Finding Faith in Moral Orel: A Short Retrospective

the only thing worse than being alone is being surrounded by people who make you feel alone moral oral is a show that intersects dark comedy with dark drama and as such it is typically remembered as a dark show but the real through line was actually a rejection of this notion a rejection of the idea that the world is a shitty place and there's nothing worth living for in it it will conceit the first of those two points but it fights you on the second one the more this world is full of blight the darker everyday seems the more important it becomes to acknowledge what good there still is and the more valuable it becomes to learn when to recognize and appreciate it but just like the meaningfulness among the nihilism the message of the show is also greatly obfuscated outwardly the show was an edgy satire of american fundamentalist values fitting in with the rest of adult swim's lineup appealing to the demographic of male 13 to 17 year olds who imagine themselves as 18 to 35 as well as 18 to 35 year olds who act 13 to 17. it spends a majority of the first season feigning a lowbrow stick of gross out humor and religious criticisms targeted at people whose worst experience with the church is being forced to go on sundays when they wanted to stay at home and play video games and while we do get a few glimpses here and there of the show's more nuanced takes it isn't until about halfway through the second season that moral oral really begins to come into its own i am not typically the type of person to put trigger warnings before things i do as it's nebulous as to whether they actually help in preventing panic attacks and the like but i will include a warning before this video many of the subjects i'm going to bring up during this retrospective are difficult to discuss gracefully or tastefully and even the show i'm talking about does not always succeed in making the topics palatable not that that was ever the showrunner's intention in keeping with the spirit of moral oral i won't try to talk my way around subjects preventing them from receiving the amount of attention they received in the show in short i am not going to censor myself even if i really should individual episode reviews are split up into four segments recap rant review wrap-up recap is a brief summary of most of the episode's plot lines rant is a section describing one aspect of the show as a whole relative to how it appears in the episode review is a general detailing of my opinions on the episode as well as some context for those opinions wrap up is largely a summary and things i couldn't find another place for the lord's greatest gift oh clay [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] reverend putty gives a sermon on life and how it is a gift granted to us by god he denounces those who would throw it back into the lord's stupid ugly glorious face as it's something meant to be cherished something precious something oral assumes the dead are wasting so he breaks the eighth commandment in order to save a few souls and steals a copy of the necronomicon from his censored all at the library when preparing to resurrect ohi's grandfather they strip the body as cleanliness is next to godliness the duo then proceeds to resurrect as many corpses as they can until the town is overrun with the undead soon enough oral's father clay learns of what his son is doing and punishes him not for resurrecting the dead but for stripping the bodies first the lord's greatest gift is the first proper episode of moral oral and its general purpose is to establish the formula of the series as well as setting up the fake tone that it'll tear down later i take that at religious fundamentalism that is as edgy as it is surface level fitting of the era before the edgy internet atheist stereotype ruining public discourse for the sake of feeling superior to somebody within the first few minutes you understand the entire conceit of the show you understand how it got green lit and each character represented it's a few stereotypical establishing lines so you understand what they're supposed to be before they get any more depth you have to go ankle deep into water before you can drown in it and you need to get the audience on top of the rug before it can be pulled out from under them it's simple to understand why oral would take away the interpretation of reverend buddy's sermon that he did how can the dead be considered sinners when they're not lucid to make the choice because christianity teaches immortality through a second life the dead are never really considered to have died only to have moved on and so if one can receive eternal life then it follows that you must surely be responsible for the sins you commit after passing this is by far the least realistic the show ever gets and ever will get and it makes it seem like an odd choice for the first episode it fails to establish the tone that the show will later become infamous for though the logic behind this decision is sound and there's a strong narrative purpose for doing so but to defy the laws of plausibility so early on does end up hurting the show's narrative credibility in a way that i'm not sure is ever truly justified is states are not meant to represent a real familiar place or is it closer to the realm of fantasy maybe it's just an example of overcompensating for the future shifting the early tone of the series too much to the quirky side of things to the later darker episodes will feel more impactful god's chef jesus no thanks reverend it's catholic free oh okay oral discovers the pleasures of being an 11 year old without internet access and begins masturbating in all his free time this gets him in trouble at school though when explaining why the adults in oral's life all conflate masturbation with wastefulness their attempts to explain the proper way to use your penis all end up with oral masturbating into a pastry bag and sneaking into woman's houses after all the woman on the street end up pregnant oral ends up being caught in the act and he's taken first by the police but later by his father to his study in the end he's punished not for forcefully impregnating woman but because he did so in a weird way and took pleasure in the act much of the humor and moral oral comes from a setup subversion formula if a character is put into a mundane situation expect something silly to result if a character is put into a silly situation expect them to react nonchalantly if a character behaves sensibly for once assume they're doing so for the wrong reasons so then perhaps a show can be said to follow this formula as well establish a tone in premise then proceed to subvert it in an unexpected way but that's either selling the shows can see it short or it's directing attention away from the truly fascinating aspects that make it so memorable instead the only real subversion is one of tone not content whereas the first season is content to convince viewers that they'll be taking a one-sided absolutely pessimistic view on small town fundamentalist values the reality is that the show will eventually become a character or study of those affected this was the first of three episodes to be held back by standards and practices for its depiction of sexual assault the original depiction of the episode included a scene of oral crawling underneath the blankets the first time he visits a woman's house but in this edition those few seconds are cut a combination of being held back by standards and practices as well as the episode the best christmas ever being aired prior to anything else led to the first season getting a wonky debut order with the initial release dates of so many episodes being out of order for the first season this isn't as much of an issue as the plots are for the most part completely self-contained though the running gag of making up new commandments loses a bit of traction when they don't go from 11 to 12 to 13 and so on though airing the season 1 finale as a standalone christmas special caused many viewers to wonder online if the entire thing wasn't just some elaborate practical joke overall god chef is an example of moral orals enforced early installment weirdness a deliberate attempt to make the show a seemingly low brow as possible to filter out anybody who might only be casually committed to watching episodes and would therefore miss out on much of the nuance later seasons would use to examine its characters charity how was your first day working boy great dad i made a lot of money you gotta get a goodie let me see let me see let me that's the best part i gave it all to a homeless man what oral gets a part-time job at figure ellies in order to learn the value of money what he also learns in this episode is that they virtue to help the poor combined with the lesson from the previous episode about wastefulness moral ends up buying then using crack from a homeless man after freaking out and quitting his job he gets caught by the police who turn him over to his father in the end oral is punished less for using drugs and more for using slang while oral is being punished for his slang usage his father drops a very important line people know who you are by the words you use not the things you do it appears at first as a humorous line to justify his father's disdain for slang fitting into the show's existing wrong lesson for the wrong reasons morality but it ends up being an important through line for the show's themes as a whole in later seasons clay and bloberda don't care that their son is a drug addict they care that he looks and acts like one reverend putty sermon is about the way that the homeless and downtrodden are placed on earth as a test for good christians objectifying their struggles by viewing them exclusively through a selfish selfless lens nobody aside from oral in this episode is acting out of anything but pure self-interest clay pawns his son off on a business owner who exploits him so that he doesn't have to teach oral election himself and figure ellie gets a cheap labor source the drug dealer oral believes he has to be printed is only giving drugs to oral to get him hooked in the end the lies and deeds of others are viewed only insofar as they're relevant to the self the real sigma grind set among religious doctrine the homeless are there to test you you raise your children to show off to others everything you do in life is about the self and everything everyone else is doing is just there to give you opportunities it's a view of the world where you are perceived as the main character and everyone else as an npc this sort of worldview is by its nature antithetical to forming close interpersonal relationships with others when you view others as supporting roles to yourself when they only exist to you once you need something from them it's impossible for any meaningful interactions to occur charity comes across as another of the early edgy episodes the sort of thing that exists to portray shock humor for the sake of portraying shock humor isn't it funny when the boy says okay jesus let's smoke the crack we see an early glimpse at clay's true alcoholism while earlier episodes have shown him enjoying a drink in a study or hanging out in a bar this is the first time we've seen him day drinking needing a buzz just to stay engaged during church waste i've been around the block a few times i know that taste what is it dear oh oral not in my good china oral is lectured on preventing waste by his parents and after learning that it's safe to drink starts to consume his own urine after setting a few new school records his track coach tells him to get the rest of the team in on it and so oro begins to sell his urine to the other students soon enough the school ends up winning a state competition but when his parents learn of what he's doing they scold him and force him to come clean about what they've all been drinking in the end oral is punished not for making other kids drink his urine but for charging them to the idea of living a waste-free lifestyle is something that practically any culture or background can support even in the most consumption happy parts of the flyover states there remains a glorification to the point of fetishization of the frontiersmen the hard lifestyle of the first few americans to brave the empty bountiless wasteland that the natives had been subsisting on for centuries the aura of self-sufficiency many love to stay claimed to is one backed up by years of religious dogma but the reality of these ideals is no different than the reality of the frontier itself the only groups that found any success were those heavily backed by corporate investors who had the startup capital to guarantee that their homestead wouldn't result in famine within the first dust storm waste is an episode that best exemplifies oral susceptibility to religious dogma as it's capable of overriding the most basic animalistic instincts to not drink your own urine of course it is just a misinterpretation or over-interpretation of a protestant variation of there are starving kids in africa style guilt-tripping but because it's portrayed as a direct command from god it holds much more weight than some kids across the world in the end oral is actually punished for the same frugality that got him into the situation in the first place cutting back on waste is a respectable holy thing but if an effort to cut back on waste is profitable then it becomes a sin coach stop frame is first shown to be a secret worshiper of satan in this episode though in this case what we see and praying for is success for the kids on his track team ironically one of the only few selfless applications of worship so far a goat being sacrificed to the devil for somebody else's benefit not just a bad faith application of the lord's word to get your kid to shut up this episode really runs with its pee jokes the number one source of humor we see is the episode tinkling a steady flow of repetitive puns on the subject gracefully the episodes are never so long as to allow any particular topic to overstay its welcome so you don't get quite sick of the slick dick tricks but there isn't too much more to this episode than the basic premise allows on one hand this is a testament to the tightness of the early season scripts on the other it's an example of the inflexibility the stories have when the characters are still one-dimensional clay figures moral oral improves on this dramatically in later seasons but for now we're stuck with a lot more gross out humor than is necessary the blessed union oh maternal paying all gone during that sunday sermon oral hears about the sacrament of matrimony and the sacred bond that unites a man and a woman he is inspired to begin looking for a way to fulfill his future wife's greatest needs but doesn't quite understand what that means so he goes to the primary source and begins asking the woman of marlton directly unfortunately oral's attempts to find a satisfied woman in a rural protestant town prove completely fruitless until he asked his father who then directs him to articles written by men invariably ending with oral in a sex shop asking for a way to satisfy the woman in his life he gets a prince albert piercing you can look that up on your own attracting the attention of his track coach who directs him back to his father's study buddy's sermons have from the beginning been clear points of self-insertion for the character himself it's not uncommon for small town preachers to be privy to absolutely everybody's gossip and then to shape his weekly sermons around the subjects leaving out just enough so as not to point fingers but still enough that more of the loose-lipped churchgoers will know exactly who he's talking about this is a point that is elaborated on much more in later episodes showing exact moments that later go on to inspire their respective sermons and while the future episode is a twist that almost anybody would have seen