955: Value in the Process

[Polehaus53]

Morrie and Suzu feel like their talents are being wasted at school when Whit wants Morrie to join a low-level computer class, and Suzu to join the newspaper as a reporter.

Anyone have any thoughts on this latest Rydell episode?

I'll need to listen to this episode again before making any final judgements. But it is safe to say that with the the issues in the last Morrie episode, "The Team", along all the controversy surrounding the Rydell Saga as a whole, my investment in the Rydell arc has dropped quite a bit.

I liked that we got to see Morrie and Suzu with Whit and them interacting together as a family. This is something that I have been interested in hearing since "The Rydell Revelations", so I'm glad that we got that here.

Whit wanting Morrie and Suzu to have healthy friendships was good, I think. It was nice to see that Morrie realized his mistake with the way he treated Trey.
I didn't find any extremely serious major issues in this episode like in "The Team", but like I said, I need to hear this episode again.

Anyone else have any thoughts?

[chadagonye]

I'm with you on the Rydell arc -- I was all in until things got weird and the whole premise seemed to shift.

I thought this episode was okay, although I found Whit's decisions a bit strange/unnerving.

I know that kids/people can't always understand the justification for particular rules before having experience, but I still thought Whit could've explained his reasoning to Morrie a little bit better. It was one of those times where his parenting style veers from authoritative to authoritarian, in my opinion, which, with a kid like Morrie, I suspect might wind up backfiring in the end. But this could have been prevented if he had just explained his decision a little bit more, rather than simply saying mysteriously, "There's value in the process!"

I don't like it when episodes unintentionally make me feel weird about Whit (rather than intentionally revealing him as a flawed human being) so I wasn't crazy about that part. And

it was hard to listen to Trey getting put down so much, but at least that was an effective message!

That said, I liked the Rydell kids interactions with other kids and the necessary lessons they learned.

[Catspaw]

I like chadgonye's review. I think Whit was trying to have the lesson be learned without being so obvious about what the lesson was, but it did come across kind of odd at times. As much as I don't love the characters or their previous storylines, it was nice to see a smidge of progress in their character development.

The first few words were the funniest part of this episode for me - it starts with, "See, sis...." but without any context and with that being the start of the sentence, for a second I thought he said, "CSIS," which is like the Canadian version of the FBI, which could also fit with these characters who have found themselves in significant trouble. I assume that no American writers/actors/fans had this issue.