The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Understanding

"Catch the catch?"

So... I hate having to be prickly from time to time, but this episode was a mess. Every once in a while, even the best television shows will leave you with an episode that just utterly baffles you in terms of how it got into fruition, and I'll be damned if "The Understanding" isn't Gumball's. Sure, the show's had worst episodes, but there's never been one this ridiculously perplexing in its existence. It's just an episode that tries too much. While I usually admire the show going balls to the wall with some fantastically insane premise, here, it pays off very little, or at the very least far from the desired effect. Let's break down why.

The largest issue with "The Understanding" is that it wants to take advantage of shock humor. I can see the logic there and why the writers thought it would be a fun idea: the episode is framed around Peter Pepperoni, who Gumball and Darwin are completely unable to decode in how strangely he speaks, so they decide to just nod in agreement with everything. This, however, backfires when it turns out he was talking about him and his parents' abhorrence for the government and inviting them on a heist of town hall records.

The issue is that, to make the premise happen, the episode splits itself into two wildly different pieces, and both aren't given a balanced amount of depth to really bridge together as a cohesive unit. As a result, while the twist is a legitimate shock, it feels unearned, and everything that follows just flies by like a confusing fever dream.

It's not like "The Understanding" is really, in the first few minutes, given much room to improve. Peter Pepperoni is introduced with the sole personality trait of being unable to speak comprehensively, and all it does is try the audience without really evolving. It just becomes a game of Gumball and Darwin trying to be tactically evasive. All of this, of course, is build-up for the big tonal switcheroo, but it takes five minutes to get to that point, at which point the pacing just feels deadening with the exception of a few inspired jokes serving as catharsis to help coax the audience through it. (The brief sliver of Principal Brown trying to figure out a xylophone chime and giving a particularly unnecessary intercom announcement is probably the episode's most enjoyable moment, for whatever that's worth.)

The big twist, meanwhile, is so opposed to how the rest of the episode goes that it doesn't really land. Siciliana and Quattro, Peter's parents, slowly reveal themselves to be rather suspicious before straight-up leading a heist on the town hall, and from that point on, there's just no room for the episode to really build intensity. Instead, we get a cute series of character interactions built around loose legal papers flying across Elmore which, while assuring some decent laughs, serves to immediately deflate the shock the episode seems so bent on establishing before roaring back into 11 for the big finish.

The only things that really work about "The Understanding," and the only things that are truly constant, are Gumball and Darwin. In an episode threatening to just take a straight nosedive, the two help anchor everything that's happening by keeping some foot, at least by some strange internal logic, in reality. It's fun to see them get dragged through everything after committing something so forseeably harmless, but the overall lack of discipline to how the plot is actually laid out always threatens to throw off that balance (and generally succeeds).

I know that this review is overwhelmingly negative, and there's certainly some good that I'm omitting, but the issues of the episode far overwhelm it, at least for me. Everything about "The Understanding" is just rough around the edges; it has an interesting idea, but it never really thinks out how to package it, and the end result is a bit too chaotic and disorganized to work.

Notes and Quotes:
-In case you were curious, Peter's character employs what is referred to in comedy as "double-talk," or deliberately unintelligible speech; it's sort of like how uncanny valley works for robots, but linguistic. If you're interested in hearing what else it can sound like, check out Vanessa Bayer's Dawn Lazarus character from SNL or Reggie Watts.
-"Well, I can see why you came to us. You want a pair of guys down with the streets, just a couple of cool dudes who are so confident in their fashion choices they haven't changed their outfits in six years."
-"I've been nodding so much I developed a six-pack here [on the neck]! I say we get out of here before my neck gets scouted for a football scholarship."
-"It still could be his birthday." "Who'd hold a kid's party at the town hall?" "I don't know. Maybe instead of a clown tripping over his long shoes, there's a democratically-elected official making minor administrative errors?"
-Mr. Robinson's multiple failed attempts to light a match to set his and Mrs. Robinson's certificate of marriage on fire was fun, but having her just hand him a lighter outright was a great way to give the joke just that extra oomph. (Also, they can argue all they want, but that's some chemistry there.)
-"What is going on here?!" "Oh, I thought Peter explained all of this to you." "Yeah, he might've!"
-I didn't really mention it in the review because I couldn't wedge it in, but the ultimate resolution, with Peter delivering a dramatic exposition to spare his parents from going to jail in his trademark incoherence, just barely lands, and it only really works because Doughnut Sheriff is too lazy to write it for evidence. Otherwise, it's somewhat a point of convergence for the two plot-lines, but the connection is still too lose not to feel disjointed.
-Lastly, it's worth noting that "The Understanding" is the latest episode not to feature Ben Bocquelet as a writer. Given those episodes' routinely spotty track record, maybe that's partially to blame for the episode's issues.

FINAL GRADE: C. "The Understanding" is an episode that just puts too much on its plate. It wants to shove together a multitude of ideas, but none of them really work, and the pay-off comes across as nothing but shock humor for the sake of shock humor. There has to be some logical grounding in whatever pans out from episodes like this, or the show has to at least surrender itself more to one of its halves (either Peter's inability to speak or the Pepperonis being anti-government conspiracy nutjobs), but the tonal shift doesn't register because of how much it feels like the idea is forced upon the narrative. I applaud how far the show wanted to push its premise, but in a rare turn of events, it pushed too hard, damaging the episode's potential in the process.

For the last Gumball review of "The Transformation," CLICK HERE.