Speechless - I-N--INTO THE W-O--WOODS - Advance Preview: "Halloween Fun"

Somewhat unpopular opinion; I was not a big fan of the Halloween episode last year. I spent most of the episode feeling confused as to whether I was supposed to be following a plot, or it was a stand-alone episode with its own stand alone stories contained.

The opening to “I-N-- INTO THE W-O—WOODS” had me feeling extremely wary that history was about to repeat itself, but thankfully this episode is fantastic and the opening turned on itself in a really fun way. Shows that know how to poke fun at itself and its titular characters are shows that I love.

Slightly out of co-incidence with scheduling I watched this episode before tuning into The Goldbergs episode from last night, and both episodes actually ended up sharing some of the same themes. Granted this weeks episode of The Goldbergs was NOT Halloween related, but in Maya Di Meo and Beverly Goldberg we basically have two smothers at opposite ends of the scale. Beverly always wants to be involved in her kids life no matter what and can be extreme with her actions, and Maya just wants the best for her kids and to look out for JJ whilst trying to accept that he is a young man slowly growing up.

On this weeks Halloween episode there are 3 different storylines going on, all very interesting in their own ways. JJ is trying to gain a little more freedom from Maya and prove that he is capable of looking after himself, whilst Maya’s trying to give him that freedom whilst also still looking out for him and meeting a mother who gives her massive food for thought.

With JJ growing up it means that Dylan needs a new partner in crime, and she’s extremely reluctantly forced to turn to Ray for that. Surprisingly being a goodie two-shoes is actually quite helpful, and we get some nice bonding scenes between them along with one particular brutal one liner that had me on the floor.

Jimmy meanwhile turns to Kenneth for help in turning the house into a haunted house. That somewhat backfires on him as Kenneth takes things to another level, before having the tables turned on him. Just when I thought I’d picked myself back up off the floor from all the one-liners, the show had to go and pull out an extremely amusing sequence of all 3 storylines cutting between each other and I’m pretty sure I lost my voice laughing.

The show is always at its finest where it balances the heartfelt moments with the comedic, and “I-N-- INTO THE W-O—WOODS” has that in absolute bundles. I thought the season had started out well enough with the two part premiere, but this episode steps things up a notch.

You can watch “I-N-- INTO THE W-O—WOODS” at 8:30pm on Friday. It’s a cracker of an episode not to be missed, Speechless continues to be massively underrated and deserves far better ratings than it gets.