It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia - The Gang Escapes - Review

Gum chewing, face scratching, falling off balconies, and room (sort of) escaping happen in this week's misadventure with the Sunny Gang, and boy was it fun. For those of us watching, at least.

Dee, in an attempt to show off to the gang, get the boys to agree to do one of those popular live room escape games that she's done before and knows exactly how to escape. The escape guide, Amanda, set up an escape scenario in Dennis and Mac's apartment, which was her second mistake. The first one was doing anything involving these people. Seriously, poor Amanda. She's just too normal for these people.

Anyway, of course, this goes wrong very fast. Firstly, as soon as the game starts, the boys lock Dee in Dennis' bedroom so she doesn't get in the way of the manly men solving the puzzle. These men then decide they need a leader, and given the total incompetency of all of them they can't decide on one and Dennis appoints himself the leader. Charlie and Frank don't like that, so they go off and form their own party.

And Dee is left on her own island to figure out a way to escape her situation. The problem is she's in Dennis' bedroom, which is depraved, to say the least. If you take Quagmire's bachelor pad and morph it with the room from The Room, you get this hideous monstrosity. In case you needed a reminder that Dennis is a total psychopath, here you go.


While Dee is trying to get out of Dennis' nonconsensual consensual sex dungeon, the boys look for clues. I use the word clues loosely here because instead of doing any real looking, they just break everything. But somehow Mac and Dennis get their hands on the lock while Charlie and Frank get their hands on the key. Once the boys figure this out, they decide to hold a sort of peace summit to discover terms of surrender. They're very cocky and there's a lot of stupid back and forth and cigar smoking and gum chewing and Dennis scratches Mac's face. It's a whole thing. And yet somehow I feel like this is not too far off from what real summits involving only men are like, which I believe is the point of the episode.

They agree to finally work together and Frank and Charlie put their key into Mac and Dennis' lock. When they do, they discover that that is actually just the first of many, many puzzles to solve to escape the room. And they're about out of time. But the weak woman, Dee, kind of comes to the rescue in that she gets out of Dennis' bedroom by escaping through the window, to the fire escape, and while trying to get their attention falls off. But this caught the attention of Amanda, poor, poor Amanda, who opens the door to the apartment when she sees Dee is in danger.

The boys celebrate their technical win by getting steaks for everybody while Dee is sitting in the emergency room with a broken arm, bruised up face, and all kinds of psychological trauma. To be clear, the trauma has been there since long before this fall. But, in their nicest gesture yet, they offer her the first bite of steak for coming through for them. And let me telling you something here, Kaitlin Olson's face when they make that offer was actually heartbreaking. Dee getting some love from these guys after all the crap they've said and done to her clearly means a great deal to her and Olsen does a great job showing that off.

This was a strong episode for everyone involved. Even though the majority of it was spent in one place, seeing everyone together, listening to this banter between these talented people who over 13 years have built up this perfectly timed comedic dynamic was just a joy to watch. The dialogue was on point and the characters feel as fresh as ever.