Dan Vs The Dentist - Just the first five and a half minutes
We open with Dan screaming with someone on the phone telling them that they're stupid and should shut up. It's his grandmother. Despite being unnecessarily cruel, this actually sets up a discussion point for a later episode. We'll get to it in time.
Chris walks into Dan's apartment and delivers some exposition about Elise's plotline for this episode. She's building a supercomputer. It's also her birthday tomorrow, and Dan owes Chris twenty bucks, so he wants the money now to buy her a present.
Dan tells Chris to talk to his accountant, a teddy bear. It's one of those stupid toys that they give you at the dentist. And naturally, that's where Dan got it. Chris estimates its value to be about twenty dollars, so he decides to take it. Dan refuses and fights him over it.
If this bear is so damn precious to Dan, then why have we never seen him with it before and will never see him with it again?*
In the fight, Dan breaks his tooth. Dan realizes that the dentist gave him that bear knowing decades later that Dan would break his tooth on it and have to come back. Naturally, Dan is in horrible pain, but going to the dentist would play into his hands.
So Dan decides to have Chris put the tooth back in Dan's mouth via hot glue gun.
Now, there are a few things that I am thinking now, including "Why?", "Isn't there a better option?", and "What the fuck?". Seriously, is this really the first thing you think of, Dan? Just off the top of my head, here's some much better options for you if you don't want to go to the dentist.
- Go to a DIFFERENT dentist.
- Do research about how this type of thing is done before trying it yourself with this stupid hot glue gun strategy.
- Get Elise to do it rather than Chris, as she's the smarter of the two - and you know it.
- Live without the tooth. Lots of people do this, and yes, it is a much smarter idea than this stupid glue thing.
- Go to a doctor. Although a dentist would be ideal, if you're really so against it, a regular doctor may be able to at least do a little bit.
Naturally, Dan does none of these things. They just do the hot glue gun thing.
- Chris: It says "Not for use on human tissue."Dan: That's just lawyer talk. They have to say that so that nobody does anything stupid with it.
No shit, Sherlock.
Now why in the holy mother of god are you seriously going through with this?
Now, it's perfectly in-character for Dan to do exactly that. And you know what? I'll accept that. He is a complete emotionally angry idiot, and that's what makes his character interesting - he comes up with all these crazy schemes, and it is funny to the viewers because of how illogical and irrational they are.
My problem here is that CHRIS goes along with it. He's smarter than that, but this makes him out to be just as much of an imbecile as Dan is. Which is out-of-character for him.
Dan swallows the tooth before they can even glue it back on. Which is weird, since in the previous shot it was IN HIS HAND.
Am I missing something here? Was there a joke about how Dan somehow just chose to swallow it or something? If there was, then it was not made clear. Which means that the joke failed. If there wasn't, then that means that the animators just flat-out REFUSED to work with the writers. Is it really so much to ask that these two elements play nicely together? Why even bother to show the animation then? You could put Looney Tunes animation over the writing and it would make just as much sense.
Chris calls the Only Sane Man, Elise. She, being realistic, recommends the incredibly obvious solution: go see a dentist. Thank you, Elise, for being the voice of reason. But remember this point, I'll have a complaint about it later.
Chris continues to hold his out-of-character Idiot Ball, and asks if he could just glue a fake tooth in. Elise, being rational, tells him that this is the most ungodly stupid plan ever.
- Elise: What is this, the dark ages? What are you gonna do next, bleed him with leeches?Chris: Would leeches help?Elise: CHRIS!Chris: No leeches?Elise: NO LEECHES!
REALLY!?
How long is Chris going to hold that damn Idiot Ball? Please give it back to Dan as soon as you can.
We also get some more character from Elise and Chris. Judging by their movie tastes, they appear to be a Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy couple. As if they didn't do enough to get me to be attracted to Elise.
Anyways, Dan's next brilliant ploy is to take a white lego (1x1) and glue it in his mouth where the tooth should be, even though the way legos work would by definition be easy to take apart, thus you risk having it fall out every time ANYTHING touches the "tooth" from any direction other than below. This is just stupid. On top of that, Plot Hole! If they had just regular, over-the-counter, school student glue, then WHY WOULD THEY USE A HOT GLUE GUN!?
I'm sorry, but I still can't get over that. Using a hot glue gun on your face is monumentally stupid - especially when you have another option sitting right there. While Dan does tend to jump to extremes fairly quickly, Chris should have pointed this out to him. I mean, could Chris possibly do anything more stupid?
Well, the tooth doesn't stay in, so Chris decides to force it. With a sledgehammer. And then he-
STOP.
WTF is this, Dan Vs writers? Are you trying to get me to hate Chris? Because you're doing a good job of that.
Anyways, after that fails, Dan decides to use his last resort option: going to the dentist.
