After last week’s episode hinted towards a leaner, more irreverent version of Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, the series delivers its best episode yet with “Spoiler: Stuart Makes a Wallet” – and even though it is a much longer episode designed as a much slower burn than the opening trio of entries, it feels like the series fully embracing itself as a pointless creative excercise. More importantly, instead of anchoring itself to its reveals and cameos, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe feels like the first episode that really takes advantage of Kevin Sussman’s lead performance; as a result, it is not only the best episode of the series to date, but a terrific showcase for its star, in a half hour that feels like the purest justification for the show’s existence to date.
What I really like about “Spoiler: Stuart Makes a Wallet” is how it pushes most of the supporting cast (save for memorable, brief appearances from Bert and Kripke) to the side, as it focuses its attention on Stuart, whose mind is slowly splintering from the combination of insane universe-hopping and whatever pills prescribed to him by confident, slightly arrogant staff psychiatrist Dr. Amy Farrah-Fowler at the mid 20th-century mental institution Stuart finds himself in.
As Stuart does his best James Cole impression, he quickly realizes the way out of this universe is not to resist, but to assimilate, launching “Spoiler: Stuart Makes a Wallet” into a delightful little montage of Stuart embracing his life in the looney bin; going to therapy, giving up his drawings of demons and alternate worlds, and pushing himself towards normalcy for an attempt at going home with his wife Denise (who lives next door to their gay neighbors, Kripke and Gary, in the episode’s funniest little twist). Through this montage, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe recenters itself on a story of a well-meaning, socially awkward dude with incredibly bad luck, finally experiencing a world where everything unexpectedly goes right for him; as Stuart begins to reject that life and try to break out of the (literal) simulation he’s in, that shift begins to take hold, and SFTSTU begins to blossom under the combination of Sussman’s selfless, nuanced performance and the incredibly chaotic, detached writing from Chuck Lorre, Zak Penn, and Bill Prady.
It all comes together as Stuart begins to poke at his surprisingly pleasant, technicolor-bright reality; and after he discovers a comic titled Stuart Fails to Save the Universe in his old comic book shop (which opens with detailing how Stuart broke the quantum machine by being too excited about his clean colonoscopy results), “Spoiler: Stuart Makes a Wallet” inverts its dystopian setting, pushing away the mystery of the what in the episode’s featured universe, and more about Stuart himself, someone who reminds his own wife “When have my dreams ever come true?” – as true a driving pathos as this series has offered to date, and one that deftly re-centers the series into its intended place, one where a group of super-smart nerds bounce goofily around the corners of the infinite multiverse, occasionally providing levity from its in-jokes and cameos from more fundamental understandings of its characters.
Instead of the weightless, loud vignettes of previous episodes, “Spoiler: Stuart Makes a Wallet” presents a story about a group of people whose default realities are ones in which, by the show’s own measures, are disappointments and failures. More presciently, it grounds this in a story observing what could be, breaking the boundaries of its text and fourth wall as a way to push its characters into interesting places, rather than place its narrative in a world or set of circumstances that is simply interesting textually.
By the time “Stuart Makes a Wallet” sees its characters waking up in a Matrix machine bath and Stuart twists and reforms a tear in reality into a vector to their next universe (the show’s equivalent of Land of the Lost, only surrounded by a tribe of people who seem to speak perfect English), one can feel the difference in the first three episodes and this one. Grounded in a story of men who just can’t help but see themselves fail memorably and miserably, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe finally reveals the heart it’s been avoiding and hiding all along – which in turn, immediately energizes the proceedings, giving the nihilistic, universe-hopping adventure something besides a string of familiar faces and some questionable intro title graphics a bit of poetic poignancy it lacked before (and in a way, returns the series back to its original storytelling roots, albeit in a more ambitious, slightly softer and less hacky form).
So while “Spoiler: Stuart Makes a Wallet” continues many of the habits formed in the show’s first few episodes – setting itself in a world it refuses to explore, oddly sidelining some of its presumed “main” characters at random times to make its storytelling feel distorted and inconsistent, relying a little too heavy on Stuart’s face and Kripke’s speech impediment for humor – it is also the purest vision of what this series is aspiring to be. What that was in the first few episodes – a self-referential, navel-gazing side adventure featuring recognizable side characters – is still what this series often wants to be: but with the slight, but perceptible shift in putting character ahead of plot, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe‘s fourth episode puts its finest foot forward (finally), finding its footing with just enough touches of pathos and irony to give itself a sense of purpose, which keeps “Spoiler: Stuart Makes a Wallet” moving and improving for each second of its 24-minute running time, and ultimately, resetting my expectations for what this series can potentially accomplish across its ten-episode first season.
Other thoughts/observations:
- The best episode of the series is also the one that features the supporting cast the least; I don’t think this is necessarily the cause of its improvement, but the space to explore Stuart and Sussman’s performance a bit more certainly came from somewhere. Something to keep an eye on.
- Jon Cryer makes a random cameo as a sherpa Stuart hallucinates; even more surprising is the preceding Weird Al cameo, a moment that seems designed in a lab for me to enjoy.
- “I held you son at his bwis.”
- There is suggestion that somehow, Stuart is guiding himself through the universes (the changing doormat, the brief glimpse of a Second Stuart watching Stuart Prime as he tries to get out of the mental institution).
- “From there, Stuart was entangled with the fate of the universe.” The anxious sigh that emanates from Stuart is the most relatable moment of the entire series to date.
- “You might want to tighten your sphincter!”
- Kripke, conflicted about his time in Prison World: “I was homosexual, but my husband was a weal worker.”
- Friday’s announcement of a Stuart Fails to Save the Universe season two is not exactly surprising, but admittedly a bit unexpected!