Why does Maw Maw know all the skills she does, notably mechanical skills? Given her age, she'd likely have been Rosie The Riveter and worked in a factory during World War II building military machines.
In an episode from season one ("Snip Snip"), Burt tells Jimmy that the day Jimmy was born was the best day of his life, despite the pregnancy being unplanned. A later episode reveals that Burt actually invokedThe Baby Trap on Virginia, so it would make sense that he wasn't too unhappy about it.
He even boasted about getting her pregnant to his parents, bringing home the pregnancy test like someone might bring home a report card.
In the pilot, Jimmy accuses Virginia of being at fault for his fruit allergy due to her smoking, which she looks rather annoyed by and kicks him out of the car. Some episodes later, it turns out she lied about his allergy, to keep him from eating her fruits as a child. She wasn't annoyed at his allegation, she was annoyed her lie came back to bite her in the butt.
Why does Sabrina get along so well with the Chances? It's shown later that she's just as weird and fun as they are, and it's Taken Up To Eleven after she stops taking the mood stabilizers that Wyatt's dad put her on.
Before she's even old enough to talk, Hope has watched her mother die, twice. And she was a serial killer. And despite being a serial killer, she still loved her daughter. It may be quite a depressing thought once Hope is old enough to put the pieces together there.
A blend of Brilliance and Horror. In the season two finale, Jimmy decides to go live in Tibet with Lucy, who now has custody of Hope. Virginia is noticeably upset as he gets ready to leave, which is understandable since Jimmy has never even lived out of the house, let alone in another country. But then you realize another piece to it — her son is leaving to another country with "the boyfriend killer". Who's to say this isn't the last time Virginia will see her son alive? (It isn't, but at the time she had no way of knowing.)
As much as Jimmy's Hilariously Abusive Childhood is played for laughs, it can actually seem a bit chilling if you were in a dysfunctional family. Burt and Virginia had a house with little to no child-proofing or basic safety, and they are almost belligerent when Jimmy points out some of the terrible things they did to him like using his identity for a credit card, Virginia's hoarding and smoking problems, leaving him all alone in the unsafe house with a negligent babysitter (Maw Maw, before her Alzheimer's kicked in) while not having AN INSURANCE, and let's not even touch how there is almost no regard about personal boundaries between him and others (like constantly telling Jimmy to destroy Sabrina and Wyatt's relationship for his own needs). It's like they have no concept of how to take care of a child and seem proud of it. How did they escape any type of child services notice? Fortunately, Jimmy has made up his mind to do better for Hope than his parents did for him.
They did get reported to the department of family services, about Jimmy crowd-surfing when he was 9, but it took them 15 years to follow up on the complaint, which itself is fridge horror. How many legitimate, potentially very dangerous and abusive situations went unchecked for over a decade before the state followed up?
