In which Jeff becomes a man…

Jeff has been around since the beginning of the show. He’s capable of carrying an episode (see Lost in Space, one of the show’s best). But if he’s going to be more than a joke character, and carry an episode, the emotional through line has to be strong and the jokes have to be good. This was not one of those times.

We flash forward to a future where Jeff owns a vineyard and he’s giving a tour to the Smith’s and another couple (who are they, I don’t know). He then begins to recount how he became a winemaker. He starts off by running off to play in the woods, finding worms (and Roger) but gets scared off by a monster in the woods. He encounters the family heading out to dinner and when Hayley doesn’t invite him along, Klaus eggs him on so much about him not being man enough. He runs back to the woods (seriously? that just seems like a giant waste of time). There he runs into a hidden house with a running stove. He ends up helping the owner of the house (Bing, not Mr. Bing) who serves him tea and shows him that the monster was just a boar.

Jeff asks Bing to show him how to become a man. Bing teaches him all about making wine, bathing, dressing properly and making food. This impresses Hayley, and Jeff rushes off to tell Bing but discovers that Bing has a lot of guns. That’s when Bing drops the big reveal that he is a retired hitman for the mafia (with a tortured joke about his name). He left the mafia after he failed his last hit but Jeff has brought him some purpose. That’s when it’s revealed that his last hit was Tuttle (a throw back to the TBS era episode). Rather than say he wants to kill him, Bing innocently pleads that he wants to give everyone wine and Tuttle gets a special bottle.

Jeff, despite being Jeff, realizes that Bing actually does mean to kill Tuttle. In an obvious move if you’ve seen any movie ever, he puts some of the wine in Bing’s tea and then it’s revealed he also took out all of the bullets out of every gun. Bing and Jeff fight and Bing ends up right where Jeff found him (coming a’fulla circle). Jeff declares himself to be a man, runs into the woods where Hayley finds him and they have sex.

In the b-plot, Roger has set up a “bang shed” in the woods and unsurprisingly has a difficult time luring willing participants, not even some racoons. Only Hayley and Jeff eventually. Not much of a plot. “Napoleon Boner-parts” is an amusing enough name which we only learn about at the end of the episode though.

Stray Observations

• Seriously, there was a ton of time wasted here, it felt like it just ping ponged back and forth between the Smith house and the woods.
• “I heard that through my binoculars!”

Final Thoughts: Not a big fan of this one. I think Jeff needed the family to bounce off of for his emotional journey, so having him bounce off a brand new character didn’t work as well. Not only that, none of the attempt at humor worked for me.