Review: Bob’s Burgers – “The Horse Rider-er”

Certainly beats Ghost Rider

Spoilers Below

As we all know, Tina loves horses. She’s never ridden a real horse, though. Only her imaginary horse, Jericho. Tina asks her parents to send her to an expensive horse camp in Montana but they just can’t afford it. However, after some thought, Bob and Linda decide to push off fixing the restaurant’s deep fryer to send Tina to a local horse day camp. Tina is so excited on her first day that she answers every single question the instructor, Diane, asks. Since Tina has shown so much horse knowledge, Diane assigns Tina a more difficult horse, Plops. Unfortunately for Tina, Plops hates her. No matter what Tina does, she can’t get Plops to be nice to her. After Tina gets knocked off Plops during a trail ride, Tina decides that she’s not riding the difficult horse in the show at the end of camp. Instead, she rides Jericho. She may look ridiculous but everyone loves it.

Of course, Tina can’t be the only Belcher kid to go to camp. Feeling bad for her other two babies, Linda set up a restaurant camp. They do crafts, go box canoeing, and camp out. As Linda sets up the big scare for her scary campfire story, she finds out that Gene and Louise are only attending the camp to avoid work. Upset, Linda doesn’t do anything for the kids the next day. When the kids start making a mess in the restaurant, Bob banishes them to the apartment. That is when they realize that they actually liked restaurant camp. Gene and Louise return to the restaurant to apologize to their parents and tell them how much they enjoyed camp. Linda casts Bob as Old Man Belcher, the old man bent on closing the camp, leaving them to perform a song to change his mind. The trio performs a (rather strange) camp song, changing the heart of Old Man Belcher, who allows them to open the camp once more.

I loved this episode. Tina got to ride a horse, even if it wasn’t everything she imagined. Gene and Louise got to have fun without knowing they had fun. Linda got to spoil her babies. The only down side was that Bob didn’t get to fix his fryer, which upset Teddy. But, as Bob and Linda know, sometimes you have to make sacrifices to make your kids happy. This episode embodies everything I love about the Belcher family.