Back on top! After what I personally considered to be a real zero of an episode last week, It’s Always Sunny returns to top form, or close to it, with “The Storm of the Century.” Doesn’t it make sense that Paddy’s has an underground bunker Dee insisted be built to weather Y2K? And doesn’t it add up that, with a massive hurricane headed toward Philadelphia, Dee would discover that the bunker’s supplies have been decimated by Charlie’s taste for sardines and pickled eggs, as well as Dennis’s frequent subterranean fuck sessions? “He was probably down here with Mac watching you rape girls and eating pickled eggs,” Dee rages when she sees her missing supplies. “We gotta stop pussy-dicking around here. It’s time to get in the bunker,” she demands, so while a tight-wound rain-suit-sporting Dee stays behind with Frank to barricade the bar, Mac, Dennis and Charlie set out for All American Home Center for supplies/women and tits.
While Charlie scrambles around the store, gleefully hunting for bunker materials, Dennis takes moment to pen his profoundly predatory Bunker Contract, which must be signed by any and all ladies who might be joining them for the End of Days. It read in part, “I hereby agree to be easygoing, to engage in playful conversation, to always act as though I desire your penis, even if I do not.” Despite Dennis denying him the chance to sign the contract, Charlie eventually gets excited for the prospect of their very own post-Apocalyptic breeding pit, making plans to sleep with Dennis’s children, for Dennis to sleep with his children, for him to sleep with Dennis’s children’s children and so on and so forth. “It’s like a perfect society,” Charlie gushes. Sounds like someone needs to draw up another contract! Fortunately for humanity Dennis was unable to lure any women down into his lair, as the busty TV reporter of his dreams Jackie DeNardo was not wooed by his bizarre stuttering attempts to hit on her. “I think I’m in love with that woman. Not for the right reasons, mind you,” he sighs. Also, the camera shot of Dennis slowly, tentatively creeping along behind DeNardo while she reported on the storm was the visual gag of the episode.
The episode also marked a visit from our old friend Rickety Cricket…who does not look good. Not good at all. As Adam points out, “They are one or two appearances away from having to put him in 3rd degree burn makeup.” Though to be fair, you know that’ll be a great episode. Lurking in the bunker like a slightly more well-dressed C.H.U.D., Cricket is almost immediately shot in the hand by a startled Frank, and gradually declines as he is reluctantly dragged to the hospital, arguing that emergency rooms “euthanize the homeless.” “You’re marching me to the ovens!,” he pleads. Luckily for him, news of Mac’s abandonment of Charlie and Dennis at the store kicks Dee’s will to survive into overdrive, and she reroutes them to All American.
I do really wish they had blown out Dee’s distrust of technology even further. From the reveal of the Y2K bunker until her final crazed moments smashing the store’s cash registers with a miniature baseball bat while screaming “Kill the machines!,” Dee’s technophobia was a vein of pure comedy ore. Having had Frank look back fondly at the L.A. riots (no, literally, they watched a YouTube video of him looting ski equipment), you knew it was a matter of time before rioting broke out, which it did once a desperate Cricket, left in the car like a dog, drives Dee’s car through the front windows of the superstore. At this point the hurricane had been downgraded to a drizzle, but details like that don’t matter when society is coming to an end. While the rest of the gang loses their mind, we cut to Mac, feeding his face and watching 3D weather lady boobs in the safety of the bunker. It was a slightly anticlimactic cap on an otherwise solid episode, but after seeing Charlie swinging his emergency hatchet and kidnapping a terrified Jackie DeNardo on live TV, what else wouldn’t be?
