It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia Review: Dee’s Halloweenie

It’s 5:30 on a Saturday evening at Paddy’s pub in Philadelphia, and Mac, Charlie and Dennis are eagerly discussing their intent to spend the night in the city’s history museum to see what shenanigans unfold. Apparently inspired by the Ben Stiller movie Night at the Museum, the three amigos list the exhibits they’re most excited to see “come alive” as Dee listens in with visible skepticism. She finally voices her incredulity in between generous bites of a sandwich, but is curtly shot down by Dennis as he claims it doesn’t matter whether they encounter “Charlie’s ancient spirits or end up running from security guards all night.” The pursuit of adventure is the ultimate objective. So suck it, Dee!

The guys use this moment to deflect attention from their highly delusional (not to mention childish and illegal) plans to take notice at Dee’s mutating waistline. As they tease her for her recent increased interest in food and the undeniable result thereof, Dee drops a bombshell and announces she isn’t getting fat – she’s pregnant. While Kaitlin Olson must be relieved to finally be able to stop hiding from behind the bar and holding random objects in front of her belly to disguise her real-life pregnancy, her character is instead miffed that the guys don’t seem to give a hoot about her upcoming motherhood. To up the ante, she tells them they should start caring, because the conception occurred at Paddy’s infamously belligerent Halloween party and one of them is the father. Cue the predictably succinct and explanatory credits, which ask the question the entire episode is dedicated to answering: “Who Got Dee Pregnant?”

Mac, Charlie and Dennis enlist the help of Frank to help solve the budding mystery as the foursome sits down to discuss the fuzzy and fragmented events on All Hallow’s Eve. While Dee is visibly a few months along, the multiple flashbacks to that fateful evening provide a welcome timeliness that isn’t often utilized on Sunny. The Halloween party was evidently a night of drunken debauchery for the entire Gang as the episode shows each character’s memory of the party in amusingly different lights. Mac says he can’t remember the party too well because he had a “brownout,” which is a level of intoxication less severe than a full-on blackout, but intense enough to hinder one’s ability to recall certain events. Dennis digs the new term and vows to incorporate it into common vernacular – I’m surprised it hasn’t been already.

The guys begin to compile their respective brownouts in order to piece together the course of the evening and hopefully figure out who Dee slept with at the party. As it becomes more and more clear that each person’s own particular brownout and narcissistic tendencies render their memories of the night unreliable, the episode unfolds itself like a lowbrow, theatrical game of telephone.

Dennis begins by expressing resentment toward Mac for ditching their plans to dress as Mario and Luigi. Poor Dennis is left to look like a cartoonish Italian plumber all by himself, while Charlie manages to thwart his own intentions to dress as a vampire by accidentally donning a Phantom of the Opera getup instead, mask and all. Frank has squeezed himself into a Spider-Man outfit (or, Man-Spider, as he later corrects) Mac is dressed as “that dude from Lord of the Rings, ‘Viggo Morgenstein,’” and Dee is sporting a sexy angel look. The guys immediately give her a hard time for choosing a costume that incorporates wings, since her bird-like appearance provides enough material for them to mercilessly tease her as it is. The guys, Dennis in particular, notice a comely blonde across the room actually dressed as a bird – a peacock to be exact – and commence their usual Cro-Magnon mating rituals to Dee’s chagrin.

While Dennis’ distortion of reality causes him to think he’s hitting it off with Miss Peacock, she’s actually in the process of telling him off when Charlie tearfully sputters toward them with an unintelligible claim that his costume is “too sexy,” and his “friend” is “sexing [him] up.” Dennis realizes he and the inebriated, but apparently laid, Charlie need to switch costumes so he’ll have a better chance at impressing his female target. Given these “memories,” Dennis concludes Charlie was “sexed up” by his “friend” Dee, and Dennis himself must have eventually closed the deal with the peacock lady if he ended up wearing Charlie’s foolproof, lady-killing outfit. Mystery solved!

Wrong, says Charlie, as he throws in his muddled two cents. He’d actually been shedding tears of joy because he ended up making out with The Waitress after punching her date in the face as Mac joined in and the creepy, milk-drinking McPoyle twins looked on. In Charlie’s version of events, the brothers are caught in the crossfire of Mac and Charlie’s brawl and end up splashing a glass of milk all over Dee, who quickly retreats to the restroom to clean up. Given this new information, Charlie reasons he couldn’t possibly be the father of Dee’s unborn child.

Frank puts the kibosh on this theory, arguing that Charlie hadn’t made out with The Waitress, but actually Frank’s sometimes lover, Artemis. According to Frank’s recollection, Artemis swooped in on Charlie after The Waitress and her date fled the scene in disgust with his drunken belligerence. Frank insists Artemis planted one on Charlie to make Frank jealous, however, given their tumultuous relationship. In light of Frank’s revelation, the guys decide to call Artemis and invite her down to Paddy’s to set the record straight.