coming the real subversion comes from the medusa in the details buddy is miserable and yet still manages to come out of his misery attempting to elevate others rather than bringing them down to his level the show's entire theme is more or less the way people pass down their traumas to everybody else in their circle the fact that reverend putty is able to have a completely unfulfilling life and then use that misery as lessons to teach others makes him deserving of the pedestal so many immoral tin put him at the top of naturally oral's attempts to learn what makes woman happy or doomed to failure in a town where none of the residents let alone woman have any sort of satisfaction in life though in order to find advice on happiness he has to turn to people who have openly rejected the shared misery of the rest of the townsfolk ironically the most isolated among morrilton end up being the ones with the greatest choice and those joys are nearly always from other people and so we see the conundrum that many of the residents face where the key to finding real human connections comes from skewing and avoiding the majority of other people opting instead for the fringes of society where you can hopefully find another person as weird as you are omnipresent let's see first to st martin's hospital for the broken neck then to freedom county prison for the broken law after spraying himself in the face with air freshener oral learns about omnipresence from liberta the concept that god exists within everything upon preying on this knowledge he begins to develop a god complex i mean a different god complex than the one that he already has and roams the town of morrilton flexing his divine right this culminates in him believing that he can not only cure the sick but decide when they die as well at least until clay calls him into his study and the complex is beaten out of him oral believes that as god can do no wrong he himself can likewise do no wrong as he is one of the creations of god since we are all created in his image it follows that we should have the same divine judgment that he does it's a fundamental policy of righteousness one that assumes that being correct or righteous is a perpetual state and not something applicable to individual situations or an ideal to work towards if a person is righteous in enough ways then they can preemptively hold the moral high ground in situations that are yet to occur and hold the correct opinions about things they've never heard of this ends up creating a sort of feedback loop where a person who believes themselves as a righteous individual must constantly double down on every opinion they hold even when they are unquestionably incorrect oral knows that life is sacred and yet when the dawn occurs to him to kill somebody he doesn't question whether that conflicts with his current beliefs as it's wrong to question something that's right the episode repression also ends up touching on this topic but in a much less messianic way we see one end of the spectrum of a crisis of religion one that airs as far under the side of plugging your ears and neglecting the problem as possible sitting in a room surrounded by flames telling yourself this is fine omnipresence as an episode is just okay many morelton citizens act a bit out of character for the sake of punchlines and we see behavior that contradicts the strong character study the later seasons would become oral demanding that reverend putties shine his shoes isn't something that a pre-powered trip oral would even consider so clearly the messiah complex must have corrupted him to an extent yet the show also consistently tells us about how incorruptable oral is despite all that happens around him so seeing this side of orville comes across as much more shocking on a subsequent watch through god fearing [Applause] dad or what have you done you killed him i did oh hooray oral is unfazed by the church's haunted house citing his belief that god will keep him safe from any harm as long as they're on good terms but lamenting that he's missing out on all the fun oral decides to break all 10 commandments in a single day so that god will hate him then he can be as scared as he wants to before asking for forgiveness after he's had his fun but when oral kills a man his father catches on to what's going on and has oral meet him in his study fear is a powerful motivating force the anxiety of potential negative consequences for our actions often has a greater potential to sway our behavior than the potential gain those actions can bring this is exemplified in psychology through principles like loss avoidance the idea that for example people will pay more money for insurance than they're likely to spend statistically on the loss that that insurance can guard against but that fear has to come from somewhere and importantly it has to be at least a slight unknown if the punishment for a behavior is something static and consistent then it becomes less of a punishment and more of a cost something you can plan around so what better unknown is there than god what exactly constitutes a sin how much is each sin weighed you can read holy text to attempt to get an idea but those are often so vague and prone to misinterpretation that they may as well be useless i mean we're not even allowed to wear polyester according to the bible the first half of this episode feels very tonally different even from the rest of the first season if i had to say exactly what was different i'd say that it feels more like the wholesome family shows at parodies than usual like it's a regular saturday morning cartoon that's funny by accident something that's impressively difficult to do intentionally without coming across as overplayed officer paper mouth is much more competent at his job compared to other episodes like at this point he was only a generic police officer with a casually brutal personality instead of what we would see from him later it leads me to theorize that this is one of the first episode scripts finished for season 1 made before the tone of the show would really get ironed out another consistent element of later seasons is the fact that oral usually gets his ideas by misinterpreting what others say but here he comes up with the idea to bring all 10 commandments by happenstance overall this is one of the more middle of the road season 1 episodes it's not something that really stands above the rest of the season but at least we don't get a significant amount of edgy humor as a result i feel it's aged well compared to the rest of the first season something that on a re-watch is much appreciated loyalty oh doughy god wants us to beat you kids when you're bad he does yes why because oral makes a new friend in joe a child his age with serious behavioral issues but due to knowing the virtue of loyalty oral believes that not going along with the future serial killers games will result in him angering god when doei tommy and the rest confront clay about oral's changed behavior clay takes oral into his study to remind him not to ignore his other friends to stay loyal to one of them the fundamental misunderstanding oral makes in this episode is that he doesn't figure out that loyalty is a two-way street you can't simply be loyal to somebody while getting nothing in her turn and you too should be reciprocating that friendship that's offered assuming everybody is acting in good faith this is the basis for any relationship any relationship with one the one we experience with religion you do favors for your friends not because you expect something in return although you certainly should be receiving something for your efforts so it's possible to be a bad faith christian one who only tries to stay on god's good side because they're afraid of punishment or possibly hoping for some kind of reward for their behavior be it eternal life or a more immediate karmic response naturally somebody in this sort of one-sided relationship with god would be less than capable of recognizing when such a relationship occurs with their friends and so it makes total sense why oral would go along unquestioningly with joe's mischief in spite of his better judgment this was the second episode of moral oral to be held back by standards and practices this time for depicting an implied homosexual relationship funnily enough there was no issue with the two boys bashing homosexuals with bats it was the kissing that had to be toned down it's the same too i would have liked to see what kind of development the you are nice boys would have received come season 3 but keeping them in the show i suppose would have been too much to risk the ultimate fake moral of this episode thou shalt be loyal to all night friends at the same time feels a bit out of place even as far as the town's hypocritical behavior goes it's easy to see how many of the other fake commandments would have been made a majority of them are the kind of things parents would tell their kids to get them to behave all my friends is a bit unrelated in that sense i also feel as though it would have made a better plot for an episode to have oral torn between multiple friendships exhausting himself as he tries to appease the increasing demands of everybody the main purpose of this episode really just seems to be to introduce joe to the cast there's a bit left on the table when it comes to what the episode could have done but at least there was no sexual assault this time so i'll take what i can get [Music] maturity [Music] oral wants to become more mature so he follows around many of the adults of morrilton in order to understand what makes them so adult he ends up gathering that it's alcohol that makes them act the way they do and so he begins to drink from his father's supply while drunk he jumps rapidly from enjoying life to wallowing in his own misery just like his father but when clay learns that his son has gotten into his stash he takes a boy into a study and tells him that drinking is something that has to be earned the ultimate moral of this episode is one that conflates maturity with suffering rather than adulthood the more you suffer the more grown up you are and while clay tells oral that adulthood is suffering we also see him repeatedly try to enforce his ideology through a just world type of fallacy thinking the just world fallacy is the idea that bad things exclusively happen to people who are bad and good things exclusively happen to people who are good if the world is shitty it's because you're shitty if things are going well it's because you're a good person no amount of hard work or luck plays into success and no level of circumstance explains your misfortune you deserved it all of course this way of thinking often tends to reinforce itself something bad happens to you so you depress yourself by overthinking the various ways you sinned in life this is a third season one episode held back by standards and practices this time for a combination of a depiction of a child drinking alcohol and domestic abuse the domestic abuse scenes were cut out though i can't find anything on whether they tone down orals drinking it's very on the nose about what the episode is trying to show off slightly different is that rather than completely missing the point oral is extremely close to figuring out that which we in the audience can see plainly but this dramatic irony is what drives most of the early episodes of the show there's a sort of expressiveness in the lack of expressiveness clay figures can produce typically with animation you see the creators exaggerating body proportions to better illustrate the character in particular scenes or to add in between frames that give more fluidity to the overall movement this is something that can't be accomplished through similar means in live action productions but those benefit from the added realism of using live actors claymation reaches a middle ground where you're pulled out of the zone of familiarity just enough by the character design so as to separate fiction and reality but the flat proportions and static designs of these characters can add a bit of ground in this to the way scenes are composed it's a perfect stylistic choice for moral oral as it's a show that is at once cartoonish and depressingly realistic the best christmas ever after hearing one of putty's sermons about the second coming of christ oral overhears his parents talking about how shape he was an accident combining this information oral begins to believe that shapi may be the second coming and so he begins to worship his developmentally challenged brother all the way into the city but the b plot of the episode catches up to the duo that of the argument between vulberta and clay over the origin of the boy they decide on a divorce something that threatens to ruin christmas but oral has faith that everything will turn out fine and so he waits and waits and waits moral oral had a tumultuous first season the show premiering with the season 1 finale several episodes being held back from airing on time and the heavy responsibilities of establishing a setting and all the characters within while trying not to undersell its own conceit considering adult swim's track record of picking up a niche show nobody else will touch and then cancelling it just as suddenly it's somewhat of a surprise we even got a second season more so due to middling viewership and a tepid the show wasn't disliked but the first season was formulaic to a fault you typically had a good idea of what was going to happen by the halfway point and the only real interest was derived from how much the showrunners were willing to push the sensors but people still saw the potential there both fans and executives and season two didn't disappoint though that is a topic for later in the video if the lord were alive today what would you give him this christmas the song we open on is a humorous if not slightly overplayed parody of the commodification of religious holidays though it gets a bit more mileage than a simple throwaway joke and then it comes back throughout the episode when oral believes he finally has a chance to put into practice what the song is selling and it gives us sort of a through line to the episode we open with a commercial jingle about the holiday season and during the final scene we get a diegetic royalty-free christmas carol jingling in the background a song that is completely devoid of any soul contrary to the original attempt of the holiday it's celebrating it's the sort of thing that strip malls blast from stereo speakers to stop teenagers from hanging out in the parking lots past 9pm this episode gave us the first fully committed glimpse into what the show would become showing off its potential with long shots that hold not on a punch line but a more somber moment liberta sitting up in bed wondering how the hell she's going to explain to her kids she's divorcing their father no sound forcing the listener to fill in the gaps themselves we've had scenes like this before but they were often played for comedy now they exist only to force us to confront what emotions have been conveyed over the last 11 minute stretch a sign of things to come god's image you see somehow you've turned things topsy-turvy young man you've made it inconvenient for the racists not the racers and at that point why even discriminate but he gives a sermon on racism in the vein of all people are made in god's image but some are made more in god's image than others inspired by these words oral sets out to segregate the figure la population as much as possible from the rest of moralton however many of the segregation policies he implements end up having unforeseen positive effects on the marginalized group and in the end the town's people decide to stop treating others differently if only because the marginalization accidentally resulted in minorities being treated better chocolate and peanut butter peas and carrots protestants and casual racism you can't have a moral a