First airdate: 5 December, 2005
Written by Jake Farrow & Sam Laybourne
Directed by Paul Feig
Thus does the Arrested Development Rita arc end where it began: with a pretty darn weak episode. But where “For British Eyes Only” suffers from having too many ideas and not nearly enough space to cram them all in, “The Ocean Walker” suffers from having not that much story to wrap up and not remotely enough new jokes in hand. It’s repetitive and redundant, doing very little more than clarifying and extending themes that were already quite clear in the preceding “Mr. F”, and its use of previously-employed gags and punchlines doesn’t feel like it’s employing callbacks as such (though Rita’s “Where did the lighter fluid come from?” certainly works on that level), and more just telling the same joke, because hell, you’ve gotta fill 20 minutes sometime. “Check out banner, Michael!”, “a thing of candy beans”, the lightsaber video, Michael getting beaned by Merry Poppuns: these are funny things one and all, but “The Ocean Walker” doesn’t try to enlarge any of them, just get the same laugh that they got the last time.
On the other hand, “The Ocean Walker” has, emphatically, my all-time favorite “On the next…” bit, in which the show’s parody of trite romantic comedies extends to a parody of trite “the mentally challenged are secretly smarter than all of us” movies, in the form of Being There; it’s also one of the best fake-outs the show ever devised, successfully playing a trick that the episode lunges into uncharacteristic sentiment and magical realism for AD, because by this point in the run we’d never expect that they’d make that kind of play in the epilogue, and so the show uses itself against us to land one of the most genuinely surprising jokes in its entire run. So we can hardly call the episode a write-off, if only for that moment.
It’s not the single thing about “The Ocean Walker” that I like, though I’m confident that things I don’t much care for outnumber things I do. Still, let us at least to the episode the courtesy of emphasising the positive things, because the point remains as it always has: poor Arrested Development is a very different thing from poor television generally. “The Ocean Walker” still has its unmistakable spread of excellent moments, or at least things random enough that their very absurdity is funny. Gob’s tear-choked promise to get his brother the cleanest call girl in Orange County. Trevor’s Legoland T-shirt. George-Michael’s prattling about the difficulties in getting cousin-marriage legislation passed in California. The reference to the Volkswagen “Mr. Roboto” ad starring a pre-AD Tony Hale. The fact that the narrator and George-Michael inaccurately insist that there are three houses in Parliament. Larry’s dismissal at the wedding. The floating and flying versions of Bluthton. “Like when they say ‘poofter’ to mean ‘tourist'”. “That way, I can see if you have a monster”. George’s recollection of knocking up a HoJo waitress (“It was Stuckey’s”). Anything involving Gob’s magic. I’m also a fan of the more controversial joke of Rita being able to open the “invisibly locked” door without either her or Michael reacting (it keeps the cartoon logic and heightened absurdity intact)
I’ve put all that in a big indiscriminate list, because frankly, that’s how it plays. Everything that works in “The Ocean Walker” (and even some of it doesn’t, quite: the George/Lucille backstory clashes with what was elsewhere implied – not stated – about their meeting through Oscar) is funny in isolation. Almost everything related to the story or the plot isn’t particularly funny at all, not least because it relies to an uncharacteristic degree on recycling jokes or just plain over-working the script. I’m as big a fan of the more personal, snarky narrator-as-character as anybody, but “The Ocean Walker” goes much to far in having him clarify things that don’t need it and generally telling us things we already knew (insofar as the Rita arc ever turns genuinely nasty about mental disability, it’s largely because in this episode, the narrator feels compelled to keep pointing it out, over and over again). What might possibly be my least favorite thing about this episode is that, more than perhaps any other AD episode ever, it assumes that we’re dumb: it clarifies too much and even commits the grave sin of putting several moments that were previously just good foreshadowing into a montage that serves its narrative purpose, but in practice feels like the show is pointing out how clever it was to put all those hints in. When Michael mentions the Olympics, and then stops short with “I just figured that out”, it’s a semi-clever way of flagging that sometimes, AD jokes sneak up on you, and the writers are aware of that. The montage is cheap.
No, I take that back: my least least favorite thing is that Charlize Theron is no longer playing the same character. In every previous appearance, including “Mr. F”, Rita is played as a character who could be a spy, or could be developmentally disabled, or could be a clichéd free-spirited dream girl, and the wisdom of the writing lied in Michael, in his infinite self-absorption, assuming she was the third. The Rita of “The Ocean Walker” is a full-fledged case of Hollywood-style mental retardation, a grown-up little girl with absolutely no ability to dissemble or be coy in any way, traits that were vital to her previous depiction. It’s more insulting, but even worse, it pushes Michael’s infatuation from mere narcissism, as he points out, to outright insanity: not all the jokes about British accents (and absolutely terrific meta-jokes about Monster) can paper over that fact.
And that’s without mentioning my least-favorite scene, the shrill and unpleasant slapstick involving Tobias falling out of a wheelchair, but since that’s primarily awful because of what it portends, it will be better to leave that discussion for a later point. “The Ocean Walker” has enough sins of its own, without being blamed for the sins of other episodes.