![]() ![]() What follows, too, is a highlight, with Gumball, alongside the rest of the family, proving his understanding of how Darwin works to help locate him. Writing a break-up song is already silly enough, but ripping it apart at its seams kills. "The Silence" demonstrates this through a fantastic R&B duet with both characters going their own separate ways, though a duet that quickly falls apart when they get too far from each other to stay in-sync or in-pitch, ultimately ending prematurely with Darwin wandering into the dump and falling into a car. While the early parts of the episode navigate Gumball and Darwin's disconnect, the episode takes a turn to actually address it as the elephant in the room, and they end up realizing that they need to split up. Once we get to the second act, though, "The Silence" actually picks up and gets really, really good. As far as I'm concerned, the joke was pretty much just the fact that Gumball as a show is game to skewer anything, which is entirely fair and respectable, but it's shallow, tepid, and mildly discomforting to watch, all for the purpose of watching the show flex on its ability to skewer certain things with frightening accuracy. ![]() Basically, if you ever wanted Gumball to talk like a coquettish schoolgirl complete with those creepy asterisks, then today's your lucky day, pervert. This all segues into what is bound to be the episode's most notable gag, with Gumball and Darwin roleplaying, respectively, as a shy anime girl and Twitter bot. (Darwin whispering "alternative medicine" incredibly faintly as to summon Mr. Small using alternative medicine on them plays it out by the books and unsurprisingly backfires. We expect him to do something douchey, so the joke honestly just fulfills its purpose in the same way that the subsequent scene of Mr. The early scene with Harold as a psychoanalyst to dissect their problem, for instance, never takes off, instead taking 30 seconds to fall into a predictable subversion of our expectations (which basically means it fails as subversion). Part of the issue is just that the episode makes its point about Gumball and Darwin's alleged disconnect through a series of simple jokes and scenes, all of which are forgettable and fail to meaningfully escalate. There's a point that it wants to make with its central concept–Gumball and Darwin seem to have run out of things to say to each other and feel that their friendship (brothership?) is quickly expiring–but everything about the episode leading up to its turning point feels indifferent. Unfortunately, as a critic, while I felt that "The Silence" wrapped itself up perfectly, it was an episode which, in my opinion, meandered its way to the finish line as a whole. ![]() If anything, it makes "The Silence" feel almost special, like an episode that, if not trying to become the next "The Choices," wants to break up the pace of the show and distribute some warm, fuzzy feelings. It's a route that Gumball routinely bypasses in favor of wringing laughs out of its generally nihilistic and cynical perspective, and being able to see the show just doing a cute and sweet character study of Gumball and Darwin was legitimately surprising, and that's not a knock against the episode. ![]() Seeing the show get meta with its storylines shouldn't come as a complete shock to anyone at this point, but what makes this episode so different is how it funnels that into an episode with so much sincerity. "You know how we can't keep up a conversa." ![]()
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