What I’m Watching: The Detour

The Detour: Season 2, Episode 9 “The Dilemma” (B+)

This was a relatively serious episode which found Robin contemplating making the ultimate sacrifice to ensure that her clearly destructive father doesn’t do any more damage to her family. It was pretty easy to see just how much J.R. messed his daughter up as a young girl and all but ensured that she would become a con woman. Her simple acceptance of the fact that he was strapping jewels to her chest so that he wouldn’t have to pay taxes on it was very much like Delilah’s adult attitude around all of these weird things. Delilah’s strange princess talent show was all kinds of awkward, and it’s probably best that her parents weren’t there to see it happen. J.R. taking the kids with him just as Nate and Robin got in the elevator to put their family back together was a worrisome and unusually dramatic finish, which is sure to set the loving if unconventional parents on a mission to take down the man who ruined both of their lives. Before he got drunk out of his mind and brought a group of angry fellow drunks with him to throw garbage at a webmaster’s window, Nate managed to pick up on a whole bunch of red flags that should have tipped them off to a company called Hoax-o-Metrics not being real. I love that Robin realized that J.R. knew Nate because he used the word quixotic, and that she was in full no-tomorrow mode, ready to offer Nate a threesome with a random and very willing stranger on a bus even though he didn’t go for it. Her advice to start a new life and get a new wife paled in comparison to the sentimental music-assisted montage that shows that this couple is much more resilient than she’d like to think.