Santa Clarita Diet: Episode 17

17. A Change of Heart

Sheila is stress eating herself because of challenges at work and one of her fingers comes off. Eric drops by for a visit to propose a plan to Joel, that of pretending to be a father-and-son distributor of seafood so they could get to the bottom of the Japopo clam issue. He also lets slip about Abby’s school canteen tray incident, which makes Joel and Sheila think that they are failing as parents. They force Abby to go to the boy’s house to apologize. It turns out that his parents are Chris and Christa, who now blackmail them with Abby’s expulsion unless they give up the listing. The Hammonds head over to Principal Novak’s house, who panics upon seeing them. He decides to expel Abby after her confession and slams the door on Sheila’s finger, severing it. She feigns pain and an impending lawsuit and gets to settle with a suspension for Abby instead. She then heads over to the client meeting but is ambushed by her boss. Squeezing a stress ball, she blacks out and wakes up in their garage still in her car with a bloodied heart on her hand.

Chris and Christa are super annoying, but I love their chemistry with Joel and Sheila, not to mention how her lines peppered with sexual fetish references are hilarious as fuck all the time. I wish they get to appear more this season. I just love the banter and the never-moving-on-from-high-school angle. The episodes seem to follow a template but the way the dialogues are written is coherent enough to earn the writers some well-deserved kudos. You just know that it’s a well-written show because despite the evident pattern, the jokes and the punchlines still come across as funny. Or maybe the characters are just relatable in their own little ways? Eric is such the clueless dork. Abby reminds me of a young Emma Stone with a lot of teenage angst. And then of course Joel seems like the helpless father figure who manages to get his shit together in the nick of time. And Sheila is Sheila, who has to battle her own demons. Plot update: We now have a lead as to where the clams came from. Hopefully, we get an answer before the season finale.

"You two came over here and told us something we never would have known and now we are going to strap it on and fuck you with it." –Christa

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