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At one point in the last episode, Joel mockingly told Julia that “Only a Braverman can criticize another Braverman”, but anyone could criticize this episode, which saw most of the characters acting irrational and silly for no apparent reason.
It all started when Sarah illogically pressured Julia and Joel to hire Amber as their babysitter for “date night”. Later on, when they politely canceled, Sarah guilted her sister into changing her mind by telling her that Amber was sad about it and the “go-to girl of babysitting” in their old neighborhood. This was all a lie, because Sarah herself doubted her daughter. Despite the fact that she made vulgar accusations about her brother in front of the rest of the family and smoked a cigarette as she told Haddie to lie to her parents because “they’re like termites”, Amber did turn out to be a good babysitter. While making “paper turtles” with Sydney, she even noticed that her mother was sneaking around outside, trying to check up on them.
A large portion of the show, however, dealt with Sarah trying to get Adam to explain the birds and the bees to Drew, while simultaneously discouraging her father to do the same. All three of them awkwardly stumbled and embarrassed themselves in various zany attempts to tell the boy things he probably already knew. But if anyone in the family needed to be told about such matters, it was Crosby, who stayed overnight with his illegitimate son for the first time.
Crosby literally played with fire, which is apparently a Braverman tradition, while he barbecued dinner for Jabbar. Strangely, this had nothing to do with him going to the emergency room. That was because the boy got his thumb hung inside of a soda can and couldn’t get it out. When he said he couldn’t feel his thumb anymore, Crosby panicked and called Julia, of all people. I don’t know why he never told her that he had a son, but he didn’t. Nevertheless, she easily calmed Jabbar and removed the can while they were in the hospital waiting room. Her advice to start dealing with things because this is “a big thing” was mostly ignored, because Crosby later told Jasmine that Jabbar’s band-aid was from “a fishing accident”.
The rest of the show focused on Adam and Kristina’s shock over the fact that Haddie didn’t tell them that she was seeing somebody. First, they were disgusted by her new boyfriend’s rapping voice-mail message and then they got Crosby to “hack into her computer”. Why they were more concerned about all of this than the fact that she previously tried marijuana is a mystery to me. However, Haddie did act strangely. She showed pictures of her family to her boyfriend’s parents and has been sneaking out of the house through her bedroom window, yet she acted outraged by the fact that her parents read her Facebook page. After a lot of arguing, she invited this same boy, Steve, to the family’s end of episode barbecue.
This episode was disappointing for me because it didn’t really go anywhere or solve anything. Next week, though, it was advertised that Crosby is finally going to tell his girlfriend about his son and that Sarah is going on a date with her daughter’s teacher. What happened to Jim?
