The Amazing World of Gumball Review: The Sucker

"Wanna come hang out with a bunch of older kids who have a reputation for being mean and manipulative?" "Do I?" "Yes you do." "Yes I do!" "He's perfect."

It might have only taken six seasons, but y'know what? It's about time that Darwin should get his own solo gig on the show. Sure, he's had some episodes in the past where he's the stand-out, but with the exception of a couple of Season 2 gems, he seldom truly mans an episode, even when placed in the hypothetical center or turned into the transgressor. "The Sucker," though, finds him in detention far removed from his attention-robbing brother, and we finally get to see what Darwin's potential is without back-up.

It does so by pulling Julius out from the sidelines, allowing for some fun, antithetical "chemistry." I mean, I don't think the episode does a better job of immediately dichotomizing the two characters than describing how both characters got thrown behind (metaphorical) bars in the the first place: Julius throws toilet paper spelling out the word "VANDALISM" on a tree, which Darwin one-ups with a follow-up "IS BAD." If that point wasn't hammered in hard enough, that quickly becomes the bread and butter of "The Sucker," with Julius saying one thing and Darwin hilariously misinterpreting his criminality for altruistic gestures that simple aggravate Julius' situation.

It starts out silly enough with some innocuous misconstruing, like Darwin literally cleaning a woman's purse, but as the episode progresses, the jokes become almost high-concept in how much they pile on. My proclaimed favorite joke of the night, for instance, is Darwin literally using his head to try to break a door open; then, when Julius gives him his credit card to try to pick the door open, he slides it through the mail slot so that they can pay for damages. (Thankfully, though, it has Julius' name and address, so they can return it with ease.)

I know that there's a lot of talk from people angry about the show presumably damaging the integrity of its characters for the second week in a row. (I never really tackled that too much with "The Rival," though I did do some defense work here if you're still prissy about it.) Let's just quickly rip this bandage off while I have the opportunity.

The way I see Darwin is that his relative shift in naivete was for the sake of him serving a necessary role in a realigned comedic duo. Julius isn't Gumball: he's far more heinous and proud of it, lacking Gumball's scattershot levels of self-awareness that require Darwin to mediate. Instead, Darwin is simply the "po-tah-to" to Julius' "po-tay-to": he mirrors him to balance that out. Keeping Darwin as subdued and middling as usual just wouldn't make any sense at all. If anything, seeing him being used to this capacity was actually sort of reassuring; Darwin's a character that the show constantly struggles to truly implement, but here, he's front-and-center, and he's the show-stealer. TAWOG, after all, wants to produce a balancing act with its characters, and that aspect is quintessential to the success of "The Sucker."

The ending, too, shows that he's not just some naive idiot waltzing around without a thought to what he's doing: he actually gets some level of comeuppance. Sure, he's too pure when he realizes his mistakes to raspberry and let the credits sequence roll like Gumball, but that doesn't mean he doesn't take it as an opportunity to turn the whole ordeal into a lesson. Basically, to make up for all the ways he ruined Julius' life, he outlines the means through which he fixed them, which hilariously "fixes" on the technical grounds of creating even worse issues (i.e. gang war, a marriage proposal, and parent framing/deportation). It works because it makes us reevaluate how much Darwin actually understands the situation; he may be naive for the most part here, but he exploits that to temporarily get the upper hand for the sake of proving a point.

There's just something nice about seeing Darwin actually get his message across for once, and all it took was ruining somebody else's life, but alas, that's TAWOG for you.

Quotes and Notes:
-My nose can actually whistle on the occasion. It's truly infuriating.
-Darwin interpreting "mauling" as "going to the mall" was adorably naive in a weirdly endearing way.
-"And to finish, some trampling!" "They have a trampoline now?! Aw man, detention sounds great! I guess they must be going for a Scandinavian rehabilitation approach."
-"I'm Reaper." "I'm Scythe." "And I'm Phillip." "No, dude, that's your real name." "And I'm Mowdown."
-I liked Darwin quietly placing a pine air freshener on the woman's bag that he was told to clean out.
-This marks the second time that Darwin's been cut off from performing a musical number, but I think it worked far better here because he's not being deprived of a place in the episode so much as deprived from being able to say something hokey and rhyming 25 things with the word "friend."
-Darwin's insistence that he and Julius kiss to make a quick cover started out dumb, but the second time wore me down. I loved it.
-Also: Julius' parents being a stick of dynamite and a firework was hilarious.

FINAL GRADE: B+. Even if we're late into the series' run to finally get a true Darwin episode, "The Sucker" proves that Darwin's a character in his own right with the capacity to do the heavy-lifting on a fun, memorable episode. It might not have that much narrative complexity, but it's a delightful character study that doesn't try to hard to impress but scores big regardless.

For the last Gumball review of "The Lady," CLICK HERE.