"When Gumball is invited to Penny's house to attend a pet's funeral, he believes it to be a date. However, when his father tells him that he needs to act cooler in order to impress her, he relies on his family members to accomplish that. Will their advice pay off in the end?"
One of the things that I have enjoyed most about this show is the way in which Gumball and Penny's relationship is handled. This episode was no exception. While those who were listening could tell from the very beginning that Gumball was actually invited to a funeral, the few moments of interaction that we got between the two of them was great. Really, if this episode had any major flaws, it's that it spent half of its allotted time on Gumball's preparation for his "date". Those scenes were funny (with one exception), but it took away from the amount of time that Gumball got to spend at Penny's house. I would really like to see more of Penny's family. I liked her father, from what little we've seen, and her sister seems like a nice kid. I just wish we could have heard from her mother, but there are always episodes later on that could delve more into her family life. Mr. Cuddles was also an interesting pet choice, being a spider and all. Gumball being bitten well over a hundred times was a bit too harsh for my tastes and reminded me of "The Gi" when I thought he suffered too much, but at least this was all an accident. All in all, I really enjoyed this episode, but I feel there
is something that I must gripe about.
The one exception that I mentioned - the one thing that really bothered me - was the little joke where Richard believed the credit card that Nicole gave him was magical, and proceeded to throw away a hundred dollars simply because he had to sneeze and had nothing else to blow his nose with. I get it. Richard is stupid. However, since all he does is stay at home and do nothing all day long while Nicole works and raises the kids, I found his actions there to be insulting. I know that this is a cartoon and that comedy trumps everything, but the crew should still be trying to make the characters likable and I just can't like Richard when he does stupid things like that. I don't mind stupidity when it isn't blatant; when it's expressed as silliness, when it's not at the expense of others and when it's all in good fun. I can even tolerate it if it is at the expense of others, as long as the character in question gets their karmic pay-back when all is said and done. But having a lazy, good for nothing oaf throw away his wife's hard-earned money simply because he doesn't understand the concept of currency just rubbed me the wrong way. I seriously hope that Richard is handled differently in season two, as little things like this really bug me.
