Bonus points for the absolute commitment from Fiona Apple to the title song playing over the end credits, echoing something like the Carly Simon performance in “Work Hard or Die Trying, Girl.” Tina ends up battling her own sleep deprivation and feelings of guilt while trying to stay awake on a haunted hayride so she can steal another kiss with the always noncommittal Jimmy Jr. It’s hard to blame Tina for being disturbed after having to dissect a fetal pig in a middle school biology course-why do we inflict that on children again? What follows is a nice tribute to various haunted house yarns, and occasionally A Nightmare on Elm Street, with actor Paul Rust doing a nice job as the ghostly fetal pig. Also: The punny costumes are sounding pretty forced by this point in the series life cycle, though “Peter Pan’s Labyrinth” is still good for a laugh.Ĩ. In truth, it feels like the kids and Bob probably should have been worked more directly into Linda’s story in some way. on Halloween night-in service of a plot as boring as this one. It’s a crime to take these kids out of their element-trick ‘r treating on Ocean Ave. The even bigger issue is the B plot, however, which strands the kids in the restaurant with Bob on Halloween night, sitting around and commenting as he tries to upgrade the restaurant’s candy situation. Unfortunately, the actual Halloween holiday feels pretty minimized in most of the episode, and the Linda and Gayle story fizzles out with a real cop out of a conclusion. High school Linda and Gayle is something we’ve seen only briefly before, primarily in season 4’s “Purple Rain-Union,” and the thought of a vindictive former classmate targeting them for ruining a pumpkin-carving competition 27 years earlier has a fun, I Know What You Did Last Summer vibe to it. The A plot of “The Pumpkinening” is certainly original, taking the Halloween episodes in a direction they haven’t gone before, so it’s easy to appreciate that. This feels quite stale, with all the gags effectively recycled from season 3 classic “The Kids Run the Restaurant.” Unfortunately, this is the sort of repetition we’ve seen from the show in more recent seasons. In the B plot, meanwhile, Bob and Linda get roped by Teddy into giving blood at a vampire-themed bloodmobile, with all the humor revolving around Bob’s already established queasiness with blood. There’s very little action to be had here, and it feels like most of the episode consists of characters standing around in the hotel lobby. It’s a fine setup, but the kids’ storyline feels largely inert, leaning on supporting characters like old Gus, who has frequently been overused in recent seasons. “Heartbreak Hotel-oween” feels like something of a bait and switch, as we initially think the episode will revolve around Louise trying to achieve vengeance on a pair of “candy stiffers” before the kids instead get sucked into a hotel-set mystery involving a woman trying to conjure the spirit of her long-dead lover. We’ve already made the argument that Bob’s Burgers has been running out of steam in its last few seasons, so it probably shouldn’t be a surprise to see newer episodes at the bottom of this list. In honor of the upcoming Halloween episode of Bob’s Burgers ongoing 13th season, then, let’s take a stroll back through the series spookiest hits to date, with a ranking of all the past Halloween adventures. Still, each year it’s fun to see what kind of ridiculous costumes the Belcher kids will be rocking. But Halloween is actually where it all started-season 3’s “Full Bars” was the show’s first holiday episode in general, and it set a standard that has been hard to top. In fact, we’ve already paid homage to those holiday episodes with rankings of the show’s best Thanksgiving episodes, and its best Valentine’s Day episodes. And in the long years since The Simpsons slouched off into obsolescence, perhaps no other series has been so associated with classic Halloween episodes than Bob’s Burgers.īob’s Burgers is a show with great reverence for holiday episodes in general, having devoted more time to Thanksgiving in particular than any other sitcom in memory. The TV sitcom “Halloween episode” is a convention with a long, fruitful and spooky past-we just love seeing comedic characters thrust into novel, scary situations outside of what we typically find on a show.
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