Bob Actually

Stephanie Beatriz (2014)

"Bob Actually" is the ninth episode of the seventh season of the American animated television series Bob's Burgers and the 116th episode overall. It was written by Steven Davis and Kelvin Yu, and directed by Chris Song. Its guests are Stephanie Beatriz as Chloe Barbash, Daniel Van Kirk as Flips Whitefudge, Gabrielle Sanalitro as Isabella, David Herman as Mr. Frond and Martin, Melissa Bardin Galsky as a receptionist and Ms. Jacobson, Sarah Baker as Ms. Selbo, Brian Huskey as Regular Sized Rudy, Brooke Dillman as Shelly, Jenny Slate as Tammy Larsen, and Bobby Tisdale as Zeke. It originally aired on February 12, 2017 on Fox. In this Primetime Emmy Award-winning Valentine's Day episode the Belchers all have their own adventures about love.

Plot

On Valentine's Day Regular Sized Rudy asks Louise Belcher (Kristen Schaal) at school if she will be at the cafeteria during lunch which she affirms. Rudy then buys a bouquet of love weeds from Zeke whereat Louise is afraid that he could be in love with her. During lunch Rudy requests her to give the bouquet and a card to Chloe Barbash. Louise agrees to do it and she feels relieved at first that Rudy is in love with someone else. But later she starts to get jealous of Chloe. When Rudy shows her the note he got from Chloe, she realizes that Chloe just uses him for his quiz answers. Louise calls out her about it tries to force her to kiss him. Chloe refuses to kiss Rudy so Louise decides to meet him after school. She then tells him that Chloe will not show up because she is not in love with him and she surprises him by kissing him on the mouth. Afterwards she slaps him and threatens him so he will not tell anyone about their kiss.

Her sister Tina Belcher (Dan Mintz) has diarrhea after she won a chili eating contest with her siblings the evening before. Therefore she cannot participate in the "sky kiss" with Jimmy Pesto Jr. (H. Jon Benjamin) where they jump on a trampoline and kiss. According to her motto that nothing can stop love, she finds a pair of stilts. So she can stand on them and kiss Jimmy Jr. while he is jumping on the trampoline. Meanwhile Gene Belcher (Eugene Mirman) meets the Italian substitute kitchen lady Isabella and helps her making dark chocolate for her boyfriend Francesco. He then discovers his love for this kind of chocolate which he did not like before.

Bob Belcher (H. Jon Benjamin) does not have any present for his wife Linda (John Roberts) so he and his regular customer Teddy (Larry Murphy) take a hip hop dance class. Later Bob, Teddy, their dancing teacher Shelly and her son Flips Whitefudge do a hip hop dance in frond of the restaurant as a present for Linda. While Bob and Teddy are at the dance studio, Ms. Selbo comes into the restaurant and tells Linda that she broke up with her boyfriend Martin. Linda thinks that they broke up just now until Ms. Selbo explains that it happened a year ago and she watches her former boyfriend who is in the restaurant across the street. Linda decides to bring Martin so the two could talk but when she comes back with him, they see Ms. Selbo kissing a different man.

Reception

Alasdair Wilkins from The A.V. Club gave the episode an "A" and wrote that the "sequence pays off Tina and Jimmy Jr.’s now basically official romance with one hell of a Valentine’s Day kiss, gives Bob and Linda a sweet moment after the deeply silly hip-hop dance gift, lets a few of the town’s other assorted weirdos get in some of their own canoodling… oh, and that’s right, just goes ahead and makes Louise and Regular-Sized Rudy a real, honest-to-goodness thing, something I’ve been calling for since I started reviewing the show." About Louise and Regular Sized Rudy he added that the "show has teased something between these two—at least in the sense that Louise had never purposefully tried to kill or otherwise harm Rudy, which counts as a serious soft spot by her standards—since their museum-exploring, train-robbing early days. Yet for all my jokes about it, the show has never actually suggested a romance before, which makes it all the more impressive how quickly they commit to the idea once it’s out there. The episode cleverly subverts Louise’s—and at least some of the audience’s—expectations by having Rudy actually carry a torch for someone else, which lets Louise move from weird, bad feelings like attraction and love and into much clearer, easier emotions like jealousy and rage."^[1]

Bob Actually won a Primetime Emmy Award in the category Outstanding Animated Program.^[2] It is the show's second Primetime Emmy Award after the episode Mazel-Tina won in 2014.

References

External links

• Bob Actually on IMDb