So Help Me Todd Season 1 Episode 12 Review: Psilo-Sibling

So Help Me Todd Season 1 Episode 12 “Psilo-Sibling,” comes within hours of CBS announcing the show’s renewal. Hooray! Let’s celebrate in the traditional way: with an episode involving everything from sibling rivalry to magic mushrooms.

The only time we’ve seen the eldest Wright sibling before, he’s mostly lived up to the “robot” label put on him by Todd. That doesn’t change much as he enters his mother’s office just ahead of the governor of Oregon. (It will change later, but we’ll get to that.)

We might not expect such an esteemed office to hand out the strangest case we’ve seen to date, but the tone is already set  in the first scene when a woman- the governor’s sister- is followed by an entity in the sky and finds a dead squirrel on her kitchen table.

The stakes are very serious, both because of who is involved and because of a complicated history that reflects the family dynamics of our main characters. The legal threats aren’t as emotionally impactful as the thought that these two sisters might never reconcile.

Even so, this is an hour that thrives in its absurdity, whether that’s an extremely awkward dinner with the governor herself, Todd and Margaret using football tactics to take down “aliens” (a drone), or the constant squabbling between Todd and Lawrence.

Yet the uncontested highlight follows a visit to a local festival where a too-nice couple promotes their farm fresh mushrooms to our heroes. We’re not talking about portobellos here, and that becomes exceptionally clear when Lawrence drinks a tea made from them.

I’m not sure whether to give more credit to Matthew Wilkas for turning a usually stoic man into a master of caricature or to the writers for coming up with dialogue so insane, they may or may not have dabbled in recently legalized substances to create it.

It’s hilarious either way, and the confession Lawrence makes about wanting Todd to like him may even help bridge a gap between these two. Then again, he does insult him more first, so there’s probably still a long way to go.

One thing that will help? Lawrence saving both his mother and brother’s lives once things really hit the fan. Did we know that he was in the military? Or that Lyle was in the air force? They both show up as total badasses by the climax of the hour, when the market couple turns out predictably villainous

Both families wind up okay, with the Wrights in about the best place we’ve seen them yet. I say “about” because the scene we see of them enjoying an evening together also gives a momentary glimpse of what Allison continues to hide following her recent misadventures.

As for what comes next, we probably won’t hear much about Lawrence until he returns again, and I’m not yet ready to guess how things will play out for Allison. We do at least know that Margaret is ready to take her shot with Gus, and the closing moments leave us rooting for them.

But there’s one more very troubling prospect. There’s been a lot of largely humorous talk about past legal issues and possible future arrests at the end of the past two episodes. Jokey or not, this is starting to feel a lot like foreshadowing. If it is, I’m hesitant to expect much comedy from whatever it could mean.

 

What did you think of this episode of So Help Me Todd? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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So Help Me Todd airs Thursdays at 9/8c on CBS.

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