And now for my tirade. Dan never surrenders to his enemy for the episode. Ever. This is incredibly out-of-character. Even if he had exhausted all other options, he would just wait until he gained more options - or he would try to create more options himself. Also, guess what? You've just established Elise's credibility by following through on her suggestion. Remember that complaint I had? Yeah, here it is. Dan is going to the dentist. Which means that he is listening to Elise's advice. Now, the reason he is going to the dentist is simple: the writers need him to be there for the story. You can't just not send him there. So why not move Elise's conversation to this point? It makes much more sense that way. As it stands now, it feels like filler, and is only there to stretch out the time. Think about it. She gave advice which we knew Dan would ignore. Then she left that scene. WHAT'S THE POINT!? The only way to get that conversation to work is if Dan didn't ignore it. So it will have a point if it is here. What makes it more jarring is that now, in hindsight, we see that Dan didn't ignore Elise, so it is easy to nitpick it, as I have done here. And this isn't my liveblog doing that, by the way. No. I actually felt all of these complaints my first time through. It was that obvious.
And now for the one complaint about this scene that I didn't notice my first time through: Chris. Yeah, the guy who has been completely out of character up until now. He is an Extreme Doormat, especially to Elise, to the extent that their relationship borders on being another trope. If you have Chris take Dan to the dentist right after Elise calls, then you can further cement his character and stop him from holding the Idiot Ball for so dang long. Instead, you not only make him out to be an idiot, but you also damage his character by giving him an opportunity NOT to be an Extreme Doormat.
Now, one could argue that Chris is also supposed to be an Extreme Doormat to Dan, and that these Idiot Ball complaints were me not realizing that. No, actually, I realize that just fine. Chris is supposed to do what Dan wants him to do, which is why he acted supposedly idiotically. However, by switching these two scenes, you don't lose that. You simply have it take place sooner. First you have Chris be Dan's doormat, then you have him be Dan's doormat again, and then you have him be Elise's. As opposed to him being Dan's doormat, then straight-up refusing to be Elise's, and then being Dan's doormat again.
Plus, I don't think Chris would go this far with his Extreme Doormat persona to Dan. He is actively trying to hurt Dan. With hot glue and a sledgehammer! All right, time to stop and think. We all have that one friend who we'd do anything for. If that friend asked you to severely injure him/her, would you do it?
Hell no.
And I see Chris as the same way. The difference is the fact that rather than him being this way towards "that one friend", he is like this to everyone. That's what makes his character interesting.
Am I wrong in assuming that his loyalty has a stopping point? No, as a matter of fact, I am not. We've seen him defy Dan already. Remember the episode just before this one? Yeah, Chris told Dan not to kidnap children, and tried to stop him from doing so.
The writers just lack consistency with his character, if he really is supposed to have Undying Loyalty to Dan. Which leads me to believe that he is not supposed to - and thus this entire episode up until this point has been him just holding the Idiot Ball. Which is just poor writing.
And if you want to make the Depending on the Writer argument, then first of all, that's a bad argument, because it doesn't justify his inconsistency at all. The writers should talk to each other about stuff like this. Furthermore, fine. I'll accept that he's a completely different character in this episode than he was in the previous one. In this episode, he has Undying Loyalty to Dan, and will do whatever Dan wishes of him, regardless of the outcome. The problem is that this is inconsistent even within the episode! Remember the beginning when Chris demanded his money and fought Dan over his teddy bear? Yeah, that argument, even stupid to begin with, still falls to pieces right here.
There's just no way to get around the fact that the writing here is dumb.
Oh yeah, and you see that title at the top? Yep. We're still only at the 5:25 mark - and we ALREADY have a ridiculous amount of problems with this episode.
To be fair, I do Accentuate the Negative. It's just easier for me to say that something is bad than that something is good. If a concept works well, then it is able to speak for itself, and I don't need to say anything about it. It's only when something is bad when I feel the need to criticize, and as a result, it's much easier to talk about the negative. Furthermore, if something is good, all I can say is "This is good," but if something is bad, I will say "This is bad because _________." So the negative will naturally take up more space.
So what did I like about these first five minutes? Well, there are two things. The first is, obviously, Elise. She is honestly the closest thing that this show has to a Big Good, and it shows. She thinks about things the way that a normal human being would. She is intelligent. She is relatable. She is unbelievably attractive. And every nanosecond that she's on screen just crackles with awesome. It also helps that she takes the focus away from Those Two Idiots, who are perpetually generating the bad writing.
The other thing is the opening with Chris wanting money from Dan, and Dan refusing to give it to him. It had hilarious jokes revolving around Dan and his two teddy bears. The writers did a good job with that.
I feel that Dan's tooth was the source of the good writing, because as soon as it fell out, the whole thing fell apart.
I feel that this page has gone on long enough. Yeah, the first five minutes of the episode were so bad that they get a page just to themselves. Join me on the next page where I'll dissect the rest of this episode.*
