It’s Mother’s Day in Chatswin, which means that its residents go more overboard than they do in their daily lives in order to honor the cult of mother. Sometimes, Suburgatory sometimes makes Chatswin is a bit to cartoonish for my taste, but all the gags centered around the holiday, like Sheila getting the Cinderella treatment, work because they come from a sweet place. The big deal over Mother’s Day also reveals a few things about our characters. Dallas misses Dalia when she decides to spend the holdiay in Israel with her father. Tessa misses her mother now that she sees so many mothers around. Dallas and Tessa kind of fill those voids in each other’s lives — making the episode from a few weeks ago when Tessa tries to hard to be like Dallas make much more sense in retrospect — but can’t quite achieve it. Presumably, the “cliffhanger” of Tessa using her grandmother to get out of Chatswin either won’t happen or won’t stick, but with all this foreshadowing, we can probably assume we will meet the mother next season, unlike on some other show I could name. All in all, though Eden is still around, I am glad the show focused on Tess again after largely ignoring her last week.
This episode also displays the Chatswin that I find to be too cartoonish, in the guise of Noah and Jill’s over-the-top nursery with its endangered animal theme. The Chatswin characters need to retain a lovable core for them to work, and things like animal pelts and an ivory tusk crib are just needlessly cruel — and clearly just designed to upset Eden so that she goes into false labor. Eden is like the anti-Chatswin, which makes it bit surprising that Tessa doesn’t like her more, really. I think the writers could have dialed this down a few notches and still made it believable when Alicia Silverstone inevitably leaves next season. She is at least perceptive enough to realize that Tessa really does wonder about her mother, so I found her less pointless this episode.
The Shays have especially crazy Mother’s Day plans, which involve Sheila’s frozen blood and reenacting a James Ingram song. I am not really sure what the purpose of the James Ingram cameo was — so what if he and Sheila dated back in the day? More interesting is the reveal that Ryan, not Lisa, is adopted, but we will have to wait till next season to see how that plays out.
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