TV Review: “The Gang Beats Boggs: Ladies Reboot” [Spoilers]

Season 10’s “The Gang Beats Boggs” is a magnificent episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia with many highlights: Charlie believing Wade Boggs is dead; Dee believing Boggs’ name is “Boss Hogg”; Frank putting so many sleeping pills in a student’s beer that it causes them a seizure, and Charlie drinking so many beers that his speech becomes impossible to understand without the provided subtitles.

This episode was revisited in the most recent episode of season 13 with a slight twist, this time Dee leads the other main female characters of show: The Waitress, Artemis, Mrs Mac and Mrs Kelly in taking the challenge of beating Wade Boggs’ drinking record on an all-woman flight to LA for a Woman’s March.

Going into the episode I initially had low expectations given the unoriginal plot-point, but as this is Always Sunny, I expected this to be addressed during the episode, but what I didn’t expect was that Artemis would spend the majority of this one addressing why they “had to do what the guys have done” and why they couldn’t do something original, immediately addressing the elephant in the room and putting a rest to my concerns. There are several moments during the episode in which Artemis, Dee and The Waitress funnily refer to the originality of their actions while taking digs at other all-women reboots such as Bridesmaids, Ocean’s 8 and Ghostbusters. Dee’s comment that “I changed three things!” to defend her decision being the highlight of these exchanges.

Not featured as prominently as the above three, but still great in every moment of the episode they appear in are Mrs Mac and Mrs Kelly who are, as expected, doing Mrs Mac and Mrs Kelly things. Immediately Dee has to prevent Mrs Mac from smoking on the airplane, which then leads to it being stated that she’s eating enough nicotine patches to last two weeks. Her questioning why segregation isn’t still in place and why they have to sit towards the back of the plane perfectly conveys her unsurprising ignorant, old-fashioned ideals. There’s also a lot of highlights from Mrs Kelly, including her downing a beer straight away, much to Dee’s surprise, her horror to find out the pilots are both female and later attempts to escape the plane by trying to open the locked doors in midair.

As this is a women’s reboot, it was to be expected that the rest of The Gang would be conspicuous in their absence, but it’s this absence that makes it so hilarious when Dee opens a toilet door to discover Frank hidden – having already spent some time with Mrs Kelly – who notes he’s acting like a spider “catching flies” and that “in a reboot you always need a character from the last one to make a cameo”. As equally amazing as his appearance is the fact he’s wearing a t-shirt that reads “I’m a feminist”. It’s around this same time that Dee receives a laggy phone call from Mac and Charlie who in a few seconds call her a bird and note the fact she’s only drank twenty beers/bottles of pink wine with Mac shouting “she’s only on twenty I knew she couldn’t do it!”.

There’s a lot more that’s good about this episode, including an appearance of The Waiter from Guiginos who remembers Dee, but isn’t remembered by her and because is this is constantly abusively called a “soy boy beta cuck”, Mrs Mac and Mrs Kelly ending the episode by echoing Mac and Charlie’s baseball scene from the previous “Gang Beats Boggs” episode and Dee’s conversation with ghosts of Martina Navratilova and Boss Hogg paying homage to the previous episode. This one defies expectations and is a really fun watch.

It’s worth noting that there’s no Dennis in this episode, but the fact Dee has to get off the plane in North Dakota after being poisoned along with the rest of the plane by Artemis. North Dakota is where Dennis’ secret family lives, so that could suggest there may be more to this episode in the future.

Rating: 7.5/10

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