 Okay, so Malcolm in the middle. It's a classic American sitcom from the early 2000s. It's a really good solid show, and I just watched all of it in quarantine. So over the past month, I went through seven seasons, 151 episodes, and at the end, they really dropped the ball, but no one ever really talks about how it dropped the ball. So, um, yeah, I'm just gonna rant about that for a few minutes. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Okay, so basically, the premise of the show, if you haven't seen it, is like, there's this lower-middle class American family, and they have four kids at the beginning, but as the series goes on, they get a fifth one in there. I'm sorry, the camera's a little too close. I can't really do my hand motions the way I normally do, and the main character is this one named Malcolm, who is the middle child. He has an oldest brother, or two older brothers, yeah, whatever, you get the point. They're all boys, and they're all crazy troublemakers. They're constantly making trouble. They're constantly breaking stuff, causing issues with their parents, getting in fights with each other, horribly abusing each other as well, and that's where a lot of the humor comes from most of the time. Sorry, you can see my laundry sitting on the floor there. And Malcolm is also a genius, though. And something I really liked about the show is that even though he has a genius-level IQ and he can do crazy calculus and math and science and all that, he's still kind of a neurotic idiot in social situations. There are multiple points throughout the show where he gets into a relationship with a girl or almost gets into a relationship with a girl, and she leaves after like 20 minutes as soon as she gets to know him a little better, because even though they think he's cute and smart and funny and all that, he becomes kind of shitty when you're around him too long. And that continues throughout the show, so that's where a lot of good jokes come from. And anyways, what I'm getting at here is that in the final episode, Malcolm is about to go off to college at Harvard, and they finally found a way to pay for it and all that, and he's offered a dream job where he'd make a lot of money, and his mom refuses for him. And he's like, well, what the fuck, mom? Why'd you do that? And apparently she has already planned out his life for him, and she is demanding that he go to Harvard and do all that, do well, get educated and work super hard and suffer a bunch like he hasn't already, and then eventually he needs to become president of the United States so that he can make life better for poor people like them. And while I get what she's saying about the leaders of the U.S. being just a bunch of rich douchebags that don't really care about people like them, I totally get what she's saying, and the show does have plenty of moments like that that reflects that attitude where they just get screwed over by the system, and it kind of leaves out how a lot of their problems are self-inflicted. There's an episode where a couple of them leave a couch on some railroad tracks which causes a chemical spill and it infects most of their town, and so they have to spend a couple nights in a school gymnasium while the government cleans everything up. And then there's episodes where they go on spending sprees and buy shit they don't need, there's episodes where the kids in particular just cause trouble and do illegal things just for fun, and so a lot of their issues are self-inflicted. And more than that, when it's shown that Malcolm's mom feels, has these super high expectations for him, which are a burden by the way, high expectations from your parents are a burden more than anything else, and she has all this weight that she's thrown on his shoulders and she's running his life for him and not letting him do things on his own, but it's portrayed as heartwarming, and that really is at odds with the tone of not only the rest of the episode, but the show as a whole. The show as a whole is about the kids in the family growing up, because, I mean, think about it, and this is something that isn't super uncommon in sitcoms, but it's uncommon in other types of media where the kids actually start out as kids and as time goes on they grow up and get older. Particularly the oldest kid, Francis, he's in high school, at a military boarding school specifically at the beginning of the series, but then he graduates, he gets himself legally emancipated, he gets a really shitty job, he gets married, he has marital problems, he gets a better job, loses that job, and at the finale he gets like a real job that his dad is proud of him for, and so you get this feeling, oh, okay, he grew up, and then the other oldest kid, Reese, he was a borderline mentally retarded kid and he grew out most of the show, he has some skills, don't get me wrong, but he's honestly just a sitcom character that's way stupider than a real person could be, but anyways, he also gets a real job and moves out of his parents' house, and in particular, the three boys destroy their nuclear option, which is basically evidence of the worst thing they ever did, which they held onto so that they could blackmail each other, and they finally destroy that in the last episode so that they can let their youngest brother have a normal childhood, and all of this is showing them grow up, you know, the idea is that, okay, they're not really kids anymore, you know, they're still troublemakers, they're still kind of idiots, and they're, well, no, mostly those two, they're still troublemaking idiots, but they grew up and they're going out into the real world now, and when you have Malcolm's mom just still running his life for him and still being extremely authoritarian and extremely draconian and overbearing, which, don't get me wrong, that causes a lot of the problems throughout the show, like a lot of episode plots are caused by just their mother being overbearing and authoritarian, which, granted, you can't blame her all that much considering that her kids are little monsters, but nonetheless, it is... it just clashes with the tone of the rest of the episode, and, yeah, it's not heartwarming. It's not heartwarming. And so where most sitcoms I feel, most sitcoms that I've watched have had pretty solid endings because it's much easier to write an ending to a sitcom than it is for serious dramas because with those, you have to wrap up actual storylines, whereas with sitcoms, it's just kind of a feel-good send-off to characters that you've known and loved for a while, and, yeah, this one, it went for the feel-good thing, and it just didn't work. You know, it didn't work as feel-good. It didn't work as humor. It didn't work as dark humor. It just felt like, oh, okay, Lois is still going to be overbearing and running her kids' lives and cause them issues in the future and not allow them to follow their dreams, and we can see throughout the show as well that her mother was a crazy person and so that's partially why she wound up the way she did, and I think you just know going forward that when any of the boys have kids, their kids are going to be fucked up, too, so it's just perpetuating this terrible cycle, and so, yeah, yeah, the ending of Malcolm in the Middle, they really dropped the ball and it was a little more depressing than they probably intended it to be, and that's about all I have to say about this. I haven't done a Rance in a while, but, you know, I had fun with it, so patron names, ooh, yeah, you don't get your names called off in these videos. Bye.