How many legs did that dog have when you found him?
I thought this was a very good episode, but not a great episode. The fact that I find a very good episode at all disappointing says something about the overall quality of the show, so I’m going to try not to be too hard on it. It definitely had some great moments, plenty of quotable lines, and lots of laughs. (Red carpet insoles! I broke everything! So many more.). Adam Scott’s hair and arms deserved to be in the opening credits, and that alone is redeeming.
It got the job done and forwarded the story and set up the rest of the season. They needed to get from Point A-the fact that Ben didn’t immediately join Leslie’s campaign in Citizen Knope-to Point B, where he’s her campaign manager, and they did that. And I really appreciate that they didn’t just assume that he was going to join her campaign. He deserved a little time to take a breath and think about what he wanted to do next, and for that decision not to revolve completely around Leslie. He’s a supporting character in the show, but not in his own life, not in their relationship. And I’m glad that they referenced conversations he and Leslie had had about this very issue-it wasn’t that the obvious solution hadn’t occurred to them; they had just decided the risks outweighed the benefits at that point. And so we got this plot of Leslie struggling in her campaign leading to her realization that she needs Ben’s help.
Which could have been really interesting. We’ve seen so many storylines about Leslie being awesome, so a story about why Ben is specifically awesome and why she could use some of his particular brand of awesome could have been really interesting. He does have political experience, which she doesn’t have much of yet. So it makes sense that without him or her advisers giving her advice, she might flounder and turn to him. The specific way this went down seemed weird to me, though. This episode didn’t really have anything to do with politics. It was just event planning, plain and simple, and my first thought was to wonder how someone who pulled off an event the size of the Harvest Festival could botch this little event up so much. Event planning is practically her job description. (
princess_george expressed some of the specific reasons some of the things that went wrong seemed out of character in this thread.) But as others have pointed out, Leslie is no stranger to event-planning mishaps-the penguin wedding, telethon, Freddy Spaghetti, etc. jncarmade an excellent point here (seriously, just go read the whole West Coast thread) that Leslie plans big, and so her successes are spectacular, but so are her failures sometimes. That makes sense to me. I think I wouldn’t have questioned it so much if they hadn’t been making it out to be that Leslie and her team were so inexperienced, and they were failing because they didn’t know about politics. No, no, I don’t think that’s what went wrong there. Maybe it was that they rushed to plan an event too quickly, in their spare time, and that outside the workday Leslie didn’t have as much oversight over what her team was doing. And maybe she was delegating more than she would on a parks project. And Pistol Pete being a flake, I’m not sure that was anyone’s fault. But none of it seemed to have anything to do with Leslie’s lack of political experience.
And that’s a really small quibble, except that it fuzzies the reasons why Leslie needs Ben, which for reasons of personal obsession I would have liked to explore more in-depth. (Yes, I’m aware of how out-of-whack my expectations are for a sitcom, but I also write these long reviews in the hopes that people will read them and then write long lovely fics delivering on all the unrealistic things I want!) Anyway, Ben doesn’t have much event-planning experience beyond Harvest Festival, and when things went wrong in Harvest Festival, Leslie was the one to get things back on track. So to bring him on because of the specific things that went wrong in this episode doesn’t make much sense. He does bring a certain level of work ethic and attention to detail that might have been helpful in preventing this debacle. Maybe, with his expertise on ice, he would have been the one to stand up and shout, “NO PETE DON’T DO IT!” But I don’t know what his political experience had to do with anything. Going forward, I’m sure that his political experience will have a lot more relevance. But I just think it would have been more interesting to show a plot where the team, say, tried a certain political strategy, struggled to make it work, and for Ben to pipe up at some point (in bed, preferably, because we need in-bed scenes) that the team could try blahblah political mumbo-jumbo because of more political words here something that shows some actual political savvy you know what I mean but it’s been too long since I’ve seen the West Wing so I can’t really put it into words. But Ben could.
