User blog:Justsomeordinarydude/City Slickers (The Loud House): A Reaction.

City Slickers

This was a perfectly… serviceable episode. As in, it ticked all the fundamental boxes required for it to be a “good” piece of television, with a reasonable amount of entertainment value as well as solid handling of the plot and characters. But beyond that, there just wasn’t that much about the story I found especially interesting or notable. Thankfully, one of my major concerns after watching the trailer was (mostly) debunked. While I figured the relationship between Lincoln and Ronnie Anne would suffer from tarnish and regression, the interactions between them work well in a contextual sense. Upon watching the episode, the only times RA really mistreats Lincoln via unnecessarily harsh pranks are when Lincoln merely imagines her pantsing him and pulling pranks at his expense, near the beginning of the episode whilst in the car with Lori, and then later when RA is only behaving aggressively with Lincoln because she is aiming to prevent him from revealing where they are both from to her new group of friends. So, while the pranking and violent behaviour wasn’t particularly amusing to watch, it did serve a narrative function as that behaviour was what enabled Lincoln to catch on to what she was doing, and call her out on her behaviour, making her come to her senses. The rest of it was mostly in Lincoln’s head at the beginning of the episode (and apparently, he actually enjoys some of this treatment, reflecting on how he missed Ronnie while thinking of all the ways she could prank him light-heartedly; then again, he is used to it by now and RA’s violent and pranking tendencies have nothing on the violent and pranking activities of Lynn and Luan respectively, and the latter I will elaborate on more in the next reaction post). Otherwise, their interactions are fun to watch, and it’s great in some of the scenes where they’re just hanging out and having fun, or when RA realises she was wrong to hide her true background and identity from her friends and abuse/cast aside Lincoln whenever he inadvertently threatened to spill the beans. Speaking of which, it’s sweet to see Lincoln have a backbone and actually stand up to his tougher friend and tell her off when she’s acting improper. If only he could do this and make it work more often when in some of his conflicts with his siblings. Lincoln is certainly wise for his age, and helped RA learn that true friends won’t care if she’s from Royal Woods or the city.

And they didn’t. From what little we saw and found out about them, Ronnie’s group of city friends were an incredibly friendly and welcoming group of kids. Of course, the key word in that sentence was “little” because they had limited screen time and no chance to actually demonstrate any unique or particular characteristics. They’re just a stereotypical bunch of cool kids who RA thinks will reject her, but in actuality, they don’t care in the slightest. I guess that’s still better than having them be jerks for the sake of the plot, but aside from being just nice kids, there isn’t much else to them as first as this episode goes, simply because they aren’t really given the opportunity to show off or develop in this story. The Casagrande’s have their moments of being genuinely funny in the 1st act of the narrative, such as CJ’s hi-jinks with Lincoln as he pretends to be a pirate, Carl humorously trying to hit on Lori, and Maria and Frida aiding Lincoln in “encouraging” RA to give him a guided tour of the city, before embracing their competitive nature and playing a fighting video game after the kids leave. But after that, they begin to lose focus or relevance in the story, so while their inclusion was great, it was a little short.

The Lori sub-plot didn’t really interest me that much, either. Again, it was serviceable… and that’s about it. Honestly, I can’t remember much about what happened other than Lori believing she was a city girl at heart and fantasising about it, finding out it is more of a struggle than she initially thought, and then renewing her optimism about city life by the end. But very few details regarding that emotional journey do I actually remember at the time of writing this, and I only watched the episode one day prior to writing this reaction. Her and Bobby’s interactions were solid, but again, nothing especially brilliant. Of all the sisters, Lori is certainly the one least in danger of being underutilised or rendered out of focus; she just had another day in the limelight a couple of weeks ago, in fact. This sub-plot seemed to exist just for filler, when honestly, I would have preferred a little more focus on Lincoln and Ronnie, the new kids, or even the Casagrandes. But, I guess I should just take this episode for what it is. The main problem is that this episode seems like a waste of time. The plot isn’t especially intriguing or entertaining. It’s rather generic and while solid, it doesn’t really leave me wanting to see more of any of these city characters. Compared to the season 2 episodes Shell Shocked and Relative Chaos (which I’ve made clear are two of my favourite stories of the show), this one seems a little underwhelming. I wouldn’t mind so much, except RA and the Casagrandes rarely appear in the show, and there are so many things I would love to see the writers do with these characters that would likely be far superior to this (E.g. RA meeting and interacting with some of the other Loud sisters, the two families meeting, etc.). So, in a contextual sense, this episode seems to be a bit of a waste of severely limited screen time and focus for RA and family.

But overall, despite said criticisms, it wouldn’t be fair to call this episode bad. It has a lot of merit. The plot kinda reminds me of that episode from the Simpsons where Lisa pretends to be a cool kid while away from Springfield to fit in with a group of new friends. As I’ve said, it was solid and serviceable (I just wish it could have been more). Lincoln is portrayed really well, RA at least learns a valuable lesson, and there are some humorous moments. But it also could have been a lot better.

Final Rating: 7/10