Arrested to Arrested Development: 110 - Pier Pressure
"And that's why you always leave a note."
Thanks to the lessons of J. Walter Weatherman, this is indefinitely one of the best episodes of the first season, thus far. The way everything connects, as effective as it usually is, is utterly genius here.
It would take too much to break down the details of every event so here's an equation...
- George Michael gets a "bad grade" (an A-) =
- Michael tells him to study more =
- George Michael seeming sleepy, with red eyes
+
- Lucille 2 sick with nausea =
- Buster seeking out medicinal marijuana to cure the aches =
- Buster going to George Michael at "pot central" AKA the banana stand to find weed =
- George Michael going to Uncle Gob to find weed =
- Gob going to Michael about it
=
- Michael suspicious of George Michael being on drugs.
The moral of the episode is to teach or not to teach your children a lesson, founded by George Michael Sr. and his one-armed buddy J. Walter Weatherman.
There are multiple, hilarious flashback cutaways in the episode featuring papa Bluth using J. Walter to pretend to lose his arm as karma for whatever he told his kids to or not to do, giving them the ultimate scare.
Yes, there's a lot more to the episode but those are the essential plot points which ultimately build up to a drug deal and final showdown on the docks where Gob stays on the family yacht and uses phony police officers (male strippers were the only available ones) to scare George Michael out of drugs, revealing Buster's ultimate intentions to use the drugs, leading to real police officers coming to the docks for a drug bust, which leads to an absurd shootout which leads to an arm being shot off, which results in papa Bluth once again pulling the strings behind bars in an attempt to teach his kids the ultimate lesson...
not to teach lessons to your kids.