But … that might not have featured as many people falling down on the ice, so I understand why they went their own direction with it, and didn’t consult with me. And I also figure we will see more of what Ben has to contribute to the campaign as the campaign gets going.
Speaking of Leslie’s campaign, I really wish I knew what the scandal situation was. It seemed like in spite of her (questionable) polling numbers, the news hadn’t really broken before Christmas. But it seems like if an assistant city manager resigns, the media would be all over finding out why, and if there was a scandal to be covered there, they’d be covering it. Also, before her advisers quit, Leslie was proposing doing interviews about it for damage control, and when they quit, she apparently abandoned that idea. I’m sure the scandal will be addressed at some point. I’m just surprised it’s taking so long to get there.
Moving on. I loved Ben’s storyline, what with the arms and hair and the jeans and the Letters to Cleo shirt which I can’t even explain why that was so awesome and the clay-maysh. Oh the clay-maysh. Requiem for a Tuesday! Go away, Chris, and let Ben finish that awesomeness. Real friends don’t tell their friends to cease and desist that sort of thing without first asking the important questions. Such as: Is that supposed to be you? Will any blond-haired characters appear? What happens next? And then what? Tell me what in your real life inspired this. Why Tuesday, why not Wednesday? What other ’90s throwbacks will the soundtrack feature? Etc.
Seriously though. As I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t think Ben was all that depressed here. He was acting a little bonkers, but not in a sad way. (Actually, the particular brand of overzealous crazy here might explain how an 18-year-old decided to run for mayor and try to build Ice Town, come to think of it.) Depressed Ben takes long sadness baths and gets all surly and makes pathetic statements about how little he has in his life. He’s unemployed, and he doesn’t know what he’s going to do next, and he has all this time to fill, and that’s disconcerting. But I just don’t see how throwing himself into a couple hobbies while he figures himself out is all that unhealthy (and if he wants to have sexy tousled hair while he does so, who are we to judge?). Of course these things weren’t going to be fulfilling in the long run for him, but it hasn’t been all that long, and he didn’t really seem to need the full-fledged intervention that Chris was staging. Not that I’m knocking Chris-I really liked seeing him try to be there for Ben. They’re friends, and when you see a friend who’s been predictable for 12 years suddenly start behaving really abnormally, you start to worry. Falling for blondes! Resigning for a woman! And now clay-maysh? Seriously, I understand Chris’s perspective here; I’m just not going to take his word for the fact that Ben was wildly depressed, especially since Chris never seemed to notice when Ben was actually depressed. Ben seemed happy at the end of Citizen Knope about taking some time to figure out what he wanted, and I don’t see much reason here to worry he’d changed his mind about that. (I love this analysis jncar made of Ben and Chris's dynamic and Chris's potential story arc for the season.)
I also don’t think Leslie was oblivious to what Ben was going through. It seemed like she was being supportive and nonjudgmental, and I don’t know what else a significant other could do in that situation. kyrieanne covered this pretty well on her tumblr a few days ago. Also, it’s entirely possible that Leslie genuinely thought the Claymation video was awesome and was sincerely encouraging him on that, if not his calzone idea.
And that brings us to calzones. Didn’t Ben already know how to make calzones? I assumed he made the one he ate in Citizen Knope. Incidentally, I’ve made calzones, and it’s not that hard. It looked like Ben’s problem was that he put too much filling in the dough so that he couldn't get it to close without oozing-amateurs! I’ve also had takeout calzones. In Minnesota, come to think of it. But they were not low-cal, so Ben’s idea is obviously revolutionary.
When I reread this whole entry, some of these thoughts seem a little harsher when I type them out than they do when they appear in little innocuous thought bubbles over my head. I’d probably give this episode an A- or a B+. The funny was funny, and the rest … is actually hard to judge at this point in the season. I don’t know what all they’re going to do with Ben’s career journey or Leslie’s campaign. It’s possible that after I see where they’re going with it, I’ll look back and see that they set it all in motion in exactly the right way.
In conclusion, I’m really just so happy that Parks is back. It’s back!