day type of show or for that matter a parody of a moral a day show without doing an episode on racism the town of morrilton practices discrimination in a step above casual racism moving out to a ranked competitive racism of sort the type of thing mandated and institutionalized into their society nothing says suburban rural america like the decades of urban design decisions that reinforce segregation-era policies even into the 21st century red zoning and other forms of real estate discrimination that were implemented to keep communities as monocultural as possible then traffic engineers separated neighborhoods bisecting entire cities with railroads and low bridges that were meant to make certain areas inaccessible to people without cars namely anyone who wasn't an upper middle class white guy that's right i'm calling bridges racist the depiction of race relations and moral oral is at best a funhouse depiction of the real world and at worst actively damaging to racial discussions we see a lot of completely normal casual racism throughout the show but then in this episode we have multiple kids actively taking on the mantle of the oppressed because they view the figure ellie family as being treated better it's the type of behavior that fear-mongers peddle when warning about woke-ism going too far but this is also a show where a claymation boy drinks his own piss and does crack so it's very easy to read too far into the political messaging as i am surely doing we get a lot of fun with words here from wig your ellies to clay's comments on racers and overall it manages to speak pretty well to what a lot of people mean when they practice separate but equal policies daniel stop frame throwing a molotov cocktail and inadvertently burning down the entire town is a humorous climax to an otherwise very strong episode a great way to start off the second season though not necessarily a tone indicator of what's to come love more than your father more than your favorite food and yes even more than money oral adopts a stray dog naming it bartholomew and the two become very close in a short amount of time but when he hears a sermon about how we are meant to love jesus more than anything else oral begins to fear that he loves bartholomew more than he loves jesus in the end joey and a group of adults come to put down the dog as they've grown annoyed with the amount of attention that the animal has been receiving oral takes some comfort in the idea that he and bartholomew will be reunited in heaven but bluberta tells him that animals have no souls while boiling a lobster ultimately puts down his beloved pet bartholomew because of a pedantic misunderstanding of language the title of the episode is love but there's no romance in the story love can refer to many different things and it really exists as a catch-all term for various types of attraction of course romantic love exists but that's not the type of love we feel towards our family and hopefully not the way we feel about our pets and so we're constantly told to love one another as i have loved you but what exactly does that mean how have we been loved because as far as the average person is able to tell jesus's love is a very hands-off sort of approach in fact it's surprisingly similar to the sort of love clay gives his children ignore them most of the time unless they mess up then you punish them and on occasion you can give them very antiquated advice that's been taken so far out of context that the original intention is all but lost to history this episode throws a few obvious parallels to the story of christ increasing in how blatantly the story is spelled out for you by the end we're practically beaten over the head with bartholomew carrying a cross-shaped stick up a hill to his execution it ends up becoming another joke in and of itself if jesus were alive today our governments would absolutely be trying to put him to death again you see how many homeless people he's feeding we can't let a godless socialist like that run around this is a very silly episode despite how dark the underlying theme is i especially love the scene where oral and doughy realize that oral loves bartholomew more than jesus both boys are panicking but they can't really explain why they're so afraid it's also worth pointing out that the name bartholomew is significant in that of all of jesus's original disciples bartholomew's death was the most gruesome being flayed alive before being beheaded the messaging here is so on the nose the show runners may have well have punched you in the face but it works to the benefit of the episode since they seem to embrace how obvious the moral is so despite the plot being pretty ridiculous it feels like we're in on a joke i do find it a bit odd that any of the authority figures even cares that the dog is getting attention normally they seem pretty content with letting this kid stay out of sight and out of mind but it's a suspension of characterization that's believable from the perspective that all of these people are so horrifyingly insecure satan yes well the lord's logic is very complex when it comes to hating nipples you see with many hello daniel stop frame an established worshiper of satan is torn between the two religious influences in his life and decide semi-randomly to attend a sermon if only to get closer to clay but when putty sees his tight pants he changes the sermon of the day to a denouncement of homosexuality something that prompts stop frame to turn his back on the church afterwards he then brings oral to a satanic ritual hoping the boy will serve as a virgin sacrifice but when the town's satanist cult ends up coming across a group as hedonistic nerds rather than a group of secretive robe worrying will cultists he changes his mind again in the end of the episode he opts to balance his life between god and satan as well as returning to his tumultuous relationship with clay coach daniel's stop frame has always existed in the periphery of morrilton never really being one of the church crowd but never truly being considered an outsider the way a character like stephanie is being an outsider in this way his sense of morality isn't tied down to the teachings of the church or the sermons of putty and since his exile is something self-imposed he doesn't mind not fitting in this way it's a common self-preservation tactic among lgbt folks in very conservative areas staying out of sight and out of mind while only associating with those you know have no interest in tearing you down to score social brownie points yet despite the sense of him as an outcast with a lot to lose should he and close to anyone else stop frame is still seen in any scene where the town forms an angry mob of any kind importantly he's the one to throw the torch at the figure ellies that burns down the town in season 2's opener there's an obvious dichotomy in this episode between the christian center of morrilton and the satanist fringes while the protestants are obsessed with image and character the satanists form a more hedonistic cult one that doesn't care about how they look to others they ask stop frame to join in on their orgy but they don't make any real effort to stop when he decides to leave it's a low pressure environment completely contrary to the rest of the town and yet it's still equally uninviting to stop frame sure in the episode the satanists are depicted as being unattractive and slobbish but considering stop frame is implied to have fornicated with animals before i doubt he's especially picky in that regard rather my interpretation is that the thrill of breaking a social taboo is what stop frame is really after in a society with so many strictly enforced rules the act of breaking any rule becomes a much needed source of emotional relief goth teenagers no smoking dispatch for them but they go ahead and do it anyway if only because they want to be able to make a decision for themselves i think one of the most important things that can be taken away from this episode is the fact that there is apparently a satanist cult in the small state suna town it shows that the decision to stay within the cult of worship around the church is a somewhat active one there exists a group of non-church-goers in morrilton but once people have their niche in their community tracking them out is practically impossible at any moment the pumping family could simply elect to stop attending mass but they couldn't stand having to start over again elemental oral gosh my mom's treating those people like they're her family i don't know oral it looks like she's just ignoring them and fed up and not happy at all to be there exactly lee oral attempts to solve the case of the missing collection plate money using religious logic naturally this leads to him going completely off the mark because despite all the evidence pointing to joe marianetta ends up being the prime suspect simply because joe pointed a finger at her marionetta ends up doing the detective work off-screen and ultimately manages to prove her innocence but her evidence falls on deaf ears as oral soon uncovers the fact that his mother has a second family when oral confronts her it is revealed that his father is in on it and the two are swinging in order to spice up their horrible home life by the time marionetta solves a mystery we no longer care about the initial plot structure as oral has found a shocking revelation his thoughts what makes this moment stand out is the fact that previously oral has always been optimistic to a fault no matter what he sees a few words from his father always sets his mind back to its bright disposition but here the fact that his father is in on it only serves to make the revelation of his mother cleaning another family's house more damaging this really is the first glimpse we get of oral's real thoughts on his life despite everything he knows something is wrong he knows there's much more to life than what people are saying he just doesn't have the vocabulary or life experience to put it all into an expression oral's parents are both treating another family like they belong there and oral is not okay with that because he himself subconsciously knows that his parents aren't doing enough for him to be neglected by your own mother only to see her turn around and use excess energy on another family has to give you some feeling of inadequacy like they don't want you there this episode breaks from the typical show's formula in such a way as to hint the viewer that much more is going to happen in the future as the thoughts are already bubbling inside oral's head we don't see those thoughts come to any more fruition until the second part of nature for now it's just a foreboding warning this is also the first episode that mentions oral's grandfather it's an offhand remark about a character that comes back in the before oral special that aired after season three so even aspects of that special had to have been in the works for this sort of development to be present in the end elemental oral is an episode that doesn't really stand out on a first viewing but on the second watch it has a much more obvious meaning as it sets up so much more of the show's world and tone offensiveness [Music] oh of course that god even makes me feel inferior moral gets to know the local librarian miss censored all a bit better as he shares a table with her at mr figure ellie's when they meet a second time she mistakenly believes that the stack of books he's picked out are meant to be burned and praises him as a natural auntie moral is then taken under the tutelage of the professional protesting protestant and learns to hate anything that can be hated this soon backfires on her as oral starts protesting against the one thing she loves more than being outraged eggs she reluctantly joins in so as not to appear as a hypocrite but the final moments of the episode show her sneaking off to enjoy the presence of an egg in an underground barn house miss cincerdall began her run in moral oral as a character of the hyper moralist the person who used their religion as a means of controlling the lies of others her first appearance has her protesting the most bland and inoffensive movies out there and more or less serving as background gags for establishing shots but as of this episode her role in the show starts to elaborate more the first steps towards a cancelled story arc involving her taking over the town of morrilton we see her planting the seeds for her takeover in the season 3 episode nesting playing oral and clay against one another in order to use their collective insecurities to control the most influential people in town what we get instead are a few scenes of her in the season 3 episode alone where we more or less learn her whole backstory she had a saltinectomy performed on her as a child rendering her infertile as an adult this leads to an unhealthy obsession with eggs as a replacement for something she herself cannot produce the egg thing was initially just a bit of gross out humor reminiscent of what we got back in season one a close-up shot of an old woman slurping raw eggs complete with sickening sound design it pays off later something which comes as a pleasant surprise considering how little any of the other shock humor ever really added this is also another episode showing off oral's impression ability and adaptiveness as well as the potential for damage it can really cause when directed in the wrong place miss censored all prides herself on her ability to hate everything that the rest of morleton finds enjoyable we see her doing the same in flashbacks and yet after only a short time under her tutelage oral one ups her without even realizing what he's done this episode alongside the earlier satan shows the idea of the outskirts of morrilton being a much less wholesome place albeit one that ironically feels more liberating and free to be a part of in underground sexy barnyard pops up as a pushback against the new egg ordinance an echo of the pushback against anything and everything that miss cincerdall herself provided no matter what society does there will always be people who fight it for better or for worse god's blunders the consolation is that we do have a class here at diorama elementary that will generously condescend to his lack of mental capabilities with a qualified teacher qualified oh no no no we can't waste those after failing a few standardized tests and struggling in class oral's friend tommy is labeled as developmentally slow all because he doesn't accept things on faith and shows a healthy intellectual curiosity he is placed into a special needs class full of other students who show signs of the c word and soon finds a bit of acceptance but the normal students continue to make fun of the group for being different until oral makes a grand speech about how god wants them to be stupid there's a speech in clay study during this episode about how god works in mysterious ways it's the usual fear of god's plan to explain away seemingly malicious actions by him why do bad things happen to good people it's part of god's plan why does the bible sometimes give contradictory advice it's part of god's plan why do mosquitoes exist it's part of it actually i think he just hates us but the idea of some esoteric plan that's too complex for us to understand is itself a misinterpretation of an early tale abraham was asked to bring his son isaac to the top of a mountain and to sacrifice him there he did so willingly and at the last second god stopped him saying it was merely a test he didn't really want isaac killed but this story is in the old testament meaning that we can also see the way that the jews interpret this story because in that telling the command itself was a test this time a test of whether abraham was capable of thinking for himself god expected that he would be fought on the command he wanted abraham to say that's my son i'm not killing my son it's no coincidence that the story is