"Mac discovers its pride" in a sensational and ever-changing finale It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia

"Mac discovers its pride" is the ultimate referendum on the joke of the series about Mac's tortured denial of his homosexuality. And during the first 15 minutes of "Mac Finds His Pride", it's really bad. In the concert hall, Frank breaks into Mac's and Dennis' apartment (trying to move his nose horribly) and unsuccessfully induces the depressed Mac to become the gay guy dancing on Paddy's Pride Tank. Trying to thwart Mac so that he helps "to challenge the gays" through a cheerful, commercial-oriented vibe, Frank takes Mac to an underground gay S & M club and a drag bar before he gets out. urge Mac to finally surrender to its terrifying, still motionless. the imprisoned father, Luther. (Gregory Scott Cummins, never more annoying.) When that fails – Luthor assumes that Mac's detailed report means that Luther is about to become a grandfather – Frank gets a leather cricket to fill, which is a cruel but understandably disgust. . Frank, his face swelling horribly with imprudent techniques of stopping nosebleeds (the fiberglass insulation is not the worst), decides enough and knocks Mac again to tell Luther.

We arrive then at the minute 16.

Some things work on such a deeply unexpected level that spoils them for someone else feels like a crime or a sin. This is one. So, as far as I maintain it's a verifiable proof of a serious head injury to read a review before looking at the thing being reviewed then complain about spoilersI'm going to go and slap a good old SPOILER WARNING here.

Throughout the episode, Mac tries to explain to Frank why he does not have the entire "dancing on the chariot of pride" approach. "I've never really had it," Frank admits exasperated at one point, explaining that Mac's finally recognized homosexuality is even more disconcerting for him. Luther said the same thing, even without knowing the gay, telling his own son, "I never really got it." Frank, trying in the drag club, Mac explains his inner fight in terms of a vision of dancing in the middle of a raging storm with a hot girl who is actually a god. You can not realize that "the Catholics really screwed you up in the air." And they did, the need for Mac forever for the love and acceptance of the part of anyone in his life transforming him into a comically twisted zealist, unaware of his way of protesting, far too much in his quest to win the favors of a god (and a father) who has been taught him, thinks little to him, if they think of him.

Sunny Walk the line that all "edgy" comedies do, that of satire rudeness, bigotry, misogyny and ignorance while exploiting these same behaviors to laugh of belly. Little by little, Mac revealed that closed gaiety was never a joke about homosexuality, but rather about fanaticism and sexual repression – and about how they could transform people. Nevertheless, the comic mission of the series offers Frank, tonight, a cover for unveiling the offensive shit of the old school. For example, when he discovers Mac does not declare anyone in the clubs, Frank has led him to know what's going on in him, sneering that it's about "five or six super-viruses, who are fighting". Or when Frank constantly reminds Mac to "watch his back" so that the "fairies" do not "sting" [him] Frank is an old jerk, so he's fun to laugh at the awful things he says, even if the joke is that Sunny is so mean by letting him say. Later, at the unveiling of the suspiciously well-designed suspicious tank for Mac to attract "gay men who spend a lot", Charlie disdainfully explains that the shower system he installed will allow Mac to do his "gay dance," or whatever. " The treatment of Mac's sexuality through the series is only one thing that the rest of the group finds grueling and ridiculous.

The whole episode (up to the 16th minute) looks like this: a series of tired jokes, on both sides recited that give "Mac Finds His Pride" the feeling of suffering from the type of impostor syndrome which governs the last two episodes. . Looks like it's the kind of tired, desperate schtick you expect from a show in its 13th season. And the fact that Sunny– which has defied all expectations and all precedents largely avoiding such a deterioration of the series – seemed to succumb to it is ultimately a real negative point. Another of Glenn Howerton's intermittent absences is launched with a line. Grilling Cricket to show his healed and malnourished torso in bondage outfit is just sad. Frank has already bled before, just as copiously, but much more imaginative. Even the signing crises of Charlie and Dee feel forced.

Meanwhile, the gloomy sluggishness of Mac seems at first too deep and enlightened. By saying to Frank, "I do not know where I am as a gay man and it's starting to make me," Rob McElhenney, from the beginning, makes Mac too self conscious, too much of a person, if it makes sense. Even his foreseeable collapse in the face of Luther's foolish enthusiasm for a grandson ("If it's not a boy, you throw that shit and try again!", Does he rage in a toxic male rabies) can not not cancel taking this episode Mac like someone coming out too far from what's allowed Sunny in terms of personal growth and self-knowledge. Sunny will give his five characters an occasional glimpse of what their sordid, selfish, and self-destructive lives look like, but the show can not exist in the air up there. They must be brought down, their prejudices and selfish weaknesses recovering just in time to recover. SunnyThe status quo at the sewer level.

So when Frank takes inspiration from the pumpkin head really upset to try to stall the nose that runs from him, he addresses Mac one last time, that is. . . badly somehow. Old pro Danny DeVito brings a touch of beauty to his call:

I was in agony all day, but I realized that sometimes it was necessary to let the blood flow to be able to heal. Some cuts that you simply can not connect. And it's the same for you. You have this thing in you and you try to plug it in, but you have to leave that shit, you have to let it sink. Otherwise, you will be in agony for the rest of your life.

