After quite an interesting series of changes, the reason behind Mike’s midlife crisis is finally revealed on The Middle this week. The cherry on top of this already promising episode is the return of Reverend Tim Tom.
With all the kids out of the house for the weekend, Frankie is determined to get to the bottom of Mike’s latest strange behavior. He’s not all that into his motorcycle anymore, and he doesn’t care that he’s missing the Colts game. He’s moping around the house and shrugs off her concern by simply telling her “it’ll pass.” On the surface it seems like he’s reverted back to old Mike – you know, pre-Hawaiian shirt Mike. Frankie knows something’s off though and needs real help. Since she can’t afford a therapist, she refers to an old family friend and man of the cloth, Reverend Tim Tom. This was an unusual reason for the Reverend to make a house call, especially since he was only ever really interacting with Sue and her teen group all throughout high school.
Bottom line is Mike’s just bummed about the realization that Frankie is turning 50. Apparently, he turned 50 a year ago, and it makes sense why there wasn’t an entire episode dedicated to his celebration. He’s a man of very few words and his milestone birthday probably came and went with minimal attention. What’s truly been bugging him lately though is the uncertainty of their future. It’s an unfortunate aspect of life that we get old. Now with the majority of the kids out of the house and in college, Mike’s feeling like he doesn’t know what’s next. I’ll tell you what’s next: Axl and Sue will most definitely return home again for an unknown period of time after college. They’re far from an empty nest in this economy. Then even further down the line, Mike and Frankie will hopefully get to watch their kids get married and bring them grandchildren to visit. Life’s far from over at 50.
Axl’s already doing his dad a favor of keeping him occupied from thinking too much about the future. By complaining to the city about their terrible landlords, Axl and Hutch found themselves evicted from their house off campus because they were being scammed and the house was illegally subleased. It’s still so funny to me that Axl would bring his freshman year roommate who is always glued to his computer screen home with him too. Something tells me there’s an unlikely friendship to be started between this guy and Brick.
Sue miraculously ran into Logan, her dream prom date from the food court when he was visiting a friend at East Indiana. Seriously though, if Brick wasn’t there with her and interacted with Logan, I would’ve thought she had dreamt him up. He’s a rare gem of an extremely attractive guy with a literal model’s body but he’s also the nicest guy she’s ever known. He wasn’t ignoring her texts over the summer because she had the wrong number! Which by the way, as soon as they agreed to their impromptu date that night they should’ve exchanged numbers again. If not that, they should at least both be on Facebook. It’s a little hard to believe that now that she lost him in the library she may never see him again. At the same time, that fairytale aspect of fate bringing them together unexpectedly in the future is kind of sweet and exciting for Sue.
What did you think of this episode?
[Photo credit: Michael Ansell/ABC]
Follow Us
