeveloped.
The gap between Shelly driving away from Dee and then showing up in a body bag dead from Covid makes me wonder if some other more elaborate episode with a different death wasn’t planned. I wonder if they ran into some kind of logistical nightmares that made them do rushed plot cuts and rewrites. Or, maybe there was a mid-course budget cut?
The first two had much more extensive casting and locations, while these had (I think) only one brief speaking role outside the main cast, and the doctor never even showed up again. Was even his scene getting showered with hot oil cut quickly?
The encounter between Dee and The Waitress also felt underthought — the generic complaint about her name was the only real joke and considering their past there was a lot more to work with. Dee didn’t even get upset that The Waitress took her big role.At any rate, it was funny as always seeing how they tried to pretend landscapes weren’t California. The shots in Bog in particular were so obviously arid rugged locations and not Ireland — I think there were eucalyptus trees at one point. But it’s been a part of the show for so many years now that I accept it as just how it flows.
“At any rate, it was funny as always seeing how they tried to pretend
landscapes weren’t California. The shots in Bog in particular were so obviously arid rugged locations and not Ireland — I think there were eucalyptus trees at one point. But it’s been a part of the show for so many years now that I accept it as just how it flows.”I was just thinking about this the other day when I was still binge-ing the United States of Tara, which is supposedly set in Missouri, but they had “Interstate 5″ shields on a lamppost in the background of an exterior walking scene.
I watch Always Sunny Christmas every year and always laugh at how obviously the train scenes were filmed in California. But it’s not as bad as the scenes in Hogan’s Heroes where you can see the palm trees on the edge of the studio lot.
Are you saying the Krauts didn’t invade SoCal?
I wonder if they ran into some kind of logistical nightmares that made them do rushed plot cuts and rewrites.
COVID precautions, I guess? It certainly felt like there was at least one more episode needed between the two that got glossed over in the second.
ha, don’t learn bird calls. I was rewatching Psych and caught chickadees in the background. Damn their natural range.
I remember the conversation around the 10 or 11th season being how impressive it was that Sunny was able to stay so consistent quality-wise that far into its run (which is a great accomplishment). I haven’t seen a terrible amount of the last few seasons, but I did check out the season 13 finale “Mac Finds his Pride” because it was getting so much praise. And as much as I loved the dance scene at the end, I was pretty shocked at just how lifeless and uninspired the rest of the episode felt. Like, it felt like the first three quarters of the episode couldn’t have been more rushed. I’d probably agree with a lot of the criticisms other people are bringing up here if recent episodes of the show still have that same feel as most of “Mac Finds his Pride.”I can understand a show like The Simpsons getting more inconsistent when it continues to crank out over 20 episodes a year in its senior years. It’s hard to excuse Sunny when they had an entire pandemic to crank out only eight episodes.
“It’s hard to excuse Sunny when they had an entire pandemic to crank out only eight episodes.”To be fair (cue Letterkenny gif) almost the exact same writing staff works on Mythic Quest, so its not like they had all the free time we all think.The problem is, I think, the show is slowly trying to turn away from the “the Gang are just narcissistic assholes doing bad but funny stuff” to “lets explain how some trauma in their past causes them to do bad stuff, so we can sympathize with them”.The problem is, classic Sunny was never based on that kind of premise, so the characters and the reactions to them aren’t the same anymore.I mean, what’s next, are they going to explore the past trauma that will make us feel sorry for the McPoyles’ inbreeding, robe-wearing, and milk obsession?They’re funny precisely because there is no reason for them to be like that.
The problem is, classic Sunny was never based on that kind of premise, so the characters and the reactions to them aren’t the same anymore.
I think it was there in the older show, it was just more subtle. They’ve shown to varying degrees that everyone has some kind of traumatic past that informs their asshole present (i.e. Dee’s self-esteem issues from her back brace (along with everyone punching down on her), Charlie’s lack of a father figure leaving him susceptible to peer pressure from those he trusts, etc.).That said, I don’t mind the more overt ways the show has addressed this as they largely just do one-offs.
“To be fair almost the exact same writing staff works on Mythic Quest, so its not like they had all the free time we all think.”I’m sure Mythic Quest is a very good show and I’m glad the cast and crew have found success that allows them to branch out of Sunny with other opportunities, but that’s a problem when you look at it from this show’s angle. What expense does that come at for the quality of Sunny when the cast and crew have all these other priorities?
Well, not to rejoice at poor Glenn’s expense, but AP Bio was just cancelled. I’d imagine, though, that he has other opportunities to follow up on, and this wouldn’t necessarily free him up for more Sunny dedication.
I really liked these two episodes but man I felt bad for Dee not getting some with the doctor. And man Denis is now full nut job and the gang may have to put him down. Then Dee left the waitress for dead and Frank was Frank and I realize they all need to be around each other forever and die slow lonely deaths! 😉
This season has been fairly uneven, but it was still mostly hilarious. Favorite moments from the last two episodes:- Frank with a turd in his mouth from the soup for an excruciatingly long time.- Dennis awkwardly leaning over and kissing Frank on the forehead.- The cut to the title card in Dee Gets Stuck In A Bog.- Dennis hiding behind a painting with the eyes cut out like a Scooby-Doo villain.- Charlie’s moment with his father in the rain. Charlie Day has always been this show’s MVP, and this scene and his performance were just plain devastating.
looking back at the season or at least the Ireland arc, im seeing a metatext appear as they threw Charlies dad off the cliff. It reads to me as a casting away of their collective past as a definition of their characters. We got to see into all of the gangs history and how it “defined” them. Then at the end Charlie breaks down at his own and perhaps all the gangs combined failed families. Just then and as loud as they ever could be, the Gang rejoins and rejects the history they all were seeking to define them. perhaps its a pointless deep read into an uneven season but I have been a fan since the beginning and these guys rarely tell a story without a purpose.
Charlie is my favorite member of The Gang so him getting a genuine emotional moment works for me. They also still end on a dark joke instead of just being sincere like Macs Pride episode. Overall not my favorite season but it got better.
This needed 2 more episodes to truly set it up well, but still a very moving finale. I’m still not convinced Shelly is really Charlie’s father, unless his mom and uncle coincidentally had the same last names.