Better Off Ted – “Mess of a Salesman”

While not the last episode produced of Better Off Ted, “Mess of a Salesman” is the last episode currently scheduled and ABC doesn’t seem to have any plans to burn off the final two anywhere. And, as Mike’s helpful Bubble Watch makes clear, the odds of a third season are pretty low. So, this could well be the last episode to grace the airwaves and, even if it didn’t go out on the high note I would have like, it was still an amiably absurd half hour.

The high point, as always, was Phil and Lem, whose antics were pretty amusing. Despite being ordered by Ted not to buy expensive lab equipment that they don’t need, they end up being won over by Ted’s salesman brother, who convinces them to ignore the rules, first by leaving work in the middle of the day (like Somali pirates) to go drinking and enjoy cheese cubes at the Admiral’s Lounge. Eventually, they got their new catchphrase, but I don’t feel like typing it here. Deal with it!

Their new blaze attitude towards authority was pretty hilarious, as they ordered a cadaver (and later named it, in direct violation of Ted’s order not to), a wind tunnel, and a family of robots (although not the whole family, which comes with grandparents who are still sitting back in the factory, brokenhearted). They also, amusingly, continued to yell “Deal with it!” while Lem bought leather pants and Phil “squeezed 10 pieces of cheese into a ball and ate it like an apple. I probably shouldn’t have done that. But I’m dealing with it.”

But why was Ted’s brother hanging around anyway? Well, it turned out he had been fired and was in town looking for a job, so Ted set him up as a salesman at a company that sells Veridian lab equipment…after Ted agreed to buy an unnecessary number of beakers (and he spends part of the episode looking for uses for them, such as coffee cups, which pays off splendidly when Veronica leaves the room during her “bad cop” act to go get “200 milliliters of coffee”). But the relationship between Ted and his brother felt frustratingly generic -  we’ve seen all the brotherly wrestling and mess-cleaning thousands of times before – which was very disappointing from a show that’s normally as quirky and offbeat as Ted.

The B-plot was also a little unsatisfying. It concerned Veronica winning an award, as she reminded everyone dozens of times. Part of the award is that she has to raise money for a charity, a job that she pawns off onto Linda until she finds out the charity provides young girls with a female mentor to help them navigate the corporate workplace. The two form a good cop/bad cop routine that raises a lot of money, but then they find out that only 5% actually goes to the charity while the other 95% of the money goes to telling the world about said charity. Linda headbutts the obnoxious head of the Veridian Foundation and then the two of them go rouge and donate all the money directly to the charity. This turns out to be illegal, but Ted’s brother, Lem, and Phil solve two problems at once by planting the cadaver in the guy’s car and blackmailing him into leaving Linda and Veronica alone.

On the whole, I thought this week was light on laughs and substance. None of the plots felt too satisfying, and none of the jokes really landed. Its kind of a shame, if this is the broadcast finale, to have to go out on a substandard note. That being said, there were still some good moments, especially when it came to the family of robots and Phil and Lem’s insistence that we “deal with it.” In the end, I can’t think of a better thesis statement for this show than Veronica’s line, “Now saddle up, Linda, and say good bye to common sense.” Its just that this episode had a little too much common sense for my taste.

Jonah’s Score: 59

Tangled Up in Wires Grade: C+

P.S. Though this could be the end of our Better Off Ted coverage, I’m not as broken up over it as I would be, since I’m going to be recapping the show replacing it, and I’m just a little excited to see what it has in store for us.