A quick review of tonight’s Brockmire coming up just as soon as I give up my vote at ejaculation…
After last week’s hilarious “Breakout Year” focused on Brockmire’s return to celebrity, “Road Trip” returns to more personal matters: specifically, what Jules and Jim (no, not that Jules & Jim) are going to do about her unplanned pregnancy.
There’s probably a version of the series that could have traveled the Catastrophe path and had these two walking disasters attempt to have a baby together while Jules was still able to. But these two make Rob and Sharon from Catastrophe seem as mature and stable as Coach and Mrs. Coach from Friday Night Lights, and nothing we’ve seen of Jules suggests she’s ever wanted a maternal life. So after some soul-searching, she opts for an abortion, which leads to one of the funniest and most unexpected gags I’ve ever seen on this subject — a literal kind of gag, given Jules’ repeated difficulty in swallowing the pill, which is a great piece of physical comedy from Amanda Peet. And Brockmire unwittingly snorting up one of the pills before she even had a chance to take it was both a great sick joke in its own right and a nice set-up for the OB/GYN’s growing certainty that these two have no business even being in physical proximity to children, let alone trying to raise one.
The episode continues the show’s tradition of cliffhangers by having Uribe’s reunion with his 17 kids interrupted by the arrival of Brockmire’s ex-broadcasting partner Robby (who got fired for a cross-dressing scandal in episode three’s flashback), who brings news of Joe Buck and gets punched in the face for it. If Brockmire was as big a name in baseball a decade ago as the show posits, then of course he would know Buck, and now we’ll get to see what happened between them in the past, and why the mere mention of his name fills Jim with such rage.
Another terrific episode, and I haven’t even touched on the flashback to Jim’s childhood, where we see the role baseball broadcasts and a drunken father (wearing pants looking very similar to Brockmire’s trademark blazer) played in making Jim the man he is today, complete with a shot of him lying in the grass, listening to Vin Scully, that looks very much like the poster for Boyhood.
What did everybody else think?