Remember when you were a kid and your parents would hire their one-armed friend to help play out ridiculous scenarios in order to teach you life lessons? No? Well, maybe your parents didn’t go to the extremes the Bluths did — recruiting a former Bluth Company employee with a missing limb to scare the sh*t out of you — but J. Walter Weatherman’s life lessons have stuck with us Arrested Development fans anyway.
Here’s a look back at everything J. Walter Weatherman taught us that we’ll never forget, because “that’s why you…”
“Always Leave a Note”
Our first introduction to J. Walter Weatherman. Note-leaving has never been the same.
“Don’t Yell”
In 1981, all of the Bluth children are yelling aboard the “Lucille” while Weatherman holds the rope tied to the dock and asks George Sr. — who is at the wheel — to let him know before he hits the gas. Unable to hear Weatherman over the kids yelling, George fake misunderstands him, hits the gas, and Weatherman’s fake arm is severed while blood squirts everywhere.
“Don’t Teach Your Son Lessons”
With the help of the male stripper pretend police, Michael and G.O.B. plan to scare George Michael out of buying/using drugs, only their plan goes awry when a the real police arrive. Then out of nowhere, an arm lands in front of Michael’s face, and he realizes that the shootout is one of Weatherman’s lessons, not to teach your son a lesson.
“Don’t Remove Prosthetics from Plastic Wrapping”
When Buster takes a trip to the prosthetics shop to purchase a new hand, he walks in on a Weatherman lesson in progress. A girl attempting to return a prosthetic foot she purchased from Weatherman’s store is unable to do so, because according to him, a prosthetic foot isn’t any good once you’ve removed it from its wrapper.
“Don’t Teach Your Father a Lesson”
https://www.hulu.com/watch/1359
The ultimate lesson. G.O.B. and Michael attempt to teach their father a lesson about dealing with Colombians by staging his kidnapping, but they are mistaken, because George Sr. is on to them and has hired Weatherman to run in and get his arm shot off, teaching them the lesson not to teach their father lessons.
It doesn’t end there. G.O.B. and Michael then teach George Sr. a lesson about pitting them against each other by staging Michael’s death. But… it doesn’t end there. Somehow, the usually otherwise incompetent Buster is able to trick G.O.B and Michael into thinking he has lost his other hand — which turns out to be his own lesson about using one-handed people to teach lessons. And that, my friend, is why lessons work.
