A quick review of tonight’s “Wilfred” coming up just as soon as I break Shabbos…
“Fear” provides a slightly better balance between Wilfred-as-dog and Wilfred-as-guy-in-dog-suit than I thought last week’s “Trust” did, as the laser pointer gag and his advice to Ryan about how dogs establish domination (“And you do this?” “Every goddamn day.”) nicely reminded us of Wilfred’s true origins, even as he was doing a hilarious pole dance at the strip club and being carted off to the dog pound strapped up like Hannibal Lecter.
And the story of how Ryan’s attempt to avoid conflict with Spencer(*) kept backfiring on him also nicely illustrated the man vs. animal conflict that Ryan and Wilfred are having.
(*) And good on Ethan Suplee for continuing to drop the pounds, even if it was weird how much skinnier he was here than in the pilot, which was shot months before this episode, even though the events are only a few days apart.
Again, the concept seems a bit thin – so much so that I’m going to play it by ear on how frequently I review episodes going forward (especially with Comic-Con and press tour coming up in a few weeks) but the chemistry between Elijah Wood and Jason Gann is terrific (just see how genuine Wood’s laughter is in the tag) and, again, I’m 12. For now, that’s more than enough.
What did everybody else think?