Review: Blark and Son “Meet the Staceys”

The one that got away.

Overview (spoilers below)

The third installment of the flagship season of Blark and Son opens in a predictable manner; Son is playing a crucial campaign in his room, and Blark unceremoniously bursts in. This time, Blark has worked himself into a frenzy over new neighbors, and lets Son know he’s about to assert his neighborhood dominance.
Things don’t go quite as expected when Blark opens the door to find what he calls a ‘beautiful human face.’ Stacey B. Swanson, the new neighbor, had stopped by to pitch his self-help book. Blark, stricken with an adoration of Stacey’s good looks, instead invites him to dinner.

It goes about as well as one might predict, as Stacey brings his table-chewing son, Junior (Justin Roiland), and Blark is desperate to impress him with the bond he has with Son. Son uses this opportunity to shame his father for his constant intrusions. Stacey, a psychologist, analyzes their relationship in between noises from his own feral child and concludes that Son, while justified, is being rude.

Blark’s impulse to defend his son cuts easily through his infatuation with Stacey, and he threatens Stacey and ends the dinner. The episode closes with Son apologizing for his behavior, and Blark softly caressing a picture of Stacey and ruminating on what might have been.

Our Take

This episode turned out nothing as the viewer expects. As we listen to Blark’s signature hyperbolic rant about new neighbors moving in, we anticipate an adventure filled with equally outrageous attempts to terrorize the new neighbor. The episode also exposes another possible side to Blark, which raises the question of his feelings of love or loneliness and leaves a little mystery when it comes to whether Blark was infatuated with Stacey romantically. The speech he delivers to Son would indicate that Blark merely admires Stacey as a great man, who’s handsome looks make him of a superior class that he desperately wants Son and himself to rise to.

However, when Blark is engaging with Stacey, and in the closing scene, he acts more like a man who has developed a high school style crush, and is let down in the end. What does it mean? Is Blark lonely, could we see him looking for love in the future? Justin Roiland’s guest appearance, while well received by fans in the comments on Go90, seemed like a forced effort. Other than a vehicle to drive the dinner conversation to fatherhood, Stacey Junior only sniffs, drools, and grunts. Mind you, these are fantastic drools and grunts coming from a talent like Roiland, but the creators mostly wasted the opportunity to have him as a guest.

The series is keeping viewers interested, and coming up with new and exciting ways to explore Blark and Son’s dynamic and this episode was a fantastic example of building on the previous story in a sit-com style where it contains the main plot within the 7-minute episode, and we can’t wait to see what they’re up to next.