It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia - Charlie's Home Alone - Review: "Charlie Kelly Should Be Dead by Now"

If you needed a reminder for why Charlie Kelly should never, ever be left home alone, here you go.

Taking us back in time to last year's Super Bowl, Charlie finds himself recreating the Home Alone series with himself playing the role of Kevin McCallister. Unfortunately for Charlie, however, he's not nearly as smart or mature as the eight-year-old. He's just as lucky, though, and gets away with a lot. A lot, a lot. As in no normal human being would be alive after what he goes through here.

The whole gang is getting ready to go to the Super Bowl to support the Eagles, but Charlie has an issue. He's lost his lucky green man to take to the Super Bowl. Charlie has this whole ritual he does to make sure the Eagles win. If he doesn't complete the ritual, the Eagles won't win, he argues. But nobody cares about this ritual except for Charlie, so they push him to leave it behind so they can go. He and Mac get into a very Kevin versus his mom-like fight that ends with Charlie wishing Mac would disappear. He gets his wish when Charlie goes back into the bar to get his green man and everyone accidentally leaves him behind, too enamored with Frank's bus to notice Charlie isn't there.

Charlie goes full Home Alone, shot for shot, in the apartment. He truly believes they disappeared as opposed to, I don't know, going to the game without him. There's that whole montage of him having fun by himself, doing the exact same things Kevin does, including getting that furnace scare in the basement. When he goes back to the bar, which is closed, He sees two guys who look just like the Wet Sticky Bandits. Of course, they are just two regular guys going to get a drink and leave when they see it's closed, but Charlie thinks they're trying to break in. He gets drunk and messes up the bar in attempts to make the bar into one big trap ala the McCallister home.

Here's where everything goes very wrong for Charlie and where he really starts to make his worst decisions ever. This leads to some of the darkest stuff It's Always Sunny has done this season in terms of injuries, and it's awesomely gruesome. After proudly finishing setting up his traps, he immediately succumbs to one of them; the bear trap. He falls over, bleeding profusely. He can't walk, leaving him trapped in his own bar. In his next bad decision, he tries to cauterize the wound with the heated metal he put around the doorknob. He passes out.

When Charlie wakes up, the game has started. What's his first priority? A sane person might try to reach the phone to call an ambulance, but not Charlie. No, his first priority is to complete his game rituals so the Eagles can win the Super Bowl. The first part is to eat something brown, so he eats a brown rat. Yep. But, it might have worked because the Eagles score right after he eats it. He's excited because it's working and he's ready to move to the second part of his ritual, but he horrifically gets sick and throws up the rat and passes out again.

When he wakes up again, he tries to keep doing the ritual. He's got to have something green. His next bright idea comes from using green paint, but he can't get to the paint can because he has it tied up to the ceiling. How is he going to get it down, you wonder? He cuts the rope with his teeth and lets the paint can fall on his face. He's knocked out again.

But when he wakes up yet again, he finds the green paint spilled on his face, and the Eagles score again. Now he's got to do something with yellow; drinking a beer. There's a beer all ready for him on the counter, But the bear trap chain is caught on something and he can't reach the beer. He uses a barbed wired, nailed baseball bat to knock the glass down, which spills beer everywhere. Honestly, I'm just surprised he didn't hit himself with the bat. But he's in a predicament. He can't have the beer. What else can he drink that's yellow? pineapple juice? Lemon juice? Nope, pee. He pees into the glass. And with the encouragement of trauma-induced hallucinations of two Eagles players, he drinks the pee. At least he doesn't throw it up.

Now he's got to see the end of the game, but he can only do it by getting through his own traps. As he crawls to the bar television, he gets hit with paint cans and shot by nail guns. But he can't reach it. The hallucinations remind him that there's a release lever on the bear trap. So he gets himself out of the trap, turns on the TV, sees that Brady has the ball, which is a bad, bad sign for the Eagles. Thinking this is because he got out of the bear trap, thereby changing the ritual, the hallucinations tell him he has to get back into the bear trap to turn the tide back towards the Eagles. Before he can fall over and pass out again, the first part of this two-part saga ends. Tune in next week to see how else Charlie damages his brain and internal organs!