Review: Mike Tyson Mysteries “Clam Bam Thank You Ma’am; You Can’t Go Home Again”

 

 

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The gang travels to Marblehead, Massachusetts for a very New England mystery. Nat, the co-owner of Nat and Pat’s Clam Shack is worried about his business. Nobody comes to the shack anymore, and they’re all out of clams. Why? Because Nat’s little brother Pat hasn’t dug for clams in quite some time. You see, Pat is a drunk and spends most of his time next door at Barbara’s bar.

Barbara informs the team that Pat has been depressed, despondent, and drunk ever since their little brother, Matt, died many years ago, when they were all children. Pat, the big dumb idiot, buried him neck deep in the sand, and the tide took him away before either brother noticed. Pat—because he’s super guilty—has blamed himself ever since.

The mystery team, who are surprisingly effective that afternoon, convince the brothers to talk. Pat unburdens himself, while Nat reveals that he feels the most responsible. Ever since their parents died, Nat has been their guardian and believes he should’ve done a better job looking after them. The brothers make up; however, since they’re overly melodramatic New Englanders, they walk into the water to be with their brother, thus killing themselves.

In the end, Barbara reveals herself to be a mermaid who lives underwater with her husband Matt who she magically saved from drowning all those years ago. Meanwhile, back on the surface, the mystery team argues semantics, never knowing about the existence of mermaids or the untimely deaths of Nat and Pat.

In the final episode, Mike is feeling depressed and alone and decides to visit a psychiatrist. He gets his lines crossed and visits an orthodontist by mistake. Fortunately, talking to any sort of professional makes him feel better. While he’s there, he also gets braces that are studded with chrome and are therefore ridiculously shiny.

The new and improved team heads to the mall where a woman is having issues getting away from a bad hair stylist. Pigeon lies and tells her the bad stylist is dying, lonely, and isolated from his family, so the woman agrees to go back to him even though he sucks at styling and cutting hair.

The gang then takes an elevator which surprisingly brings them all to heaven. Gabrielle, a hot, Australian angel, greets Marquess and informs him that his penance is over and he’s finally becoming an angel. After a tearful goodbye with Yung, and an awkward goodbye with both Michael and Pigeon, Marquess quits the mystery team to live life eternal with a bunch of sexy, shirtless angels.

Unfortunately, Mike has to poop, and returns to heaven looking for a bathroom. While he’s there, God inadvertently sees his own reflection in Mike’s shiny braces which causes the Supreme Being to explode. With God officially dead, Marquess cannot become an angel. With nowhere else to go, he reluctantly rejoins the mystery team—forever.

 

Our Take

Welcome to the finale. After many months, season four of Mike Tyson Mysteries has finally come to a close. I’m not here to drag the entire series—in fact, if you look at my past reviews, they’re generally positive—but I want to point something out about this twenty-episode run (plus X-mas special).

One of the underlined themes of many of this season’s adventures was “running out of steam.” Throughout the season, there were numerous examples of the team getting tired of their normal routine, wishing for something fresh and new. As the season progressed, the characters and even the clients slowly became shells of their original selves.

“Clam Bam Thank You Ma’am” is a great example of their diminishing clientele. Nat and Pat, with their Boston accents and thirst for the dramatic, were similar to Marquess’ Scottish relatives who appeared in the first half of the season. Both were “big” characters with “super-exaggerated” accents, but the New Englanders went to their deaths with considerably less pizzazz than their European counterparts.

To the contrary, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” was an example of the mystery team losing steam. For years, and particularly in this season, Deezy has bent over backward to do right by the mystery team. However, during his brief appearance in the finale, he simply admitted falling for a prostitute sting and didn’t even try to insert himself in the actual mystery. And Mike, usually the bearer of the randomly dramatic and the dramatically random, went so far as to self-diagnose himself as depressed. Throughout the episode, our poor, perturbed pugilist protagonist seemed to be going through the motions in a cloud of redundancy.

Should this make fans of the show worry? Absolutely not. Remember, MTM is one of the most meta programs of this generation. Mike and the creators obviously have a lot of thoughts on life, the universe, and everything, all of which they’ve included in the show at one time or another. And now that their creation has been on the air for more than five years, it’s not surprising to see them exploring the redundancy of an idea. With that being said, if this is as far as they believe the idea can survive, this may be the end of Mike Tyson Mysteries. On the other hand, just like in life, this watershed moment could also lead to a fruitful second act.