Frank Shoots Every Member of the Gang
Episode 2 of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia Season 16 begins in a restaurant where Frank, Dennis and Dee are having dinner together. Frank suspects this is their ploy to get money from him, which, of course, is true!
While at the table, Frank has trouble opening a can of anchovies which he brought to the restaurant himself because the fish in the establishment isn’t salty enough. Rather than call for help, he pulls out a gun and consequently tries to open the tin with it. After promising Dennis and Dee that it’s not loaded, he accidentally shoots them both in the face.
Despite this near-tragedy – the bullet only grazed the two – Frank is rather nonchalant about what he did. We cut to the bar where Dennis and Dee arrive to tell Mac and Charlie about what happened. Mac considers getting shot in the face and surviving as “pretty cool.”
Dennis is worried that Frank is going to accidentally kill himself with the gun before he gets old and senile enough to rewrite them into the will. Charlie tells Dennis and Dee that money isn’t everything. When Dennis scorns him for having nobody rich enough to pass money on to him, Charlie reveals he has a huge inheritance coming his way. It turns out this family inheritance is a jar full of teeth that has been filled by his descendants.
Charlie is set to inherit these teeth when he’s 40. Unbeknownst to him, he turned 40 a long while ago, according to Mac, which prompts Charlie to visit his mom to retrieve the teeth. Mac’s mom is also at the house and Mac asks her if his family has any heirlooms. He finds out about letters dating back to World War 2 that belonged to his grandfather. They now belong to his Uncle Donald.
A scream is heard from the other room. It’s Charlie’s mom who tried to pull out her own teeth. Her mouth drips blood as she tells Charlie she didn’t have the heart to tell him she gave the teeth away to his sisters. This is why she was trying to pull out her own molars, to trick Charlie into thinking they were the inheritance.
While Charlie is calming his mom down, we cut to Dennis, Dee and Frank in a car. Frank is scratching his itchy head with the gun which makes the others nervous. To stop him waving the gun around, Dee offers to scratch his itch for him.
When Frank gets out of the car to take a pee, Dee and Dennis discuss ways to get the gun from him. They decide to lull him into a false sense of security by giving him the best day of his life.
Meanwhile, Charlie, Mac, and their respective moms are in a car driving to Donald’s house in Hamburg. The journey is a bit of a nightmare due to Charlie’s mom’s slow driving and Mac’s mom’s insistence on smoking in the car. When Mac and Charlie start arguing about the letters, Mac’s mom burns him with her cigarette to make him shut up.
Back in Dennis’s car, we see he and Dee have bought Frank some hamburgers. He eats them like an animal and accidentally dips his gun in the ketchup. When Dennis stops the car so Frank can go pee again (on a hydrant like a dog), he and Dee briefly discuss their strategy.
We cut to Mac and the others at Donald’s house. Mac thinks the letters were written to Donald but his uncle reveals they were written to Mac’s dad because their grandfather liked him best. Donald refers to himself as the “funny one,” implying that he might be gay, which is something his family never liked to talk about. Donald tells Mac he’s sure he knows what “that feels like,” which implies he knows Mac is gay. Mac refutes this suggestion and gets back onto the subject of the letters.
Donald digs out the letters and tells everybody he kept them because he wanted a connection with his dad. This is something else he has in common with Mac, who, as we have learned in previous episodes, also craves affection from his father. Mac overlooks this as he’s more interested in the letters. Charlie is surprised at this as he realizes Mac has everything he always dreamed of at his Uncle Donald’s. Presumably, he is referring to a connection with a dad-like figure with an understanding of his sexuality. Donald even suggests throwing a ball around with Mac which Charlie relates back to the bonding Mac wanted with his dad.
The next scene is at the beach where Dennis, Dee and Frank are looking at the ocean. Dennis suggests the sea might bring back a lot of good memories for Frank but his response is to shoot at the water with his gun, calling it a cesspool!
Frank tells them he knows why they gave him a good day and gives the gun to them. He actually thinks they are at the beach so they can “put him down,” and starts to undress so he doesn’t poop in his pants when they shoot him. Dee explains their intention wasn’t to shoot him but to give him one last day with his gun. This infuriates Frank who takes the gun back and tells them they are out of the will again, just in case they really try to shoot him in the back.
Dennis and Dee are then led to the car at gunpoint by Frank while elsewhere, Charlie and the others arrive at his sisters’ house. They live in a beautiful house due to their ASMR videos. The girls tell Charlie that people pay to watch them put their hands in the jar of teeth. Mac is surprised that makes them money but they explain they take their tops off too.
As the siblings argue about who gets to keep the teeth, Mac’s mom returns from the toilet. She tells them there was no toilet paper so she used the family letters to wipe her butt and then flushed them down the toilet. Mac is appalled at this but we don’t get time to dwell on his unhappiness as Charlie grabs a vase and tells his sisters he is going to keep it to put his and his mom’s teeth in it – a new family heirloom.
We cut to the bar where Charlie is pulling his teeth out. Frank arrives, shooting at the door with his gun and shattering the new tooth jar with a bullet. The episode ends with them arguing about their broken legacies, causing Frank to slam the gun down on the bar, causing it to send a bullet flying around the bar and grazing each of them. As the episode’s title suggests, Frank really does shoot every member of the gang.
The Episode Review
This wasn’t a particularly funny episode. Sure, there were some amusing scenes of Frank going crazy with his gun, but there wasn’t a lot here to really tickle the funny bone.
Despite the lack of any real laughs, it was still a joy to spend time with the gang on their respective road trips. The re-introduction of the two moms was a nice touch, with their various quirks and unpleasantries, and it was good to see new characters introduced to the show, namely Charlie’s sisters and Mac’s uncle.
The best part of the episode was at Uncle Donald’s house because we got to meet a man Mac could relate to. Not that Mac considered bonding, of course, as he was too focused on the letters. But there might be scope later in the season (or the next season) for Mac to build a relationship with the guy if Charlie can convince him of their similarities.
As with the previous episode, this instalment hardly qualifies as a classic. It’s the actors that keep us glued to the screen rather than the hoped-for hilarity of their character’s predicaments, as they never fail to delight, even when the writing isn’t as cutting as it used to be.
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You can read our full Season 16 review of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia here |
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