the last we hear of abraham in either book god tested him and he failed the story is over after season one established so many trends and formula for the show season two revels in breaking as many of the established rules as possible in interesting ways these inversions of the formula allow us to see the characters in lights they wouldn't ordinarily get and we get to see characters undergoing challenges to the status quo that reveal more information about them in a way that feels natural and organic during this episode we see the ever trend living oral define what everybody else is doing in order to soapbox about his hero god whereas season one oral would have joined in in casting stones the same way he did during loyalty season two oral knows enough to trust his gut that something is wrong and he actively seeks out advice on what to do in the end oral's heart being in the right place actually solves problems instead of creating new ones and this is the first of many future examples where oral pushing back against the morals of common society actually creates something much better maybe i'm a bit more biased towards the episode than i should be because it features a similar experience to my own i taught myself how to read when i was three by watching wheel of fortune reruns and so my elementary school teachers had no idea what to do with me as a result i never really learned how to school properly so by the time i started taking classes and didn't teach stuff i already knew my ability to study was already irreparably damaged this episode has a sort of happy ending but tommy and his new friends are certainly never going to receive a proper education leisure oh son you're still young you'll naturally grow out of seeing the bright side of things okay believe me it'll happen soon enough and let me tell you it's pretty great huh just kidding oral interprets a putty sermon about pleasure to mean that anything pleasurable is a sin unfortunately oral finds helping people to be a satisfying act in and of itself and stops helping others in order to be a better christian but that proves not to be enough and soon he begins to actively seek out pain as he believes this will police the lord the conflation of self-inflicted pain with self-love soon proves to warp his psyche into enjoying the pain and oral joins a club of pain fetishists when his father finds out he doesn't quite know how to punish the boy pleasure is what i consider to be a companion episode to season one's maturity whereas maturity is an episode all about how suffering makes you an adult and is something to be welcomed and sought out pleasure is an episode about the way that happiness is something to be avoided and shunned if it feels bad it's probably right is a similar line of thinking to if it feels good it's probably wrong as impressionable as oral is it isn't a stretch of associations to be made in his head about what acceptable behavior is and is not and of course hardcore religious sects aren't exactly dissuading this sort of thinking self-harm as a form of worship is not just something from monty python but mortification of the flesh is a ceremonial act performed even in the modern day this included things like wearing shirts made of camel hairs wearing wire chains around the legs that cause discomfort and of course the word discipline itself is derived from an instrument used to whip one's own back all of these devices were used as a sort of self-reconciliation a way to purify yourself by paying for your own sins of course the practice as a form of purification was meant to drive thoughts of desirous evil from the mind so there is a hint of irony in the fact that oral uses these acts as a form of pleasure but oral missing the point of religious doctrine is nothing that's new to us by this point we just get to see him misread it in a new fascinating way again more of the season 1 edginess rears its head as oral joins a literal fetishist club a fetishist club that is surprisingly cool about letting a child join up but there's a different reading of it this time as oral seems to be more victimized by the story the narrative doesn't treat him as this chaotic bowl of energy destroying everything around him with a smile rather oral has become a bystander caught up in the mixed messages that those around him are granting all in all this episode contrasts the first season very nicely and that we see a much more mature and nuanced look at a story that would fit in nicely in season 1. all of the setup this show had to reach this point is beginning to pay off and it only becomes more engaging as we continue the lord's prayer they're here how do i look like you always do a new family the posables moves in next door to the puppingtons the two families are alike in almost every way and get along greatly the wives find common ground over their cleaning supplies the husbands share a comedy album together shaping and block manage not to lose their temper for a few minutes and oral seems to find love in the neighbor's daughter christina but soon the two families learned the horrible truth that the other's family is the wrong type of protestant using a slightly different version of the episode's namesake the lord's prayer the two families leave on a sour note and oral is told not to associate with them any longer but he defies his parents and beats with christina in private where the two pray together but oral's guilt overcomes him and he soon meets with reverend putty who tells him that guilt is for catholics and that he should repress his feelings in the end the posables move away accidentally leaving block behind while taking shapey the posables are an outwardly happy family giving the appearance of the perfect neighbors for the puppingtons of course by the end of the episode we see them involved in the exact same penny arguments that their mirrored cells face and from this we can infer that their miseries are the same everybody in morrilton is so obsessed with maintaining a good image and of course they're very talented at it for a brief moment we forget that everybody hates everybody else and the first half of this episode has a genuinely happy and optimistic tone it's like if we saw clay relaxing in a study and even briefly we believe that he was just having a drink in a normal and healthy way season 2 continues to chip away in orals happiness in the same way that it always has giving him glimpses of the world outside his bubble of culture and then snatching it away under the guise of dogma or tradition oral and the rest of the puffington family find their perfect matches a group of people with whom they get along so well that if it weren't fiction i wouldn't believe it a family of people completely incapable of connecting meaningfully with others manages to find a match and it is of course too good to be true some are so entrenched in their ways that they will fight any attempts to improve their life naturally this sort of self-serving attitude will cause issues in more way than one it's never even considered that if they're praying wrong perhaps we should simply teach them the right way show them our point of view surely they'll be reformed into the light i think if i had to pick a favorite episode of season two this would be it even beating out nature it fits the tone of moral oral so succinctly that you could just watch this one episode and have a good impression of ninety percent of the rest of what happens and if i had to convince somebody to watch moral oral with one episode this would be it granted it's probably best not to recommend this show to your friends if you want them to stay friends recommending moral oral is basically a mental health flag holy visage but then the renaissance came and ruined everything when artists started taking the clothes off all their paintings oral on the way back from a field trip to the jesus museum orals bobblehead lacerates dr chosenberg's stomach a wound which the local doctors refuse to disinfect because it resembles jesus oral is torn between trying to ease the man's suffering and respecting the sanctity of a religious image made worse when the local sikhs start to worship the wound leading to the infection getting much worse in the end oral learns from his father how to lie to himself giving the doctor the means to treat his own wounds while ignoring the fact that he may have done something right dr quentin xavier potter's wheel is the only real medical practitioner in morrilton his assistant nurse bendy never getting the leeway to do any more than stand there and look pretty he is utterly incompetent as a doctor almost exclusively because he makes no real attempts at actual doctoring his faith and lack of morals prevent any real diagnoses and his fetish for flesh wounds often gets in the way of his desire to actually treat said wounds in the season 3 episode sacrifice we get some implication that he allowed his first wife to die this way a plot that likely would have received more attention in the second half of season 3 that exists only in theory like many others in morrilton his desire to keep his head low and get on with his life makes him extremely good at ignoring people's secrets to treat them discreetly not out of a sense of respect for doctor patient confidentiality but because he really just doesn't care about other people enough to blab about their private lives in this episode we see oral fighting against what everyone else is doing even after going to his father for advice he sees another human being suffering and is told that it's okay it's all part of god's plan but oral doesn't accept that and accidentally helps out another person this act of defiance shows that he's finally beginning to create his own moral code and importantly understand when his ideals contradict the beliefs of others he defies professionality defies authority and even approaches to find god's will in the interest of doing the right thing this might come across as a conflict of faith but i don't really think that's the case oral believes that god is good that god would always want him to do the right thing and so he keeps that mentality while projecting the notion that god wants others suffering should that suffering be preventable this lesson seemingly contradicts with what he's learned in clay study about suffering and pleasure rather than being applauded consistently though it's a sign of development and it's done so subtly that it feels like a logical conclusion to the episode even though it's an uncharacteristically happy ending for all involved it's a testament to the quality of the show's writing that we can learn so much about the cast not just from the challenges they face but from how they grow in response to that without feeling likely compromising earlier characterization be fruitful and multiply and i'm saying it could be any lady any shape any size any color i mean any weight after finally convincing stephanie to go to church reverend putty is quickly smitten with the girl only for her and shortly afterwards reveal that she is his long-lost daughter conceived after a stalker stole used tissues from the pastor's bedside trash can at first he resents knowing this information after having spent the entire episode and the entire last season and a half being terminally lonely reverend putty learns that he has all the titles of fatherhood with none of the parts that make you less lonely that is until he has an encounter with oral and the boy's purity at heart convinces him that this sudden opportunity is not a wholly negative event in the end reverend putty and stephanie meet at her store and buddy declares that he's going to try to be as good a father as he can to her putty is a self-centered narcissistic deeply depressed individual who simultaneously believes that he is both high value and totally worthless at once so he fits in perfectly with the rest of morrilton however one key difference in his personality is the fact that despite being petty and selfish he still does genuinely care about the well-being of other people he complains about how much he hates his job but he also tries to go through and do his best at it he'll feel as though his life is completely worthless but then trying to put other people up instead of dragging him down with him as such he serves as a foil to one of the overarching archetypes that the show relies on whereas most of the morrilton residents are terrible people who try to pass on their traumas but he makes an active attempt not to pass on his misery to the world around him this doesn't necessarily mean that he succeeds in doing so but the fact that he's constantly trying is itself a large amount more than anybody else can say this episode concludes season 2 part 1 which aired months prior to the second half of the season the split season style is something that adult swim animations do pretty regularly usually in response to delays and production the network offers a lot of creative freedom to their projects and this is a compromise the second season tonally matches the first and that the darkness behind the characters is more implied than shown and the genre can confidently still be considered a comedy first drama second but we've seen enough scratches at the surface to plainly see what we're going to be in for for the future the formula has been all but eroded away oral gets his ideas from different places than before and for the first time comes to conclusions that may violate the spirit of his instruction intentionally rather than by mistake this is an episode all about irony but he believes he's giving aid to as i say not as i do sermon to the congregation only to learn by the end that he has in fact followed his own advice adding to that he managed to be fruitful and multiply in a way that has had as little pleasure for him as possible possibly the most christian way you can do totally loveless procreation this is a great episode to show off who putty is as a person he gets angry about the situation he finds himself in and he complains the whole time but in the end decides to do the right thing even when he could have justifiably at least justifiably to the town done nothing at all praying what are you doing oh hi dad pretty great huh i'm at one with god uh-uh not my son the praying bee exactly what it sounds like assuming you didn't just imagine a bee with his head bowed is coming to moralton everybody seems to have something writing on the outcome but nobody has more going on the bee than oral who's expected to win by all the town's folk as such they have been praying every waking hour of the day even preventing him from going to church but the stress ends up damaging his ability to focus and he turns to stephanie for help who gives him incense and a cd of meditative chants when oral uses the meditation they practice on his own to the praying bee he ends up winning mostly due to the other kid passing out from begging for forgiveness too hard funny how in a show where the townsfolk seem to care more about the performance of praying than actual faith there's a literal competition for the performance of prayer i would call it ironic but only because i like most people don't actually know what irony means very few and morrilton actually care about their faith they just want others to know that they care about their faith in fact the actual religious aspect of the show may as well not exist the town of morrilton could be obsessed with star trek and then judge each other each on how much they know star trek lore and how many conventions they've been to for all the actual impact it has on their lives and so we see a theme occurring in the show while it presents itself as a take that of religious fundamentalism the reality is that it's criticizing anybody who would use that sort of fundamentalism to dictate how others live their lives while justifying their own faults boy there sure are a lot of religions out there aren't we lucky to be born under