'My Name is Earl': Enter a world of pure imagination

Did you watch My Name is Earl tonight? Oh man, if you didn't, you may have missed the single greatest episode the show has ever put out. At least is was until it got a little too sappy towards the finale, but not to worry, we'll get there.

Let's start at the beginning though. The whole point of the show tonight was to explore the imagination of the characters (an interesting notion) and consequently we got to spend a little time with them as they each wrote a story.

Frankly, the first time we went into Earl's imagination tonight, at the beginning of the episode, I was scared. I know that we only saw a gymnast that had absconded from Earl's bunkmate's imagination, but still. The place was just how I pictured it, a big white open space with not a whole heck of a lot in there. Maybe though I'm confusing Earl's imagination with Earl's brain, because that's something I've definitely never understood. As his brain doesn't really come into play though tonight, I get to avoid the topic for another week.

Randy's imagination however was awesome. I'm not sure I in any way, shape, manner, or form understand anything that took place in Randy's imagination, but it was awesome. Why Randy has superpowers and has Earl claim that Earl is just borrowing Randy's mustache I don't know, but I'm convinced it doesn't matter. I would really have liked to have seen him taken on the sumo wrestler with the bazooka, but breaking Joy's neck was pretty good as an alternative.

Unquestionably the award for the best imagination tonight went to Joy. I like that she thought in animation and dreams about killing both Earl and Randy. It seemed both completely logical and totally farfetched. I imagine that the reciprocal death wishes that Randy and Joy have for each other will pop up again in future episodes. At the very least, I hope they will.

Darnell though, wow. Who knew the man could sing. Does anyone out there think it was actually Darnell singing? Also, who knew he was quite that attached to the crabs he cooked. I'd leave that whole song down below as a quote, but it would take up an awful lot of space.

The show even gave Catalina the chance to show her imagination. She wrote in a telenovela style, which does seem a little bit of an easy joke, but after ignoring her for most of the season thus far, just giving her more screen time was welcome. Her seeing Darnell as the Churro Man instead of Crab Man was the clear highlight of her dream about the stripper named Catalina.

Now, if the show had ended after Catalina dreamed her little telenovela dream I would've been thrilled. Hugely, hugely thrilled. Sadly though, it didn't. The show had to get all pointlessly sappy. In the end, Earl couldn't think of anything outlandish, or funny or insane, so he just wrote about what, it seems, he wanted most in the world -- to be back at the Crab Shack eating wings with his friends, except for Darnell, who, even in Earl's imagination has to serve him (there is something else we should take up another time).

I just don't know why you take a show that was so off the wall and hilarious and end it with this mundane and overly sweet Earl story. Do the producers believe that each and every episode has to show some heart and issue a kind of moral? It was completely out of place tonight. They would have been far better off had Earl come up with some idiotic joke about Earl stealing everyone else's imagination and having him write a story that featured the monkey from Randy's imagination, only animated, singing about crabs to a stripper. Instead, we got him spewing a story about being in the Crab Shack, and what made it worse was that the inmates seemed to love it.

We get it, Earl is a good guy and people like him, we need not bit over the head with a crab mallet every week.

Other thoughts and maybe a quote or two:

• I don't know why I'm surprised that the Crab Shack actually serves crabs, but seeing Darnell dropping a crab into a boiling pot surprised me.
• Randy after Earl explains the idea of using your imagination to write something -- "Writin' sounds cool. You could make a world where anything could happen, like a guy all alone in a boat hunting a big white whale." Earl's response: "Randy, nobody is gonna want to read that."
• Earl states that Randy only uses a 17 letter alphabet, does anyone have any idea what letters he doesn't use?
• The beginning to Joy's story -- "...Once upon a long, long time ago pretty far away, there were two whiny little brats who I loved but I still wanted to wring their necks sometimes and a mom with the class of Princess Diana and the body of a porn star."
• Catalina to Darnell after Darnell laments the cracking of Joey (a crab) -- "You should probably stop naming them, that's what we did with the children in my village after the military took over."

And now, if you'd like to see my imagination, you should know that all you have to do is visit The TV and Film Guy's Reviews.

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