Boys will be boys; carousing with promiscuous bimbos is totally OK even if you've got a real girlfriend. Then, when you get bored and the party's over, just go home to the idiot who put up with it - just like a pimp expecting any of his girls to accommodate him at the drop of his zipper.
This episode embodies everything I hate about Wings - Joe and Brian, especially Brian when he veers so deeply into shallow, frat-boy/jock, egoistic and clueless immaturity that he no longer resembles a human being. The end of the episode emphasizes the point: the only reason he tries to returns to Alex is because carousing alone (remember the joke about how you can tell if an Irishman is queer) just ain't fun without the ego re-enforcement from the boys.
And it makes me wonder about the writers - how can they write such great schtick for the female characters and then so totally lose it with Joe and Brian? There are a lot of episodes when they try to mine the Brothers' deeper emotions; problem is, they don't have any and the attempts to pretend that they do fall dismally flat, like Joe's sudden proposal to Helen. It just doesn't work - compare it to Sam and Diane in Cheers. The comparison makes anything Joe could do look pathetic, especially since in every following episode Joe constantly whines MeMeMeMeMeMeMeMe whenever any issue, like what to serve at the reception, emerges.
Again, the disconnect between Joe and Brian and everyone else is so glaring you just have to wonder what the hell is going on.
Then there's original premise - running off to carouse with, um, who? All of those promiscuous, fun-loving bimbos? Where are they? Never saw any when I was in College, vacationed in Hawaii or the Caribbean or anywhere else and, if you look closely, 'carousing' pretty much involved Cathouses until the teen movies of the 50s and 60s - even in the 20s it was assumed that all of those night-club flappers and chorus girls moonlighted as hookers. The promiscuous bimbo is a frat-boy/jock wet-dream descendant of those 'carousers' that, even in the wide-open 60s, never existed and which, at its root is rancidly misogynistic.
This episode embodies everything I hate about Wings - Joe and Brian, especially Brian when he veers so deeply into shallow, frat-boy/jock, egoistic and clueless immaturity that he no longer resembles a human being. The end of the episode emphasizes the point: the only reason he tries to returns to Alex is because carousing alone (remember the joke about how you can tell if an Irishman is queer) just ain't fun without the ego re-enforcement from the boys.
And it makes me wonder about the writers - how can they write such great schtick for the female characters and then so totally lose it with Joe and Brian? There are a lot of episodes when they try to mine the Brothers' deeper emotions; problem is, they don't have any and the attempts to pretend that they do fall dismally flat, like Joe's sudden proposal to Helen. It just doesn't work - compare it to Sam and Diane in Cheers. The comparison makes anything Joe could do look pathetic, especially since in every following episode Joe constantly whines MeMeMeMeMeMeMeMe whenever any issue, like what to serve at the reception, emerges.
Again, the disconnect between Joe and Brian and everyone else is so glaring you just have to wonder what the hell is going on.
Then there's original premise - running off to carouse with, um, who? All of those promiscuous, fun-loving bimbos? Where are they? Never saw any when I was in College, vacationed in Hawaii or the Caribbean or anywhere else and, if you look closely, 'carousing' pretty much involved Cathouses until the teen movies of the 50s and 60s - even in the 20s it was assumed that all of those night-club flappers and chorus girls moonlighted as hookers. The promiscuous bimbo is a frat-boy/jock wet-dream descendant of those 'carousers' that, even in the wide-open 60s, never existed and which, at its root is rancidly misogynistic.