the exact right set of circumstances correct culture part of the world time and geography that we would worship the right one coincidentally what our parents and their parents and their parents and their parents and their parents chose we see oral listening to buddhist chants while meditating and finding a sense of inner peace as a result but this doesn't necessarily mean that buddhism was the better religion for him orville is just as content when he prays to blue eyes white jesus than any other performance of faith and the only real reason he finds a greater peace elsewhere is due to burnout from praying too hard earlier so one of the most overtly religious episodes of the series is actually the episode that shows how little religion really matters to the show itself it serves as set dressing much in the same way that a real world city and another show might take place and does and while the setting of morrilton goes a long way in detailing the types of stories moral oral can tell it's really not a show about religion repression just remember the lost 29th commandment everything's fine principal fakie is losing his mind over the guilt he feels for constantly cheating on his wife with nurse bindi and just as often as he's having sex with her he's crying to reverend putty about how bad he feels oral overhears his laments and turns to his father for advice advice which ends with fakie learning to completely ignore the problem by convincing himself it's not a bad thing because he's not a bad person oral is nearing the point of being wise enough to understand that nothing was really fixed by his actions but after applying the same advice to himself themes that quote everything is fine hell hath no fury like a middle class american being told that their normal behaviors contribute to large global issues being told that something you do every day could be potentially damaging to society or the planet or even yourself is more or less a demand to change your way of life it's why so many people are resistant to things like health as a lifestyle or environmental concerns it's easier to simply ignore that these issues exist at all or to find some confirmation bias that absolve you of any responsibility principal fakie shows us an example of how some people struggle with the idea that they should be feeling guilt over their lifestyle and oral recommends one of the most popular coping mechanisms tell yourself you're a good person and tell yourself that good people only do good things the episode omnipresence has a similar theme to this episode but this time the episode is told from an outsider's perspective repression being an episode that retreads earlier thematic ground has the burden of expanding on the existing ideas expressed in the earlier episode and i personally think that it fails to live up to that at least in a sufficient enough way to justify the episode in the first place it takes a viewpoint of innocence through helplessness if you can't fix the issue it's not your fault if you can't fix the issue it's not a real issue either way keep doing nothing and convince yourself that nothing needs to change the entire episode also suffers an enjoyableness by focusing on characters we're not meant to like doing things we're not meant to agree with them doing overall it's not a very nice episode and i feel as though it's among the weakest episodes of the season though i should point out that just because the episode doesn't feel good to watch doesn't mean that it's automatically a bad episode some media is meant to make us feel good powerful prouder righteous other media is meant to make us feel uncomfortable afraid nihilistic ashamed moral oral routinely falls into the latter category but most of the time it at least has a message beyond that or some kind of moral to take away this episode just reinforces things about the town of morrilton and its people that we already knew turn the other cheek not sure you know you shouldn't upset your mother by coming home with dirty clothes because then your mother talks to your father and no one wants that oral learns to turn the other cheek which to him means actively allowing himself to suffer at the hands of others and later himself he believes that by doing this he's setting a good example of how to be a proper god-fearing individual but when bluberta and clay find out they're concerned for oral safety because all the blood on his school clothes is going to cost him a lot in detergent so clay teaches oral to be more proactive in his morality and make the other guy turn his cheek first taken to its logical extreme oral starts roaming the town assaulting anybody he perceives to be threatening so everybody until he beats off his father at which point they sit down in the study and clay refuses to admit that he's done anything wrong turn the other cheek is an episode about masculinity specifically it's an episode about the paradoxical relationship between the ideals in the bible and the macho lifestyle many religious men try to idolize on one hand jesus was a virtuous man whose lifestyle we should all aspire to emulate on the other he was a bit of a fruit he never got into fights to defend his honor he relied on others for help constantly he cried a lot if the lord were alive today he absolutely would have been bullied in middle school clay tries teaching oral how to defend himself to stand up against the perceived harms in this world and not to be such a little boy about it and in the end of the episode despite oral being feared at school and beating up both his parents clay doesn't punish him he did the manly thing even if it was a sinful act oral takes two lessons in this episode one of actively seeking out pain itself slightly retreading morals from pleasure and one of actively seeking out to inflict pain oil is able to switch seamlessly from one of these concepts to the other without actually thinking that the first way of thinking was wrong or harmful at all as such he's never put into a position where he has to question what he's doing we've seen oral questioning authority a few times already this season but this is an episode where he seems to regress a bit though it only seems that way we've already had the fact that oral has a subtle pain fetish established so this episode is actually building on that earlier bit of established lore in the end this is an episode that's more humorous than anything else we get to see the ever peaceful oral going goblin mode on everything that moves and we get a cathartic scene of him beating up clay for once later episodes go on to show that clay has conflated physical violence with affection as a child so this episode takes on a totally different tone with that knowledge but for now it's just a fun romp down the religious propaganda double thinkhole geniuses leave it to the liberals they take a perfectly fine word like conservative and rape us with it oh oral and friends stumble across a missing link when hiking in the woods the missing link terrorizes a church bake sale for a while before ultimately the townsfolk take it upon themselves to re-educate him as a god-fearing protestant afterwards he becomes a right-wing talk show host before ultimately remembering where he came from after which the townsfolk refreeze him and forget the whole ordeal ever happened this was much more topical back in 2007 when the episode aired today it's more of a garbled mess of mixed metaphors and celebrity references that makes the episode seem way too on the nose even for season one i think the main issue i have with this episode is that in addition to being incredibly dated the commentary of this episode doesn't actually say anything what is the take away from this episode supposed to be it's not like it's completely devoid of any attempts at saying something at around the halfway point when discussing what's to be done with the missing link the townsfolk produce a craniometer that's a sort of oversized caliper used to make measurements in phrenology a pseudoscience that was proliferated to among other things justify slavery white man's burden policies and falsely incarcerate suspected criminals on the bases at their heads shape caused them to commit crimes overall geniuses is probably the only episode of season 2 that i recommend skipping not because of the content but because just not very funny or insightful courtship wow oral you sure are smart gosh dad said smart almost never means righteous i better go make sure we're doing the right thing okay joey's parents give him a few bucks to leave the house for a while something which oral learns they do very often in lieu of affection the next day joey falls in love with this teacher miss sculpt him after she offhandedly calls him son something his parents have never done he spends all his allowance money on a gift for her but this only temporarily buys her affection so in order to continue funding his one-sided relationship with miss sculpt him oral sets him up with a one-sided relationship with the local pedophile slash ice cream man mr creepler after a while dougie realizes he's not making any actual progress and that relationships are about giving gifts without expecting anything in return something that he misconstrues his parents as having done all along everybody shows affection differently we each have our own unique love languages some people show their affection through physical touch hugging their friends and putting their arms on their shoulder others will show affection verbally constant reminders of their affection for the subject and joey in this episode shows his affection to sculpt him through gibbs but differences in these love languages will always cause some sort of conflict to people who do not understand the differences a person who shows their affection physically will find a verbal lover's constant platitudes insincere and self-serving a person who prefers gifts will find it strange that another person keeps acting physical towards them doughy just wants to receive affection through time and language he likes when people praise him even if he doesn't quite understand that connection made in his head quite yet he sees others giving and receiving gifts for their displays of affection and deems that to be the best way to get to ms sculpton's heart it works for a time but ultimately he never has his feelings reciprocated as he never truly got her love language figured out it's the season 3 episode alone where we finally find out she's been longing for a more physical relationship but here it's a mystery by the end of the episode in the end zoe accept that his parents do in fact love him just in a very roundabout way tinced with a healthy amount of denial courtship is an interesting break from so many oral centric episodes it does the writing gymnastics of having a pedophile play an important role without creeping into awkward territory so it deserves some acknowledgement for that following this episode we enter the final quarter of season 2 where a lot of things begin to wrap up but not before a couple of brief diversions school pageant wow everyone sure hates jesus whoops oral tries out for the role of jesus in the never before wanted school pageant but loses the part to junior christenstein instead winding up as judas he's reluctant at first but the playwright talks or sings him into the position and he soon carries a performance in front of the whole town with the original song i hate you jesus the song is a big hit and soon enough the whole town is singing about how much they hate jesus oops moral oral is at its best when it's a character study putting established characters into new situations and exploring the way they react as well as what they learn from the experiences we love oral because he keeps a positive attitude as often as possible even when there's little to be happy about we admire putty because he constantly attempts self-improvement and bettering others even if he has historically not been that successful at his attempts the episode's school pageant introduces a new character and gives them the focus of the episode oral plays a very small role a role which doesn't have much of a real conflict he's briefly concerned about playing judas but in the very same scene the insecurity is brought up it's resolved and explained away nobody learns a lesson nobody has their faith tested to quote the episode itself if it wasn't for that pandering judas song the episode would be totally forgettable the focus of the episode is on dale armager a failed musician turned failed playwright who has delusions of grandeur he'd be a good fit as a regular morleton resident if he appeared in any other episode and had a bit more to his character as a result i suppose it isn't completely true his figure appears in earlier episodes that they posts are on the wall in many background shots the missing eyebrow on his figure is actually the result of the heating lamps he used for photography melting it off but ultimately the character and his feature episode are one in the same a forgettable one-off appearance and has no overall influence on the rest of the show or its cast i suppose this could easily have been an intentional decision though his whole arc is about the fact that he resents being forgettable and wants a claim to fame the fact that he himself only appears once and gets forgotten about is thematically consistent intentional or not this is one of the final episodes of the show to not be overbearingly dark the rest of season 2 consists of a recap followed by the two-parter nature after that we get much more depressing in season 3 while containing a few moments of happiness for the cast here and there only has those moments stand out because of the grittiness of what surrounds them presents for god thanks sonny but i'm already saved you see i'm a catholic [Music] [Applause] after hearing reverend putty's lamentations about the moral righteousness of the citizens of morrilton oral decides to find sinners in the neighboring town and bring them over so they can be saved although the exact process through which they're saved he never quite inquires as to word of mouth spreads about what he's doing and soon all the men in town went in on the action so oral sets up what is effectively a prostitution ring no lesson learned no morals that's the extent of the joke people always make exceptions to their moral codes for themselves every man in morrilton seems to be fine with hiring prostitutes if they think they can get away with it sure they'll all outwardly tell anyone who asked them about it that the sex work is illegal as it is immoral never mind that jesus himself actively sought out thieves tax collectors and yes prostitutes as companionship one of the major themes of the bible is that jesus would go out of his way to surround himself with sinners so that they could be saved it's not enough to pray that someone's soul be saved you should try to save it yourself a good moral to have but the way you go about saving others will play a large role and whether or not it makes your attempts viable forcing your lifestyle down someone else's throat will only make them resent you accepting someone's lifestyle despite disagreeing with it will at least keep the person close enough to you that they don't stray any further from the path of righteousness okay i forgot about this episode for some reason i believed it was part of season one though that may be because it has a return to form of the season one edginess wouldn't it be funny if the little christian boy smoked crack wouldn't it be funny if he became an alcoholic wouldn't it be funny if he ran a prostitution ring like season 1 there's also very little take away from these plots ordinarily oral commits some atrocity and then we see the moral for lack of a better term that an authority figure in his life typically his father imparts onto him but far from the structure of season 1 this episode has his distinction