User blog:AustinDR/Review: The Loudest Yard

Now...."The Loudest Yard." In this episode, Rita places Lincoln on a football team as a means of getting him to exercise more. As you would've guessed, Lincoln has little to no knowledge on the game, so he has Lynn play in his place. All seems fine and well until he learns that his family was to attend the final game due to all of the press.

With the episode....remember how I said in my review of "Toads and Tiaras" that it started a trend of having similar plots? For the most part, the LH has original plots, but there are some episodes that were not necessarily rehashes of earlier episodes, but it makes me go "Hey, I remember seeing an episode like this." The episodes "Come Sale Away" and "Chore Day" also suffered from this, because it concerns the Loud siblings doing something that affects Lily in some way (believing that they lost her in all of the mess in the former, believing that they sold her blanket unintentionally in the latter), and in both episodes, turns out that their parents had something to do with it. So basically what I'm saying is that while the LH uses original plots in their episodes, they tend to borrow ideas from other episodes. So in the of the "Loudest Yard," it is essentially one of the Loud siblings pretends to be another either to win something or cover for the other. So, in this episode, Lynn covers for Lincoln by pretending to be him, only for him to take her place when she gets injured. Again, much like how Lana pretends to be Lola when Lola got hurt.

Now, several LH fans have stated that they hated this episode, in particular the ending. For those unaware, the episode ends with Lincoln scoring for the wrong team, and being chased off by his teammates. While I can see why this episode was hated, I personally found it decent. Don't get me wrong, the episode is pretty mean-spirited towards Lincoln, but I felt that it was a good balance. For one, the episode notes that Lincoln isn't good at sports, so it sets up the outcome that he would lose. I mean in all honesty, did you really think that Lincoln would win with that in mind? I admit that Lincoln getting a Charley's horse whilst running from his teammates was a little unwarranted, but overall I wasn't outraged by the turn of events. That's not to say that a show basically needs to be mean-spirited, but if it chooses to employ that type of humor, it needs to be done in such a way that it doesn't infuriate the viewer.

There were also a few funny moments in this episode as well. For one, I loved the reference to the Peanuts that they did when they have Lucy pull the football away from Lincoln as he went to kick it. Given the comic strip style of animation that the show uses, it makes sense for them to make a reference to it. If I remember correctly, I think it was said that the LH was greatly inspired by the comic strip; I can't think of the name of the website that I received that information from. I apologize. This episode only furthered my belief that Lola is a sociopath as well. As part of a plan to get Lincoln out of having to play football, Lola was going to run his leg over with her car. Given the fact that she had a smile on her face the entire time, don't tell me that she wasn't going to thoroughly enjoy it. Which makes it worse once you realize that she probably got that idea from one of the mob movies that she had seen (seriously, do her parents know she watches them).

Overall, this was an episode that I should've hated, but I found some things in it that I liked. I felt that the mean-spirited nature of the episode was at a normal level, there were some hilarious moments here and there, etc. I can see why many hate this episode, but it's far from the worst in my opinion.

'Final score: '3 stars out of 5