“Movie Truck”
July 24th, 2012
The concluding scene in “Movie Truck” is offered without any context, a coda in which Sasha performs a dance routine to a They Might Be Giants rendition of “Istanbul.” While the episode has a number of key revelations for Sasha as a character, none of them particular tie into that song, or that performance, and even the co-writer of the episode (Beth Schacter) admitted on Twitter that it was, well, “weird” (in addition to other adjectives).
However, it was a bit of weirdness earned by an episode that did a lot of things right, perhaps because of the fact that the show was finally allowed to breathe without Fanny there to suck the air out of things. When Kelly Bishop was only listed as a guest star in the early going, it felt like a death knell for the series, making it that much easier to jettison the mother-/daughter-in-law storyline in favor of the young teens closer to ABC Family’s target demographic. And yet while I continue to like Kelly Bishop’s performance, the show’s rhythms felt much stronger when she was off vacationing than when she was largely serving as an obstacle for Michelle to overcome.
Cultural Learnings 