of not containing an overt moral teaching section why is that section removed because nobody treats oral as though he's done anything wrong at least not thoroughly enough to act on their feelings the appeal of fiction is to introduce us to characters and then see how those characters react to different situations how do they learn how do they change how do they grow this is an episode that shows us the reaction not of any individual character but the town itself the nonchalant lack of moral outrage against sex workers being brought into morlton and mass shows exactly where their morality stops mattering for them to get their rocks off orals movie premiere i love jesus so much that nothing else matters to me i don't need girlfriends or wives or anything like that i'm happy being all alone forever a retelling of the first three episodes of the series from oral's perspective that also gave us a conclusion to what he's been doing during the credit sequences of each episode thus far an important part of any story is going to be the context for each actor involved and how that context informs their actions we have an understanding of why oral acts the way that he does because we're constantly exposed to his perspective of things but the characters who do not see things his way are those around him the adults offering him advice rarely understand the full perspective of why he's asking the questions that he does this episode is all about the shock that the rest of morals in feels when exposed to slightly more of oral's life the strange questions that get brought up and how conclusions might be drawn from the newly connected information we can laugh at the expense of the town's folk watching orals movie premiere but their shock is actually a bit of a mirror held up to themselves a mirror that we don't yet know is even there you see a majority of the episodes in season 3 follow a formula of introducing a minor character during the plot of a season 2 episode then expanding on that character's backstory and home life as the rest of the details are filled in we learn a bit more about not just who they are but why they behave the way that they do the slight resentment that zoe feels towards oral and how it manifests as an inferiority complex only truly becomes clear after season 3 episodes like trigger and of course the context that an episode like alone adds to so many minor characters ends up making the indifferent adults of orals world seem much more sympathetic in their plights compared to what you might think of them on a first watch through so as we see the adults slowly piece together what oral is actually doing with their advice we get an early look at ourselves slowly piecing together why so many people in this town are as messed up as they are the adults in orals life have never considered his side of the story just as likely as we haven't considered theirs that said despite the analysis i can't help but think of this episode as filler while the reactions of the audience at orals movie premiere are interesting not too much ever really comes with them the future episode innocence does a much better job at exploring how these relationships can result in actual consequence and this episode comes across as a pre-finale recap more than a typical character piece nature ah this is the life kid out on the fresh air no one telling you what to do or how her day was after the unseen resolution of an unseen plotline we see oral and his father's study standing around awkwardly when orals gaze meets a taxidermy deer the idea to go on a father-son hunting excursion enters clay's mind and the two men set out for the morrilton nature reserve but oral's hesitancy to shoot at any of the fauna gains the resentment of his father who gets progressively drunker as the episode continues culminating in a semi-nonsensical rant and an off-screen gunshot the next episode begins with the pan down to reveal that oral has not in fact shot his father but has instead wounded something much more dear to clay's heart the last of his alcohol in a stupor clay shoots his son then he drinks the rubbing alcohol from oral's first aid kid before passing out during the night the campsite is visited by a bear that oral shoots and kills something that would have made his father proud had even awake to see it rather than risking the acceptance of his father though oral lies about the origin of the bear's corpse and gives the credit to clay who takes him home to put the weaken behind them this two-parter is the finale of season two as well as the start of the final story arc of the show at least chronologically oral's hunting trip marks the exact point where he loses his innocence so to speak and the show takes on a dramatically darker tone so far nearly every episode is played on orals optimism in the face of the rest of morrilton and each plot has been a test to see how well his innocence can hold up now that we've reached the breaking point this formula is completely gone moving forward indeed most of the season 3 consists of flashbacks and storylines taking place concurrently with other season 2 episodes this keeps the show's theme consistent while still allowing the show runners to expand on the setting and characters moral oral is a show about innocence children are innocent idealistic and good adults are corrupt cynical and bad while a child may have the naivety necessary to believe that they can change the world an adult knows better but moving forward we start to see that this isn't the end all of what the show wants to say because while it marks naivety as something one may grow out of it also extols that that same naivety as something too important to leave only to children sure it's naive to think you can change the world but it's heartless to stop trying even if you can't save everybody you can at least make one person's life a little bit better and then hope and pray that they continue that cycle lord knows they'll continue a cycle of hurt given the chance nature as an episode is unique in that there is no music for the entire episode excluding the intro theme no music helps to establish the tone it's just oral clay and the sounds of the nature around them we're not told how to feel when oral finally works out the courage to say what's been burning into his mind for the last decade of his life and when his father is completely unfazed by the pronouncement of this hatred we're still on our own oral is for the first time exploring thoughts and emotions that nobody else can explain to him not that he ever turned to another person for help with these thoughts that's not what he's been taught ultimately this is oral's darkest moment the exact moment where the foundation of everything good in his life the rock on which he's built his church gets pulled out from under him and he's left to not only find joy but faith in the ensuing emptiness but there's little joy to be found moving on numb i'm sorry oh wait no i'm not i don't care wow what a freeing thought the episode details the events in blueberda's life during the hunting trip at the end of season two largely her attempts to feel literally anything at all at first she approaches reverend putty but after an extremely premature ejaculation he chews her away she goes to stop frame who confesses he only ever feigned interest to get closer to clay she then gets desperate to the point of mutilating herself just so she can visit a doctor but much like everyone else in her life the doctor is only interested in her insofar as he has a fascination with bodily harm when she no longer feels the need to hurt herself for attention he ceases to care out of options she returns home only to once again don the mask of the loyal housewife that even she can't bring herself to believe in ultimately liberta deals with uselessness during this episode a fear that she has no purpose as nobody needs her around she is a mother to oral shapey blocky and even clay but ultimately it isn't her that they want around just what she does for them her issue throughout the episode is that she wants to be useful to the people around her the people of morrilton and she wants them to desire her she wants to be desired so much she is willing to mutilate herself just to get the attention of dr potter's wheel but just as everybody else does dr potter's wheel doesn't desire her as a human being he's only attracted to the mutilation she undergoes in her attempts to catch his notice nobody likes floberta for bloberta not even poperta likes herself if only she could have some validation from others if only god had a plan in mind for her but by the end of the episode she's resigned herself back to her domestic role still not satisfied and a bit less optimistic that satisfaction is even achievable this is the episode of moral oral that introduced a bunch of teenagers to the mountain goats which isn't so bad if you consider that the alternative is that those teenagers discovered the band on their own we see a strong precedent that established during this episode one of flashbacks and in between episodes that flesh out character motives and desires a bit more liberta has for the longest time existed as sort of a background character she is oral's mom and not much more she's as much a character in the show as the puppington house is an inanimate object to serve as background info this of course plays on the typical role that women are expected to play in a protestant society a role of being seen but not heard never mind the toll that has to play on a person who desires validation just the same as anyone else ultimately this is one of the strongest episodes of the season if you can overlook the gross-out humor it contains well not so much humor as these moments are played as shocking not to be shocking but to show how far gone the character is alberta is mutilating herself for shock value not the shock of her mutilation but the shock of her desperation i think it shows a tonal shift that something that the first season would have considered a punchline it's now meant to be something depressing grounded hey it's a miracle a miracle so it's free well gauze is expensive knew it after collecting blood and ruining the upstairs bathroom oral is grounded from church he makes it about two weeks without going to church before he snaps believing he is a church and walking around the town before being struck by lightning in his near-death experience he begins to hallucinate the afterlife only for the experience to be taken away from him when he is resurrected at the hospital but after chasing a bit of depth he craves more and begins electrocuting himself again and again experiencing more and more of god before eventually the experience and epiphany is beaten out of him what's the point of staying alive i don't mean this in a depressing sad boy kind of way this is a question asked out of academic theological curiosity it's established that those who know not of christ but lead generally good lives end up going to heaven despite their non-belief those who do believe also end up getting into the eternal kingdom of heaven as well a second life that is eternal so then what fundamentally is the point of being alive now it should be understood that to an extent life is a test of sorts a means to gauge whether or not one deserves heaven at least this is a typical interpretation among protestants so then if you're good right now at this very moment what's to stop you from actively seeking death suicide of course is a sin and disqualifies you from the good afterlife but reckless endangerment isn't really brought up you could make an argument that you're squandering life recklessly exploiting your one chance at existence but since you live eternally anyway what is there to fear from death other than the unknown in a less depressing rain today grounded is a pun oral is both grounded from going to church and also grounded as he keeps electrocuting himself it's very clever the continuous near-death experiences oral undergoes in this episode are meant to show him coming closer and closer to a true religious epiphany in the end the cryptic i am a church is something proclaimed briefly before the true with a capital t moral is forgotten this isn't the first time we've seen an enlightenment oral in the series during the episode praying oral achieves a new sort of peace by meditating while is named a chance and the epiphany we see in that episode is needless to say extremely different from what we see him achieve in this episode this isn't an inconsistency though oral is undergoing an extreme amount of mental stress during the events of grounded so it follows that he'd have a more shall we say traumatic license with his internal reasoning i really like the sound design in this episode moral oral has done a lot with silence over the last season and it continues to do quite a bit with it going forwards so seeing what they can do with noise is equally impressive fluberta and clay wear the facade of getting along quite well in this episode all in the interest of driving oral to insanity it's actually a bit concerning and hints that the show could have gone in a completely different direction i'm not sure if the two silently resenting each other is more or less depressing than bonding over their casual hatred of their son but it's a question that remains hypothetical innocent wait a minute you're asking me to take responsibility for what oral does i know it's a tall order 90 of the time i'm not even responsible for my own action following the events of school pageant the town holds an emergency meeting discussing what to do with the world rather than anybody taking responsibility for the advice they give to him they decide to do away with advising the boy altogether hoping to instead let him come to conclusions on his own this backfires dramatically when he ends up taking the worst possible lessons from his own conclusions and at the end of the story we see the setup for the previous episode grounded this is the third consecutive episode that details events in reverse chronological order each episode ending where the previous one starts this is lampshaded in the previous episode where we hear the line you think god can't see into the future during one of oral hallucinations followed by the line being spoken outright during this episode the reason for doing this is largely because the season 2 finale was a bit premature during nature oral officially has his innocence lost something that becomes a bit of a theme for earlier flashbacks since many of the plots are structured around oral misinterpreting bible verse he needs to be in a state of mind to bother listening to verse in the first place and so a majority of season 3 takes place during season 2. there are also a few moments that help us to time a certain event in the lord's prayer we see blocky swapped for shapy something that persists until the episode numb when both boys are brought to the same house then then in close face the mix-up is put right things like this as well as orals cast give us some sort of ground to work with something to tell us when each future episode is occurring though most episodes also begin with some kind of establishing shot usually a scene from another episode shown from a different perspective to further put each piece into chronological order it ends up being a bit heavy-handed for the sake of clarity certainly a consideration made so that characterization doesn't appear to get out of whack even when it is being consistent in essence feels like a little more shock humor something we get back in season one in this case it's meant to show that despite the best efforts of morleton there's no real changing orals destructive ways everybody ignores him except for stop frame who was answering facetiously and he still ends up bathing in the blood of children in the end the more things change the more they stay the same alone the episode follows three of the women of