Parts of Rec: "Soda Tax"

Adam Scott
Welcome to Parts of Rec, a new column that will attempt to take the weekly brilliance of NBC show Parks and Recreation and cut it into the bare essentials. After all, time is precious and sometimes you cannot read pages and pages of reviews. While it will be impossible to bottle all of the highlights, I will do my best to cover the plot, as well as memorable moments and just what makes it great in general. Make sure to look for Parts of Rec every Friday following the episode.
Season 5, Episode 2
"Soda Tax"

Left to right: Aziz Ansari, Rob Lowe, and Chris Pratt
"Well, it's roughly the size of a 2-year-old child, if the child were liquified"

-Dee Dee (Courtney Cook)

In this week's episode, we see Leslie (Amy Poehler) attempt to take down the soda corporation with a new soda tax. This is because their drinks are ridiculously over sized, which the spokesperson Dee Dee (Courtney Cook) considers to be more bang for the consumer's buck. Meanwhile, Ben (Adam Scott) is working with a new group of interns with April (Aubrey Plaza) that are all somehow in direct line of power from their parents. Also, Andy (Chris Pratt) wants to join the police, so he is trying to get in shape with the help from Tom (Aziz Ansari) and Chris (Rob Lowe). Things go awry as a city meant goes haywire for Leslie and the Soda Tax is threatening to take away jobs. Ben decides to befriend the interns and try to get in good with them, even though they think that April is his daughter. Chris suffers some physical pain while Andy is exercising and is rushed to the hospital. It ends with Leslie voting for the Soda Tax, Ben going back to being the hard boss and April being herself, and Chris learning to take it easy. A lot it achieved and it is all in a quest to better everyone's health.

Rating 4 out of 5

Aubrey Plaza
MVP: April (Aubrey Plaza)
While we have become used to April being the smart mouth who always talks back, it always seems to have been a position with no power. Here, the very fact that she is the elder intern with experience makes her more confident and her comments equally infectious. Her sarcasm shines bright in this episode and her quest to trick everyone into thinking that Ben is her father is equally as nutty. It is nice to see her strutting her stuff here and while Ben is a close second, she wins for simply putting Ben in an awkward position through the whole episode, including drawing really rude cartoons of him.

Left to right: Rashida Jones and Amy Poehler
Best scene: In the conversation with Dee Dee, it is almost simultaneously a great satire on fast food corporations desire to be bigger for cheaper and an insult to them. The whole fact that the punchline is that a Child's drink is 512 ounces makes no sense, even as Leslie places the cup on her head, which manages to fit snugly. The whole conversation is absurd and one of the moments on the show when the comedy transcends into great social commentary. It also helps that Leslie is a do gooder that wants her way no matter what, even when the corporations want to take her down. There are so many good lines here that it is impossible to state them all here. It also foreshadowing on what Leslie has in store for a whole season as city councilwoman. 


Check out more of my work at http://nerdseyeviewpodcast.blogspot.com/ where I post every Wednesday and have a podcast called Nerd's Eye View.

Comments

  1. This is my favorite show right now, and when Community comes back, it will be my co-favorite show. It is just genius. My favorite moment of the night was the scene where the “child-size” soda cup is explained That killed me, I must have rewound that a hundred times. I have a Facebook group set up with some of my friends and coworkers from DISH and we were chatting during the show. For our favorite moment as a group, it was between that one with the cup sizes, and the one where April threatens to blind Ellis with a melon-baller, and then telling him his uncle would have to by him a special dog to drag around his eyeless face. I love chatting about the show with them, but I tend to miss a few things, so I always re-watch the episode by myself the next day. I use Auto Hop on my Hopper to watch it without commercials so I can get a fuller, more immersive viewing experience. It really seems like that’s how the show is meant to be seen, with no breaks to ruin the flow of the show.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment