"The Choices" review

The absolute, best episode of “The Amazing World of Gumball” is “The Choices”.  This episode is something special.

	This episode starts with Nicole narrating saying that she wishes that her family could be normal and civilized.  Shortly after she says this we see the kids shouting “We want food!” many times while Nicole is slaving away in the kitchen with Richard being of no help.  Eventually Nicole’s pot catches on fire, and the kids and Richard fail to put it out.  Right after Nicole extinguishes the fire, Darwin rushes in with whipped cream to extinguish the flame with, accidentally covering Nicole with it.  After this Nicole, asks herself, “Where did I go wrong?” and concludes that it was the day that she met Richard.

	 This episode is focused on deconstructing a cliché.  In many family sitcoms, the family is always in complete chaos with the mom and dad constantly, angrily fighting and arguing.  These shows depict the mom and dad as constantly angry with each other and miserable.  They leave the audience wondering the question “Why on Earth did they get married if they hate each other so much?”.  This show does not have that problem because, despite the fact that the family members can be quite different and they can argue, they still love and care for each other and are all in deep agreement.  Therefore, while the “Why did they get married?” question isn’t a problem for this show, it is still a curiosity.  The intro to this episode is focused setting up the cliché that the episode will then deconstruct.  The intro paints the scene that many family sitcoms always portray, and the episode uses that as a launching point for the story that it tells.  When deconstructing a cliché a vital step is establishing that cliché.  Establishing a cliché however, is like walking a tight rope however.  You want to establish it for long enough in order to fully and accurately portray what you are trying to set up, but not so long that it damages the quality of the work.  This intro achieves the perfect balance, managing to establish the cliché in just the right amount of time while also having good humor.

	After the intro, the episode enters a flash back and the audience sees Nicole’s parents for the first time.  This episode does a fantastic job at establishing the personalities of Nicole’s parents.  Very quickly the episode shows that the mom, Mary, is controlling and demanding, while the dad, Daniel, has anger management issues.  The writing allows the episode to showcase everything the audience needs to know about Nicole’s parents in one scene, without being too bloated with information or exposition.  Later in the episode, the audience is shown that Nicole’s parents did not even go to her and Richard’s wedding, and the audience, with the information the episode already gave about Nicole’s parents, is able to infer that the reason they did not go to the wedding was because they were upset that Nicole was marrying a lazy slob like Richard instead of a doctor like Mary intended.  The writing of Nicole’s parents gets another point for being a logical backstory.  In the show, the audience sees Nicole lose her temper from time to time and occasionally be over demanding and/or controlling.  Nicole however, has these problems in a much less intense and much less negative way than her parents.  The part of the backstory showing Nicole’s parents is great because it does an incredible job at portraying the personalities of her parents, while also being a fitting backstory for Nicole.

	On the way to Nicole’s karate tournament, Daniel gets angry about the traffic and slams his arms on the steering wheel, causing the car to break down.  Nicole leaves her parents’ car and runs to the karate tournament she was supposed to compete in.  On the way the episode shows the several choices Nicole made that ended up leading her to meeting Richard.  Nicole then contemplates where she would be if she made other choices in her life that day.  When Nicole deliberates on her different possible choices she sees that all of them end badly.  After her consideration she believes that she had no choice other than meeting Richard because everything else had such an unfortunate ending.

	The audience then gets to see Nicole and Richard meet.  They talk for a short while and then the episode transitions into a montage that concludes the episode.  In this montage, Richard and Nicole grow up, and their relationship develops over the course of their life, while a gorgeous piano piece plays the whole time.  The episode shows Nicole and Richard’s love blossom over time.  It shows Richard and Nicole living together in their young adult years.  The episode then shows Nicole getting pregnant and her and Richard getting married right after.  Afterwards, Richard and Nicole move into the house that is usually seen throughout the show, and, lastly, the audience is treated to Nicole and Richard starting a family.  After the montage ends and as the piano music comes to a close, Nicole says the line “You know what, I wouldn’t change a thing”.  The episode then transitions back to normal time, and, instead of being mad or sad, Nicole laughs and starts a food fight with her kids.  The episode then ends as it zooms out from the house and the Wattersons can be heard laughing.

	This ending in spectacular.  It is reminiscent of the first 10 minutes of “Up”, but the writers did not simply plagiarize it.  Instead they took inspiration from it and used that inspiration to make a montage that tells a very different story that has a very different tone and feel from the sequence from “Up”, but is still beautiful.  This ending, while it is a phenomenal sequence, also works wonders in the greater narrative of the episode.  Earlier in the episode Nicole contemplated the different choices she could have made the day of the karate tournament and concluded that she had no other choice than to be with Richard.  If this was written poorly it easily could have come off as Nicole being destined to be miserable no matter what she does.  If the episode came of that way it would be terrible, but it does not.  The ending of the episode is not Nicole realizing that she would be miserable no matter what, and therefore, she should just deal with what she has.  Instead, it is Nicole remembering her family and all the good in her life and realizing that despite the fact that her life can be chaotic and stressful she is more than happy to deal with all the chaos and stress because of all the happy memories and the happy life she has created with the husband and kids she loves.

	This episode is truly special.  It does a wonderful job at deconstructing a cliché and uses that deconstruction to give interesting backstory to Nicole and to tell an emotionally powerful, truly amazing story, while still not sacrificing the comedy and managing to be really funny in the process.  This episode is an absolute 10/10 master piece.  This is a near perfect episode that truly puts the “Amazing” into “The Amazing World of Gumball”.