The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Mess

"Ask me for anything you like and I'll buy it for you!" "I would like the golden twinkle in an old man's eye as he holds his infant granddaughter." "What?" 

For whatever reason, Gumball's writers really like making Gumball sleep-deprived for quick jokes. The good news, though, is that they do it incredibly well, and evolving his sleep-deprivation into a full-fledged, conceptual episode alongside Darwin was a smart way to elevate the gag with some new wrinkles added to the formula. Fueled—or, I guess, the opposite of that, really—by a night of video-watching, Gumball and Darwin are tasked with watching Penny's sister, Polly (making her first major appearance in an episode) though they fade in and out of consciousness repeatedly, losing Polly along the way and awakening every minute somewhere else, in the middle of a new scenario with an inexplicable lack of context.

That's the game of "The Mess," and it's a ton of stupid fun. Watching Gumball and Darwin run around at only half of their mental power is already fun enough, allowing for more interesting dialogue and an all-around weirder narrative, but centering it around them attempting (and failing) to babysit Polly adds a nice sense of urgency to everything. It's just a terrible day, but amplified up a thousand times, and that kind of idea is right up the show's alley.

A lot of people have made comparisons with "The Mess" to The Hangover, but after watching it in preparation for this review, I don't really see that strong of a comparison. That very well might've been a point of influence, but more than anything else, "The Mess" shares DNA with one of Bojack Horseman's most memorable episodes, "That's Too Much, Man!" which, to the uninitiated, has its lead character fading in and out of drug-fueled black-outs and emerging in increasingly worse locations alongside a druggie child star. In both cases, the narrative structure maintains a sense of hypnotizing intrigue at what what happen next, but whereas that episode spells everything out neatly, "The Mess" really works because of how much it starves us for context in its first half.

While there's an argument that can be made that the episode pursues a sense of randomness in place of organic comedy, the character's antics are so absurd, and their reactions so horrified, that it really worked for me. This episode manages to make a leap from building a snowman out of meat to being in an upside-down police car cruising down a hill, and it works—there's legitimate unpredictability that gives the episode a sense of surprise that others lately have struggled a bit with achieving.

That's why I think that the second-half of the episode is a bit of a step down, with Gumball and Darwin miraculously recovering at their front door with Polly at their feet, who then explains everything that happened to them over the past day. There's a lot of fun in seeing all of the seemingly-random dots suddenly connected, and to the episode's credit, not too many of them feel very forced, either playing with jokes involving Gumball as an unreliable narrator (such as him perceiving an attempt to save a man's life as he and Darwin knocking him out on the street and taking his money) or the Watterson boys' mental incomprehensibility.

I feel as if too much of the episode is devoted to it, though; I feel like I'd have much preferred more time being spent showing the characters fading in and out into increasingly more bizarre and life-threatening situations, then relegating Polly's take to a few minutes shorter. Because of it, "The Mess" goes from full-throttle to more methodical, and the change of pace splits the episode in half, though it does maintains a great sense of humor throughout.

Even so, the palpable fun surrounding "The Mess" just won me over. It's sort of like "The Ghouls"—even if there's some visible and easily-citable problems, this is such a infectiously silly episode that the amount of joy radiating from it is impossible to dismiss. The writers clearly had a blast coming up with the bizarre timeline of events that make up the episode and choosing what to highlight for the first half, and the VAs, especially Gumball's (Nicolas Cantu), give some of their best performances to date, alternating between horror and near-sedation perfectly. When both the writers and performers are giving it their all, there's a sort of intrinsic magic that transcends easy classification, so I'll just leave it at that: there's not a lot of other episodes that have had me grinning at every ridiculous turn, so let's just celebrate that!

Notes and Quotes:
-Surprise! Considering that CN decided to release all of the final episodes early (which I... don't entirely agree with as a fair way of ending a television series), and airing them two at a time, I'll be posting episode reviews twice a week, evenly spread apart, through to the series finale. Be on the look-out for new posts every Thursday and Monday.
-In a coincidentally-recurring segment I will now call the Gen Z Reality Check: the idea that Gumball and Darwin would stay up all night watching a ten hour long video of a guy preparing to fire an arrow is unrealistic; you can skip to the ending. With that being said, the segment where Gumball broke down YouTube vlog editing was brilliantly accurate, throwing around as many entirely unnecessary special effects, random shots, and black-and-white slow-motion as one could possibly fathom.
-"Aw, Penny, please! I'm the most responsible kid I know!" "I agree. Usually when something goes wrong, you're the one responsible."
-"Something's wrong with us! Check our symptoms on the Internet!" "I'm not sure searching online for 'meat snowman surprise' will yield the most constructive results!"
-Also, the final reveal of there being a bus somehow balanced on top of the Wattersons' house's roof was the perfect visual to close the episode with. Just wanted to get that out there.

FINAL GRADE: A-. Even if "The Mess" struggles a bit with pacing itself in its second half, there's just something so joyous about it that I can't hold that against it too much. Let's just gush about the excellent joke-writing, fun plot mechanic, and strong voice performances for once and enjoy an episode that commits to its premise without a single reservation, because that's the Gumball I've always loved.

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

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