The second episode with the clan now living in Los Angeles continues the quickly (think warp-speed) growing relationship between Robbie and Katie. We see Katie enjoying supper with the family, none of whom has any idea what the entree was that Uncle Charley served. One of them guessed meatloaf, which seems impossible, given that Charley later tells Steve it was "pork", not the veal that Katie thought.
After talking with his Dad, Robbie agrees that he shouldn't only be dating Katie, that it's not fair to him or her and decides to tell her at a picnic the next day that they should date other people. We see them conversing but Robbie never gets close to what he wants to say. We switch to the next scene and Robbie says, "How many times do you ask a girl to marry you?"
Wait a second. We viewers have no clue how he went from wanting to not date her exclusively to openly proposing like this? At least for this episode, this is where the plot "jumped the shark."
Next is another conversation with Steve and Robbie, who agree that he needs to call off the wedding-he has no job, nor does she, they're still in college, and neither has much money. But the next thing we know, they've set a date and he bought her a ring. Again, we don't see anything to explain how he does the opposite of what he wants to do.
Steve next tries to do what Robbie should have done, but all he can manage is postponing the wedding for two weeks-it sounds like they'll now get married in about four weeks instead of two.
At least when Mike and Sally married, it was portrayed that they took about a year and a half between meeting and getting married. Here Robbie meets a girl, and not much more than a week later he proposes and the date is suggested to be only about a month away.
Of course, we know they didn't quite rush into it as quickly as it was implied here.
Another big problem with the script, as pointed out by the other reviewer here for this episode, is that Robbie and Katie are about halfway through college yet Charley and Steve talk about how wrong it is for them to date each other exclusively as though the couple are 14-year-olds. Why should a guy about 21 who has dated many other girls, some of them seriously-as shown in earlier episodes-need to continue to keep seeing other girls when he seems to have found the right one? Nothing shown about Katie suggests there is any reason for Robbie not to marry her other than the fact that he has barely gotten to know her.
Plenty of shows through the years have shown a guy getting roped into a marriage proposal through answering questions that only suggest he wants marriage, with the girl, and/or her family jumping the gun into believing it is a proposal. Sometimes the pair are just talking and she asks questions that suggest this and she doesn't realize the talk didn't mean the same thing to him that she was thinking.
But here we are left clueless. I guess the scriptwriter couldn't come up with a way Robbie could suddenly decide to propose-which he truly did-when he wasn't at all wanting to do so. But the way it was written just makes the whole thing about as realistic as an old Popeye cartoon.
Because of this, there wasn't any humor in these portions of the plot, and very few laughs anywhere else.
One side note: When Robbie and Chip shared a bedroom, Mike had just one bed in his room-naturally. Then Robbie got Mike's room when he disappeared from the Douglas family forever and he had the room with one bed.
Suddenly, as we see Robbie's California bedroom, still used only by him, we see two twin beds. Cannot think of a reason why he would have added a bed to his room...not when he never needed it before. Did this college man start having sleepovers with his buddies?
Overall, I cannot justify a score higher than 2.
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