My Name Is Earl: The Camdenites
By fred | May 17, 2008
(S03E21-E22) Another NBC comedy, another season finale, and another special one-hour long episode ! This year will definitely stand out in the life of our good friend Earl, because, well, what a mess it’s been! Earl’s life has never been very “normal” anyways : before we used to follow him week after week he used to steal for a living, then Karma came into his life and he made the list.
He wasn’t doing bad things anymore, but that doesn’t mean it was the usual things you usually do in your life. But this year, he started being locked up, and had to stay behind bars for a while before getting trapped in a coma, and finally ending up in yet another marriage. That was clearly a pretty odd year for Earl, and a quite messy one let’s be honest.
And this episode served mostly one single purpose : to get things back on track. Earl needed to be able to have a clean start next season, to be out of his marriage, back on his list, and have enough money not to care about anything else, Tabula Rasa.
And that’s clearly what this episode was about, getting Billie out of the picture, while giving a way for Earl to be back on his list next year without requiring to look for a job. This was a much required thing, I welcome this because I’ve hated the whole prison and coma plots, and I’m more than happy to know that next season Earl will be back working on his list as he used to before.
That said, this episode really wasn’t one of the funniest of the show. It had its moments, some things were indeed funny, but I laughed a lot more during last week’s half-hour than I did during this hour, and I think I would have been a lot more opened to such an episode, had it been a series finale. But for a season finale, I wished that had find a way to bring everything back to normal for next season while focusing a lot more on comedy.
Because here, not everything was really funny, quite a few things were predictable - I mean who didn’t see coming the whole Billie having a life changing experience in that camp, hence getting out of the picture as well as giving Earl his freedom back, plus enough some money to be back on his list.
And again, the whole plot about Billie going to “undo” Earl’s list, a nice way to get lots of people back, have a way at all the lives of people Earl made better with his list, and how they were now willing to help him, it was a nice thing, but I did not find it that funny, and I’m pretty sure that for a series finale I would have been a lot more fine with it. But for today, I wished there had been a lot more laughs in there, because it felt a bit short on that area.
At least we had some Catalina in her greatest outfit, and it seems that Randy is gonna had a girlfriend next season, that might be something. In the end, it was an okay episode, not more, but I’m just really happy to see that things are now going to be back to normal next season, so I won’t complain.
And here’s just a couple of thoughts from the great mind of Randy, because I just love them :
- The girls never came back? “They were alive when you left them, if that’s what you’re hinting at!”
- Earl gets an ATM card, and suddenly Randy gets it : “Ohh! There’s a special card you have to put in!”
- And when Earl gets confused about what Karma is trying to say, he can always count on his brother to explain things : “It’s so obvious, Earl. If you pick up the trailer for one lady you pissed off, and you amp around for another lady you pissed off, then you’re annoying wife will give you a box of tissues. I think the ATM card is just random.”
- This one is just brilliant. “This is a show called CSI: Miami. That means Crime Stuff In Miami.” Awesome, that one had me rolling on the floor actually. And later on, when Earl played Oracio, with the sunglasses and the screaming in the back, pretty awesome stuff!
Posted in Reviews
Shows: My Name Is Earl