Although she says she doesn’t remember “most nights,” including the party, Artemis does offer helpful insight into the guys’ shoddy detective work. After Dee retreated to the bathroom to wash the milk off of her costume, Mac followed suit to clean the blood off of his knuckles from his involvement in the scuffle. Dee had apparently been in the men’s room to avoid a line for the ladies’, and Artemis herself heard the unmistakable sound of figurative boots figuratively knocking mere moments later. Just when it seems the case is closed, Mac’s obvious embarrassment gives way to his reluctant confession that he hadn’t slept with Dee in the bathroom – he’d had a run-in with Margaret McPoyle, the equally creepy deaf-mute sister of the twins, after shooing Dee away. For shame!

Now, the guys realize they must confirm Mac’s story with the McPoyle twins themselves, especially since they’d been drinking milk that whole fateful night and were likely the only people there who could’ve passed a breathalyzer test.  They head over to the McPoyles’ creepy lair, where the brothers are both wearing shabby terry cloth bathrobes and holding their ubiquitous glasses of milk. Despite their undeniably off-putting demeanor, the twins’ sobriety means they have the most reliable recollection of the evening. To Charlie’s dismay, it turns out the woman whose boyfriend he (poorly) attempted to pummel wasn’t even The Waitress (ha!) at all, but an innocent, unknown patron. Also, Mac’s attempt to back up his friend in the needless fight only resulted in sloppily bumping into the twins, which caused them to spill their milk all over Dee. The brothers then express squirm-inducing delight at the one correct conclusion the guys came up with: Mac did indeed have sex with lip-licking Margaret in Paddy’s run-down bathroom. With the story now set relatively straight, both the guys and me have had enough of the McPoyles for one evening.

The titular mystery of the episode remains unsolved, however, and the brothers do offer one last pertinent piece of info as they recall Dee accosting Miss Peacock with drunken jealousy. Dee proposes switching costumes to give Dee the chance to feel like the hot chick, while the actual hot chick can have a break from the leering idiots who haven’t left her alone all night (ahem, Dennis). Plus, Dee tells her, if they switch costumes, “I won’t beat the shit out of you.” There you have it. As Dee prances about the party in her new outfit, she’s proud as a you-know-what and uses her newfound confidence to grab the first guy she sees and lure him into the office. According to the McPoyle brothers’ reliable memory, the guy Dee grabbed was Charlie in his Phantom costume…but wait! The guys make the sickening realization that Charlie and Dennis had already switched costumes by then, meaning Dee had grabbed Dennis in the Phantom getup, not Charlie, and the siblings were already too deep in their respective brownouts to recognize one another. Clearly, Dee thought she was with Charlie and Dennis thought he had actually scored with Miss Peacock. As Dennis begins to hurl with disgust, the McPoyles offer satisfied smirks and a deadpan “delightful,” in unison.

The guys scramble over to Dee’s and nearly pound down her door. When she finally answers, she looks justifiably bemused at their frantic rehashing of the events leading up to this horrible discovery. Dee laughs with impunity and tells the guys that none of them are the father and she had only told them otherwise to drive them crazy. Evidently, it worked. Besides, she says, just because she dragged Dennis into the office at the party doesn’t mean she slept with him, for crying out loud. Gross, guys! They are relieved to know they’re all off the hook, particularly Dennis, and they proceed to retreat back into their self-involved ways and claim to Dee they’re back to not caring about her pregnancy or the identity of the father. If it isn’t one of them, they reason, why would they? The episode closes with Charlie, Mac, Dennis and Frank recommencing their plans to spend the night at the museum and awaken ancient relics.

I found this episode the most enjoyable and old school Sunny of the season, as the roundabout, flashback-heavy storytelling tactics managed to bring back recurring characters from the entire series and utilize the zany writing to its sharpest degree. I had the pleasure to watch this episode at San Diego Comic-Con in July, and I was pleased to view it again during its intended airtime. The Halloween theme was pleasantly pertinent, and subtle recurring gags throughout the episode helped break up the heavier, more sadistic humor. I particularly liked the recurring joke of Dee growing more and more literally bird-like as the guys’ recollections continued; she started out the evening in an angel costume, then appeared with feathers, then a beak, and finally as a full-blown ostrich in Mac’s memory of their brief encounter in the restroom. Lighthearted humor such as this mixed with the irreverent shock value of an incest revelation makes the provocative storylines funnier and more surprising than if just used alone for the sake of being controversial. While we still don’t know who got Dee pregnant, this episode of Sunny is such a standout on its own, I’m not sure it even matters in the long run.

Season 6, Episode 7: Who Got Dee Pregnant? (originally aired October 28, 2010)

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