morrilton living in the alone ford apartment complex with the through line of putty's radio sermon being more or less tuned out whenever not relevant to the ongoing stories nurse bendy is shown to regress to a child-like state when not around others and having never had the opportunity to experience adolescence herself due to constant advances from the men around her miss sculptum suffers from ocd following her complicated relationship with creepler in the universe it's portrayed as a non-consensual encounter albeit one that sculpton made no real efforts to avoid it gets explained in better depth in two of the cut episodes from season three more notably abstinence we also see miss censordal's side of two telephone conversations one with farmer phony crops and another with her mother both of which serve to expand upon and explain that her obsession with eggs comes from a solving ectomy performed on her when she was an infant season 3 is the final season of moral oral and as anybody who is at least marginally aware of the show can tell you this episode is why following the two-parter nature producer mike lazo allegedly asked for the next season to be even darker and even edgier a few months later the script for a loan was shown to him and shortly after the show was cancelled for being too dark this episode got the show cancelled not for the content that it portrays but the message by which it portrays that content sexual assault was depicted in much more graphic detail during the episode god's chef but that was played for laughs non-consensual sex is implied during the episode courtship but again pedophilia is played off as a joke we've even had an episode focused on miss cincerdall's obsession with reproductive freedom and offensiveness and later nesting but only when it's a traumatic experience is it ever considered too far as dark as this episode is i have ultimately found it to be a very important episode not for just the development of the characters in the universe but for the effect it's had on the other side of the fourth wall this is not personal experience it is anecdotal but victims of sexual assault have praised the episode for the realistic depiction of survivors so often rape is something that we avoid in polite conversation and media the type of evil that we acknowledge is there but rarely attempt to do anything about because even acknowledging it makes too many people uncomfortable this ends up harming victims greatly as their trauma is considered something that makes them unclean and uncomfortable to discuss it causes survivors to be victimized twice once during the attack the second time by society alone has gotten priests for not skirting the issue showing a humanized non-glamorous depiction of a survivor of sexual assault and indicating the very real nuanced traumas that can arise as a result it's a real shame that this is the episode that got the show cancelled maybe we as a culture still aren't mature enough for the discussion but it's a damn good thing somebody had the bravery to say something my findings aside i still don't quite like the direction the episode ends up taking many of the characters in my distaste comes from a different reason however so often too often in media female characters are relegated to a smaller array of tropes than their male counterparts this episode makes no attempts at subversion in that regard clay oral doughy are all traumatized characters people with interesting dynamics to the way they act and what caused them to act that way hell even in female examples liberta has a lot of creative depth and nuance to why she acts the way she does but as for the side characters in the show they fall for the simple i don't know how to write woman trap many newbie writers lean heavily into male writers only know two ways to write a tragic female character one maker sterile two raper this episode is over three trigger gosh who would have thought that bringing a loaded gun to school could be such a disaster angry about his neglectful parents joey throws a rock in a family of squirrels only to realize that he doesn't feel upset at harming them at all continuing his sociopathic streak he stumbles upon oral and clay shooting cans in the puppington front yard the lesson isn't going well until the trio discovers that doughy is a natural marksman and the boy is assigned to be oral shooting coach but when clay threatens to take doughy on the hunting trip instead of his own son joey begins to actively sabotage oral's lessons trying to keep his thoughts away from improvement by depressing him in the end oral learns that the real secret to being a good shot is to stop caring about life or anything else and though he is swiftly forgotten about again zoe latchkey is the red-headed stepchild of morrilton not literally at least not the stepchild part he's the runner-up in the attention's arms race to anybody who knows him on a first name basis as for his last name latchkey is a somewhat antiquated term for a neglected child and we see this of him not just in the darker second and third seasons but in season one as well the lack of attention he receives in his life manifests itself as a sort of inferiority complex which drives him to lash out an emotional outburst whenever those feelings grow especially strong we can see from him both large levels of passion as well as rage whether he's throwing all his allowance money at a crush or throwing rocks at squirrels he has it pretty good compared to many of the other denizens of marlton but that by itself says extremely little i like how accurately this episode catch cersei's small town lassie's fair attitude towards firearms oral muzzle sweeps his family and friends so many times without so much as a second glance he constantly has his finger over the trigger and of course there are more negligent discharges in this episode than there were in god's chef it plays to that american attitude of showing an intense love for something you don't quite understand fully or that you're barely even using right like gun owners who don't know trigger discipline or car lovers who drive automatic or cowboys who don't have any cattle overall this is an episode that combines a decent pace of casual comedy and genuine character drama in a way that never patronizes the audience with pauses for laughter or more overt messaging none of its themes are heavy-handed and has just enough nuance to provide consistent intrigue a great episode that shows off moral orals writing at its very best i wish the entire second season could have been this tightly written dumb that was sad violin music number seven by ludwig von stopmotion animation name it was yes father you know it is it didn't sound familiar that was sad violin music number seven by ludwig von stop motion animation name you're getting worse angry about his dementia-ridden elderly father joe goes searching for his real mother who turns out to be nurse bendy he visits her house which is more or less the same as what we saw in the episode alone though here we get to find out more about her surrogate family specifically we learn that her toy bears are meant to represent a real child she was never able to raise herself though when joe arrives and shows even the smallest amount of interest in her life she quickly loses interest in the bears at the end of the episode joe and nurse bendy share a small moment together finally having found a small amount of happiness and otherwise tragic lives joe is an angry angsty child who has never been told no by anybody seriously meaning to stop him from doing anything he's the end result of constant enabling and failings to act on negative reinforcement as well as a total lack of positive reinforcement his father once an allegedly brilliant doctor has long since become senile and his sister lacks the energy to control his outbursts combining these elements joe has become unruly egged on by the constant lack of pushback by his community no matter what he does he's rarely punished for it outside of a single instance in season 1. in any other tv show some sort of karmic justice would be doled out to him creating a sense of justice but morleton is a town without karma or justice and yet we still see a reasonable solution to his issues when he's instead given a positive role model in nurse bindi this fermenting relationship is the first truly happy ending to a season 3 episode so far an ending that becomes sweeter if only because it's surrounded on all sides by mellow drama and suffering as i mentioned before there isn't a real sense of justice to any of what goes on and this episode plays with the idea a bit we pieced together through conversations that nurse bendy was sexually abused by dr second opinion sin which resulted in her birthing a child a child who was soon taken away from her the combination of abuse and loss results in the trauma we see during the episode alone and all of it is a result of a man who is now far too senile to remember any of what he's done so when joe takes out his rage on the man it's hard to say whether there's anything just about the act overall this episode manages to run one of the most wholesome stories possible out of two characters who initially appeared as shallow childish one note stereotypes it's not something exclusive to this episode far from it but it is something that's best exemplified here a handful of decent jokes and an unusually happy ending result in this episode being among the most memorable of the season hell i tried talking to your mother but she wouldn't even let me have the courage to bring it up let alone say things a flashback about alberta and clay meeting for the first time at a wedding reception this episode gets quite a bit of context from the following episode passing so we'll put a small pin in this episode description instead of explaining the mental state of clay during his introductory scene though we do see vloberta's history she doesn't fit in at home being passed over for parental affection in favor of her siblings the way mental children often are and she doesn't fit in with the other women of morrilton as they're all getting married as they're expected to when she finally meets a normal-ish single guy she latches on to him feeling validated as he's the first person to show appreciation for her help understanding blueberda's character is mostly an exercise in understanding the world surrounding her she's a woman who's never had any amount of acceptance in her life and as a result craves positive feedback from those around her even at the expense of cultivating her own interest or developing a personality she wants to protest with the other woman of marlton despite not having a real passion for it she gets married but only because everyone else is she performs the role of a dutiful housewife not because she loves to clean but because that's what's expected of her you can summarize her personality in two words why not of course nobody is ever going to praise you for blending into the background nor will you stand out if you fit in and so roberta ends up never receiving any sort of positive affirmations despite doing what she's been taught as acceptable in the end she's a miserable woman who's too afraid of being shunned to fight against the social role she's been expected into the old boomerism of hating your wife is the expected social end result of so many who were forced into marriages before they were ready the societal expectation to get married at 23 have two and a half kids and then wait out the rest of your life in the suburbs trapped so many people who barely had time to consider if that was the life they actually wanted for themselves i will go ahead and give you a bit of affirmation you don't need to know what you're going to do for the rest of your life by your early 20s help is an interesting episode in that it shows us a site of two characters completely different from what we've seen before we see a liberta with optimism and a clay who doesn't even drink after this episode bloberta quits drinking and play begins a metaphor for the way the people pass on their miseries to those around them more or less a summation of the show as a whole up to this point passing never take the lord's name in vain sorry especially at the dinner table what is that one of those lost commands that made me hold a gun a flashback of clay's youth as a spoiled only child learning that he's not actually an only child and that his extremely religious mother had a series of miscarriages prior to him he reacts to this information by lashing out and faking his own death not quite realizing the effect that his death will have on his mother's sensibilities after so much experience with it in the end he's forced to adapt by acting up and being struck by his father the only sort of attention he receives until meeting blueberda clay puppington is at once the most tragic and also most reprehensible character in the entire show reprehensible in his actions in the way he actively seeks out to corrupt others and tragic in the way that he's incapable of remedying his behavior due to his complete lack of remorse for any of it you can view him as an evil person but unlike a typical villain clay doesn't believe in his mind that he's anything but that most wicked people can at least justify their actions and explain away misbehavior as doing what they believe to be right or beneficial but with clay he is not only keenly aware of his faults and issues but actively seeks out situations where he can push that misery onto others there is no justice no fairness no righteousness only self-interest and misery through this episode we can see mirrors of many past events occurring in a short span of clay's childhood the phrase there are no accidents appears at this point the very same praise clay used to scold oral during their hunting trip this not only justifies clay's rage to himself but also shows us one of the major reasons he lacks any guilt for his actions guilt comes about from mistakes if you hurt somebody by accident or make the wrong decision that results in something bad occurring you'll feel guilt over your mistake if you hurt someone intentionally you'll feel just in your actions and therefore no guilt believing wholeheartedly that there are no accidents means that people hurt each other through intentionality something that you don't have a right to feel remorseful for unless of course you change your ways but this is not a possibility in clay's mind one would expect that passing would serve as a sort of justification for clay's actions throughout the series something to explain why he acts the way that he does and give a bit of tragic backstory so that we feel pity instead of spite but rather than that we saw a glimpse of clay that proves that he hasn't really changed that much passing is the episode that shows that exact moment that clay loses his innocence much the same as help for liberta and nature for oral but we also see that a person's actions exist independently of aspects like innocence oral goes on to be a good person in spite of his past and the show asks us to cast judgment at those who lack that fortitude close face well unless you don't mind of course just give me a sign do you mind wow of all the things he could have said thanks an episode told in two parallel timelines leading up to the arms-length dance one in the present involving oral and christina the other taking place 12 years ago involving stephanie and kim in the past stephanie's relationship is viewed negatively by the townsfolk and doesn't work out though not wanting to see oral repeat her suffering she helps him spend the night of the dance with christina she practices her guitar in the back of her truck only to be joined by her father who reminisces with her about the past saying he disapproved of her lesbian relationship not because she was gay but because she was with somebody who didn't care about her stephanie is routinely