But where does it come from? What is the gag? Frank does not have Mac and, like the rest of the group, largely despises what he understands. And Mac, seemingly ready to accept what he thinks is Frank's pretense of monetizing his gayness for Paddy's sake and his relationship with his father, seems to give way, until Frank stops him. According to Frank, by presenting himself to Luther in this way, Mac would be "doing it for the wrong reasons." Sunny McElhenney and the co-author of the episode Charlie Day were going to organize this referendum on the humorous treatment of the series by Mac. And, as the first 15 minutes were played, it looked like a mediocre job, cringing with cheerful jokes and sluggish and outlandish sentimentality. Until the episode reveals how well we have been set up in a masterful way.

When Frank and Mac return to prison, "Mac discovers his pride" interrupts the scene. In fact, he breaks it so unexpectedly, so completely and with such irrevocability that I was – and remains – not convinced. It's always sunny in Philadelphia can still participate in his 14th season, already announced, as the same show he was. The swing that the series is taking here is so big and so successful in its objective, that I do not know what to compare. I mean the unexpected musical interlude unexpected in Magnolia, perhaps. But that's not entirely correct. (Same thing for frogs.) Our colleague Emily L. Stephens felt it was like Sunny pulled a Louie (less, you know), which seems closer in terms of redefining the expected form of a supposed sitcom. After spending the last five minutes of "Mac Finds His Pride" again and again, I'm still lost. I still do not know if it works in the context of It's always sunny in Philadelphia, or if it redefines the future of the show. I know I have been impressed every time. I know it's the most amazing and impressive sequence I've seen on television this year. I know it's glorious.

Mac comes to his father dancing. An interpretive narration of five minutes, exquisite choreography and a movement as impressive as ever. (Of course, I'm practically not an expert on the subject, but I'm going to stick to that.) With Frank, Rich Wealth opened the way for an impromptu performance, supposedly mandatory in prison, with rain that the episode had launched as one of Charlie's improvements, Luther is sitting fore and center for a visual and auditory expression of the inner struggle that Mac has tried and fails to articulate all the episodes . A storm inside. A beautiful woman who is an angel or a god. The need to speak to his father imperiously terrifying and aloof (see: god) the way he really wants it – and has prepared himself for what is clearly very long.

Rob McElhenney's recently torn body joke is bearing fruit here, revealed not as a transformation other than "it would be funny" like that of Season Six, but by the need to be the full physical expression of the silhouette carved, ideal but tortured, that Mac wanted to represent. With the partner who earlier, Frank had assumed that Mac was hitting to meet the demand of a child of Luther (the amazing talented Kylie Shea), Mac expresses his life with conflicting feelings and urges in a ballet that is both shocking but graceful to two people in Sigur Rós. "Varúð" haunted. The joke of the two previous triumphant musical sequences written by a Gang has been undermined by the deceptive and whimsical deception of this gang that is bearing fruit because here the carpet is never fired. There is no joke. There is no other reward than Frank's stunned applause beside the prisoners around him and his tearful breath: "Oh my God. I understood. I understand. "There is no limit to the outcome of the dance, where, after their magnificent and magnificent representation of the Battle of Mac with who he is, the beautiful woman cradles the exhausted Greek statue of Mac, a form in his arm on the stage soaked and repeats, "It's okay. It's okay. It's good. There is no wink, no irony. In the interpretation of the divine blessing given by Mac, the applause of a cavernous room full of brutal men (although not the late Luthor) and the venerable blessing of Frank to end the episode and the season.

I do not know if It's always sunny in Philadelphia is the same show after that. For McElhenney and Day to conclude their 13th season of creation with a devastating, unprecedented and sincerely felt and redemptive bow for one (and perhaps two) of the "worst people in the world", this suggests that they plan to give another direction on their show. I guess they could pick up the return of something like old Mac (and maybe Frank) as they did largely after Dennis's moving move at the end of last season. I guess that would not bother me too much …Sunny remains one of the only practitioners of this type of comic brilliance on television. But I will not forget this Mac (and maybe Frank), whose exorcism of the oppressive forces that turned Mac's life into a single sickly joke is realized and, yes, glorious, like everything I've never seen.

Observations lost

• Like Jodie Foster in Contactpanting: "They should have sent a poet" after his first glimpse of the infinite universe, a dance expert should be able to interpret the nuances of Mac's performance. (Choreography by Alison Faulk and Leo Moctezuma.) But I'll try it.
• Mac's trip tonight saw him literally throwing away the conceptions of his sexuality. While not judging the lifestyle choices of club members Frank takes him, Mac rejects them simply because they are not what he finally understood. Similarly, he avoids the group being accepted by the gangs for purely commercial reasons, which makes it a subtle discovery of a similar transformation of a certain clean and pleasant corporate ownership of the LGBTQI community.
• The joke about how Paddy needs a real homosexual man to dance and not about a straight heterosexual pretending to be homosexual may be a bit too smart, but go for it.
• He also choreographed his dance to incorporate the inevitable renunciation of his father.
• The management of Todd Biermann after Frank and Mac's return to the prison is absolutely staggering. If the Sunny The Emmy drought will always end, this could be the episode / category that does it.
• For me, Mac's brutal yet graceful physical character with his partner is a guided tour of how his own stories about his sexuality have seen him relate to women. There is a moment when, after splitting in two and having gone through the water up to the opposite ends of the stage, Kylie Shea throws herself on the body in front of the standing and motionless Mac, pushing only one sobbing sobbing under the impact as she wrapped around him. it stopped my breath every time.
• And that's the end of Season 13 of It's always sunny in Philadelphia, gang. The Gang – somehow – will be back. And me too. Thank you for reading.