A Halloween episode is a natural fit for Fresh Off the Boat. It provides an extremely easy avenue to tap into ’90s nostalgia, dialing up the referential jokes to 11 with visual devices like pop culture costumes, using them to enhance the presence of the show’s ancillary characters, a world Fresh has been building since the back half of Season 1. In addition, the distinct personalities of the Huang family members meld nicely with the holiday theme: Louis’ reverence for American culture and Eddie’s love of hip hop make building a Halloween story around the family effortless – at times a little too effortless, considering the awkward fashion in which the various story threads of “Miracle on Dead Street” eventually come together.
When Louis discovers his neighborhood has a terrible Halloween reputation – partly because a bunch of Disney “imagineers” live nearby, and Halloween is “their Christmas” – he decides to take it in his own hands in order to properly celebrate “the only thing white people do better than us.” Of course, Jessica wants nothing to do with Halloween, more interested in protecting her investment home (which is finished already, though it appears that story is only beginning) from a group of skateboard-carrying teenagers intent on assaulting the home she’s just spent weeks fixing up. While these stories naturally isolate from each other in the first act – Jessica wants nothing to do with Halloween, Louis the same with the investment home – they struggle to come back together later, when Louis is in Full Mr. T costume and parading around the area with Eddie and his boys.
The dissonance comes from the emotional range of the two stories. Louis and Eddie’s pursuit of an awesome Halloween is pretty superficial material, able to ride on Louis’s excitement and the costumes Eddie’s friends wear in the episode’s latter half (Brian arriving at school in-costume as The Mask was the single biggest laugh of the episode). Jessica’s is a little more nuanced, a story that’s both about her trying to assert herself over the insurmountable immaturity of teenage boys, and her attempts to branch out her real estate career with the investment house (a story I thought would be more developed throughout the season, even if the termites at the end suggest more to follow).
These elements kind of sit in awkward contrast to each other, and never really come together in the way the episode wants them to, when Louis suddenly realizes the importance of supporting his wife while out for Halloween. It’s just kind of a moment that happens in the middle of the third act, shoved into the proceedings in order to bring the various threads of the story together. It makes the ending, while still charming in that Fresh Off the Boat way (“A little early on the door opening, Dave!”), feel a little engineered, a surprise conclusion that just randomly brings back Nicole in a schoolgirl costume to make a joke about girls being the biggest fear of teenage boys – a totally valid point, but one that comes out of nowhere, for a conflict best visualized when Honey spends a lengthy amount of time holding Jessica back from beating the skateboard carriers with various objects off her body, and from her purse.
Rather, “Miracle on Dead Street” is at its best when its playing into the trivial pleasures of Halloween. Eddie’s pursuit of candy is as familiar as any Halloween story, and there’s no Sam Weir-like debate between Eddie and his friends on whether they’re too old for the holiday or not, even though they’re in eighth grade. Louis, after all, proves that childish joy can be found at any age: any man that happy about his terrible Mr. T wig is clearly someone with a feverish pleasure in enjoying life, and that’s the kind of sentiment “Miracle on Dead Street” captures the best, along with the visual gags of Eddie as Shock G, aka Humpty Hump, Grandma in a full-body Garfield suit, and Evan and Emery’s adorable Silence of the Lambs homage.
And that’s okay. After all, Halloween in modern America is about embracing the silliness and the darkness of the world, dressing up in costumes in order to hide our shame in begging for candy (okay, that’s more Jessica speaking than me, but you get the point). For 22 minutes, Fresh Off the Boat just wants to have fun, to take a holiday from the heightened emotional stakes of its usual weekly hijinks, and when those episodes are as entertaining as “Miracle on Dead Street,” the lack of a meaningful cathartic resolution isn’t really missed.
[Photo credit: Michael Ansell/ABC]
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