‘Avenue 5’ Recap: ‘He’s Only There to Keep His Skeleton from Falling Over’

Written by John Edward Betancourt

THIS IS THE EMERGENCY SPOILER ALERT SYSTEM. YOU ARE ADVISED TO READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.

When it comes to stories that feature great chaos and disaster and overall incompetence, from the people who should be saving others from such problems, they often tend to feature an important turning point. A moment where someone in charge finally realizes that the current path is no longer sustainable, and someone needs to step up to the plate and make things right. Because audiences and readers are all about a happy ending, one that sees order to chaos and one that shows us that perhaps humans aren’t always a disaster, and for a time it seemed as though Avenue 5 was going to take us down that particular storytelling path.
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After all, the prior episode saw Captain Clark doing everything we just discussed. He started to step up as a leader aboard the ship, he found a way to make a problem passenger an ally and even figured out how to make the ship function like a normal vessel despite the shortcomings of his bridge crew. And it just so happens that the feel-good nature of those elements didn’t end with Episode Four’s cliffhanger. Because ‘He’s Only There to Keep His Skeleton from Falling Over’ saw Captain Clark and Billie, do the impossible and save the day. Because their combined efforts kept the poo shield mostly intact and that kind of heroism really made it seem as though hope was going to spread through the ship and that better days were ahead.

But let’s be honest, this just isn’t that kind of show. Because any story where corpses orbit a ship amidst a lovely ring of human fecal matter, is just itching to find a way to go dark and it most certainly found a way to make that happen in both epic and subtle fashion. The subtle side, well that came from the fact that not a single person bothered to acknowledge Billie’s help in saving the ship outside of Clark. Instead people gravitated toward Spike Martin as a hero and while that may not be the most chaotic and cruelest thing to ever happen, it’s just a jerk thing for people to do and the jerkiness present in this tale didn’t end with how Billie was treated. Because everyone suddenly believed that Frank’s pressing of the do-nothing button caused their latest problems and they were giving him grief, and really, all of this was designed to build us up to something big.

Because the problem with people acting like asshats, is that eventually that kind of sour nature spreads, to the point where everyone just suddenly feels the need to be an assbag and the culmination of these sour vibes came to fruition during the ‘Halfway Home Party’. Because Jordan Hatwel, the ship’s comic, couldn’t lighten the mood since he was being micromanaged live by Iris and Matt, and a disastrous set and a drunken Judd, helped to bring an already rowdy and surly crowd to a boil. And they quickly turned on Frank and with more egging on from Judd, they were ready to toss him out of an airlock and had it not been for Captain Clark’s quick intervention they likely would have killed a doofy and innocent man and this was just, a heck of way to end this episode.

Simply because, it goes to show just how precarious things are aboard the ship right now, and that one bad day could turn everything into disaster and while that seems a little too dark and too real for a series grounded in comedy, that’s simply not the case. Because sometimes comedy dives into the realm of commentary as well, and everything it had to say about mob mentality and how we sometimes let the dumb overtake us was spot on and painfully relevant here. And the fact that the series pulled this off in hilarious fashion, because the laughs worked here and they came forth in rapid fire fashion, speaks to the genius of this particular tale. But all cerebral stuff aside, this is an important episode for certain since it really does give us a solid idea of how precarious the situation in space truly is right now and it should be interesting to see what happens next since clearly, chaos is the name of the game when it comes to everyday life aboard the Avenue 5. Until next time.

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