Thanksgiving can be a great holiday, like Dre announces in the intro for tonight’s episode, or it can be a disaster. The mixture of estranged family members and pressure to have a perfect day can be extremely volatile. Dre and Bow have the right idea about leaving the kids and having a baby-moon, thus sparing themselves from all the drama between Ruby, Pops, and Aunt AV (the effervescent Lorraine Toussaint).
One thing that Black-ish has done very well this season is take one-off jokes and probe them for deeper meaning. Just like last week showed that Pops needling Dre about his job was covering up some long-held anxieties and resentments, this week doesn’t hold back when depicting Pops’s and Ruby’s relationship in all its petty glory.
The “Pops is a horndog” jokes are almost always just tossed in there for laughs, so it was a surprise when the show takes Pops’s infidelities seriously. It also leads to another great emotional moment like we got last week.
It starts off with the arrival of Aunt AV, hailed by a change in the wind and a chill in the air. Ruby, who is normally in high spirits during her favorite holiday, knows something’s up. Then Pops’s older sister AV shows up and Ruby realizes where the snake is.
Dre loves his aunt, but can’t show it in front of his mother, who hates her. AV seems like everything Ruby isn’t (she even likes Bow) and it is easy to believe that the antagonism between the two women stems from how different they are. Instead, Black-ish shows a deeper bond between the two and adds layers to Ruby’s character.
AV is not at the Johnson house just for Thanksgiving. She has found out that Pop sold his old bachelor pad and she wants half the money. After he and Ruby married, Pops put the condo in AV’s name so Ruby wouldn’t get suspicious and he could continue to have various dalliances with bank tellers and others. AV wants money she thinks is rightfully hers, and, when Ruby finds out, she wants the money too.
Meanwhile, the kids, going a little stir-crazy, try to get to the bottom of the conflict. Junior immediately thinks that Pops and AV are fighting about their role in staging the moon landing back in 1969 (Pops was lighting, AV was A/V). Jack thinks that all three were bank robbers and there’s still money hidden in the walls (hidden wealth explaining why Bow would fall for Dre in the first place). Diane thinks that AV isn’t Pops’s sister but his secret girlfriend and maybe their actual grandmother.
The drama, however, isn’t as extraordinary as the kids think. Instead, it involves ordinary people with very ordinary, human problems. After Ruby gets her revenge on Pops and AV for the condo by shredding all their clothes, she admits the real reason she can’t stand AV. She believes that AV was the one who urged Pops to divorce her all those years ago.
AV doesn’t deny it, and it looks like the rift between the two women will never be healed. Instead, Pops finally does the decent thing. He tells Ruby that AV urged them to divorce because she believed that Ruby and the kids deserved better. AV also apologizes to Ruby, telling her that she should have been a better friend and a better sister. Everyone does the mature thing and, in the end, Thanksgiving truly becomes a time for the family to connect.
Zoey, the latest to spy on the trio, goes back to her siblings to report what happened, but can’t bring herself to tell them. As she looks at eager and naïve Jack, Diane, and Junior, she doesn’t have the heart to tell them that the fighting was about Pops’s infidelities. It’s better to think it’s about the moon landing. Some family secrets aren’t meant to be shared.
Also, the less said about Dre’s and Bow’s storyline, the better. The emotional core was there, as both of them confront this last pregnancy of Bow’s, but the jokes were just so hacky. Guys getting weirded out by male massage therapists was an old joke back in the ‘80’s. It wasn’t exactly one for the ages, either.
Did you like Dre’s and Bow’s storyline more than me? What did you think about this very special Johnson family Thanksgiving? Let me know in the comments!