viewed as one of the happier people in morrilton though this is likely the result of her limited screen time perhaps if we had gotten more episodes with her we would learn otherwise that said what we do see is a person who is more often than not able to keep a level head and offer relatively decent advice even if it turns out to be a bit tone deaf to the realities of moralton for example she recommends that oral meditate not realizing the danger that puts him in as his new form of prayer is likely to result in him getting ostracized still her willingness to help others when given the chance is something rather rare in the town of morrilton and arguably something she inherited from her father despite not growing up around him perhaps it is her ostracization that has resulted in her ability to help others in such a forthcoming way she never had that part of her personality harassed out of her or at the very least resisted those who might stifle it as is common for the media of the era going as far back as the haste code would allow the subject of lgbt groups has always been treated as shock humor or a punchline for several decades even portraying a gay character in a positive light guaranteed that your work would receive the most restrictive possible rating as such the topic remained taboo outside of humor for decades to follow it's a somewhat recent development that gay characters have even been treated as human beings let alone proper characters this flashback episode portrays a time when representation was on the brink of both of the above while simultaneously containing present events that show an even more regressed state of marriage equality the disdain that rural society shows for two people of different religions is something that still exists to this day even if it's not quite as prolific as it once was this is one of the strongest season 3 episodes and also one of the few with the happy ending it goes to show the validity of the decision to shift to a darker tone as the light becomes so much more brighter when you're surrounded by darkness it fits back into my thesis that moral oral is not a show with an inherently dark message ultimately it's an optimistic view of hope in a world that makes pessimism so easy sundays wait a minute oral oral puppington [Music] we start with the series of flashbacks progressively working their way towards the current day much in the same way the third season has already been doing the framing device is reverend putty's sermon so the focus of the episode is in the strained relationship between two background characters florence and dottie the two despite being friends sabotage each other's relationships and lies only getting along due to proximity more than anything else again much like every other character in this season is revealed to do this is an episode about ego everybody participating has some kind of pretension to greatness that they imagined for themselves some kind of value exclusive to themselves that elevates them above the rest of moralton but one by one we see the consequences of these clashing egos as more and more people realize they're not all that special lawrence imagines life alongside putty a man with whom she has little if any meaningful interactions with throughout the series imagining herself as more desirable than she really is her self-image is broken when reverend putty calls out dottie's name during intercourse donnie feels personally challenged when after a messy divorce she finds herself living with florence though she keeps her spirits high by putting her roommate down it's not until florence and putty's fling that she realizes that perhaps she isn't all that special after all and of course putty's shallow lust towards dottie is an exaggeration of his own desirability as a man who has historically had no romantic successes in the end the egos clashing against one another only cause harm despite all three of these characters getting exactly what they wanted out of the episode putty gets laid only to feel miserable about it dottie sabotages florence's relationship only for the guilted hurting a true friend for her own sake to eat away at her florence finally finds the romance she's been longing for only for it to be a pretense to get closer to one of her friends the ultimate moral is one of appreciating those who are close to you and being thankful for what you have an inability to recognize the good parts of your life will often result in a rejection of the things that make you happy in favor of something you only think you need at the end of the episode despite the awkward and depressing last few days putty still resolves to give a sermon on hope looking to oral as a beacon of optimistic wisdom but since this scene takes place after nature that is not what he finds then i'd do it again too i do it over and over again that's my life over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over okay clay i get the no you don't following an inspirational sermon by putty many of the men in morrilton visit for getty's bar for their usual only to be ranted at by clay after prying open all of their insecurities they leave in a mixture of disgust and fear this episode consists almost entirely of a rant by a single character as they unequivocally declare their thoughts on the events of the last few seasons as well as detailing in their own words events that have shaped themselves and those around them into people they currently are kind of like that one episode of bojack horseman except much earlier also like bojack the show began as a comedy and slowly shifted towards character drama steadily enough that nobody even realized how light the earlier season seemed it's not as though i'm accusing bojack of intellectual theft establishing character through comedy is one of the most effective ways possible to get an audience close to them if you can laugh alongside someone that you can feel alongside them too the rant and sacrifice is the closest clay ever comes to feeling genuine remorse for anything that he's done wrong in his life we see him break down a bit in the privacy of nature and on occasion he'll act shaken in the privacy of his study but the public setting of forgetties is where he chose anything close to actual guilt even then a majority of his sadness paints him as the victim in all this a victim complex fueled by his own self-hatred you see clay really is suffering he has to spend every hour of every day alongside the person that he hates more than anything else in the world himself and so the origin of his remorse becomes more clear he treats others poorly as a way of seeking justice for the tragedy in his own life lamenting that if perhaps if life were better he may not have done so many horrible things to those around him in this way there is a bit of sympathy built for clay during this episode while the show doesn't try to portray him as any less villainous for his actions we at least get the first hints of an impending breakdown something that continues throughout the last few episodes of the series and all of this serves the large narrative throughout the show that there is no justification for harming others the other townsfolk have had just as much if not more struggle as him and yet none of them have lashed out in the way that he has he tries to provoke them into violence as if the attacks on his person might confirm that they're secretly just as evil as him only pinned up and not openly expressing it but when they refuse to stoop to his level he finds himself all alone at the bottom as infamous as episodes like alone are i think that sacrifice deserved the role of the most iconic moral oral episode despite the extremely limited cast it still shows off just as much of the show's strengths as any other episode does and manages to tell so many different stories so effortlessly nesting tell me the truth oral i don't know dad uh-huh don't know okay well i take everything back and i'm glad i shot you noticing the strained relationship between oral and clay ms cincerdall turns oral against his father in an official capacity she opposes him in a mayoral campaign oh yeah clay's dead in job is mayor in order to increase the amount of stress on his shoulders just enough to break him then when he's at his most vulnerable she seduces him in order to have de facto control over moralton a revelation that would have had a much greater impact if the show had more than one episode remaining the running gag of clay complaining about his dead-end job is not just a build-up to this singular joke being the mayor of a small town in this way really is dead end because where does he actually go from here morrilton is a town permanently stuck in its ways a town where very little ever needs doing as most people are content to silently seethe over their issues rather than going public about them sure you've got the gaggle of women who protest anything and everything but miss cincerdoll has always been a character who never bites she protests but always stops before any action her activism is nearly all performative to actually change anything about the town would draw the ire of the other folks who prefer their days to be repetitive something she learns firsthand when oral convinces clay to van eggs and so this is why she has to roll from behind the scenes cynthia doll tries to gain control over morleton through clay and after learning of the strange relationships clay has with well everybody she realizes her in to de facto power nesting seems like a strange episode to include in season 3 for the reason that it's one of the first steps towards a seasons long story arc involving miss cincordo's plans to take over the town an arc that the showrunners knew would never gone to fruition after the episode alone was exhibited to adult swim executives they cut the number of season 3 episodes in half and announced that the show would be canceled after that point unfinished flat lines be damned so there was a pressing need to wrap up as much of the show as possible and this included figuring out which plan season 3 episodes had to be cut from the final version nesting is an episode that spends a majority of its run time setting up plot threads that ultimately never get a conclusion i think that the showrunners may have included it as a holdout for hope that the show may have gotten a fourth season after all and so they've retained as many of the plot hoax from the 13 cut episodes that they could manage it doesn't create a great episode on zone and unfortunately this amount of peace moving never pays off honor coach you like my dad the way my mom likes my dad don't you your mom likes your dad oral is lamenting the fact that he no longer has any respect for his father and seeks to remedy that so he can become a better christian he seeks out inspiration by looking for somebody who likes its father and winds up talking to coates stop frame unfortunately stopframe happens to have discovered clay's relationship with miss cincerdall and he himself is also struggling to find reasons to love clay in the end the two of them have fun together so i think clay has to put a stop to immediately ruining both relationships in the process this episode marks the final stage in clay's downfall and the final story the show gets to tell with honor there are no longer any characters in the show who show even a small amount of respect for the man sacrifice shows the way in which he scares everybody off and that they only begrudgingly accept his company when he's not preoccupied with something else nesting shows the ways in which he even betrays his own self-worth giving in to the advances of miss censored all finally the one person who always shows the most optimism in morrilton the one person who is able to find the good in anybody loses faith in clay ever becoming a better person by the end of this episode clay has nobody not even himself honor is a strong finisher to the season despite what i understand to be kind of a rush to wrap up for the show's third season they managed to squeeze several cut plots into the last few episodes leaving it at once open to a potential renewal while also being satisfying in its own right it's understandingly not a very satisfying conclusion you can definitely tell that there's still more to be said season 3 ends on a very low note overall and then cuts forward to a happy family scene one can't help but imagine a fourth or fifth season where oro learns to love the world again and move past the loss of his innocence because it's not very telling of a person who's young innocent and naive who sees the best in everybody but a person who's jaded and cynical and still tries to see the best in everybody is much more mentally strong and respectable and there's one part of the episode that i didn't cover in the recap one part of the episode that completely changes the entire perspective of the show and that underlies the entire premise a final scene of a future oral future christina and their future family sitting by a christmas tree and enjoying a family holiday together smiles on every face photographs of loved ones on the wall and next to that the most important part of this entire scene a crucifix a symbol that oral after everything never lost faith there are technically three more episodes of moral oral that i could have talked about but one is made using unofficial models one only exist as a script and the last one was released years after the show ceased to air that kind of served as an unnecessary prequel before oral trust is an episode that shows us not how oral became so trusting of everyone around him but rather explains that he's always been this way we don't learn too much and very little is really added as a result really though i just couldn't find decent footage of the last three episodes so that's why they're not here i'm gonna go off script a bit here i think uh what youtubers are supposed to do with some kind of spiel about like liking the video and subscribing but thankfully i am not a youtuber so i don't have to say any of that stuff you know what the subscribe button does um you know what liking the video was gonna do you if you subscribe you'll probably be a bit disappointed i rarely do content like this i mean okay that's what i said last time i made a long video about an adult twin property so who knows but this is this is not the norm this is the exception i do if you do comment though i read every comment i don't reply to all of them but i do read them so i'm not gonna ask you to like comment you know for the algorithm or anything but i'll let you know that much uh if you're not gonna comment do it for yourself do it for me do it because you got into an argument with a stranger on the internet i i don't care you don't have to you don't have to do anything uh few final thoughts moral oral is not a satire of the church satire requires a clear target and a clear intention and it says a few definitive things through its run but never really takes shot at like structure or doctrine of the church itself just just said the people who hide behind like the bible to push their own control uh that's something that can really be done with anything protestantism is just like it's set dressing more than anything else so that's that's about it thank you for sticking through this thing to the end or if you skipped straight here that's fine too i don't really expect people to watch this thing all the way through uh 1.5 x speed chad's where are we at right now i don't know how to conclude this not good at ending so i'll just kind of bookend it with that robin williams quote that i started it with the only thing worse than being alone is being surrounded by people who make you feel alone shut up video games ya

Channel: viedo gaems

Views: 132,621

Keywords: Moral Orel, Claymation, Video Essay, Analysis, Adult Swim

Id: ixos_e7XIWI

Length: 119min 3sec (7143 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 31 2022