Blood, buckets of it and enough intrigue and deviousness to rival the royal courts of old, feature on this episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season 10. As should be apparent to anyone with the smallest grasp on contemporary popular culture it is a parody of the HBO show Game of Thrones. When the gang has no knowledge of a particular area, they rely on TV and movies to fill in those gaps. That’s why you get Dee (Kaitlin Olson) putting on a, sort-of, British accent when she wants to sound “arch”, and that’s why you get Mac (Rob McElhenney) plainly saying that he’s going to backstab them to the person he’s going to backstab.
They lack subtlety because the shows they watch lack it too. Game of Thrones has been the subject of controversy lately with the rape of a character; to me it screams of lazy writing. All too often a female character is sexually assaulted as backstory, to increase agency, and it gets tiresome. I might be reading way too much into it though. The issue, briefly raised in the previous episode, of whether Frank (Danny DeVito) is Charlie’s (Charlie Day, is tackled with as much vigour, and blood, as Frank seems to be drained of. For such a short man he seems to have a lot of it, bursting at the seams with it in fact (‘How Mac Got Fat’). It doesn’t work like it does on TV however, as the doctor tells them. All he could tell from the bucket of blood is that someone is in desperate need of blood.
The highlight of the episode comes in the form of Dennis (Glenn Howerton) and the overly complicated, indeed Machiavellian, scheme that he has left to brew for years. The fact that he assumes the others would have done what he did, and to be only met with strange looks by them bordered on genius. I just wonder what was in that hole in the beginning? Season 10 of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is now available on Netflix.
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