Fishing For Gold

[ASmouseInTheHouse]

Thoughts?

First off, we finally have art for Detective Polehaus!! I'm relieved that he generally looks like how I imagined.
This was an interesting episode because all the characters but Polehaus were new.
I can't say I was a fan of the storyline. Just listening to that kid trying to get the phone was painful. To quote Mrs. Kramer, "You little con artist."
I also don't get the title. I get the fishing part, but what about the gold?

I need to hear it again. I did like the fact that we see yet another side of Polehaus, but I wasn't a fan of the other parts.

[Polehaus53]

This episode was interesting. Yeah, I have to agree with ASmouseInTheHouse about this episode being painful to listen to. I had a hard time listening the first time I heard it. Molly’s behavior of seeming so happy to see her grandfather with an ulterior motive to get him to buy her a phone was just terrible and drove me mad. Seriously, Molly would make a good criminal, using practices identical to what Buck Oliver was doing in “The Green Ring Conspiracy”. She used all the Old Tricks Buck probably would’ve used. If Molly had also been emailing Polehaus, then we might as well have renamed this episode “Phishing for Gold”. But then again, she was taking orders from Allison, so perhaps we need to question who Allison has been hanging out with and what gave her the idea to teach these How To Manipulate Adults 101 lessons. ARREST HER!!

Fortunately, Detective Polehaus is not that gullible and didn’t fall for her tricks for a moment. And thankfully Molly realizes the horridness of her plan and drops the act and decides to go for a genuine relationship with her grandfather. The moral of this episode was great: Love ought to be sincere. Much to my relief, Molly learns this (before Polehaus investigated) and apologizes (probably should’ve done that immediately) and decides to spend time with her grandfather without wanting to get things out of him. I think the lesson here was very good, getting there (showing what insincere love is like) was just a little hard to listen to.
My initial thoughts of this episode as a whole were pretty negative when I first listened to this episode. However, upon relistening to the episode, I have a better opinion of it and like it more.

Okay, time to nitpick. I know I’m probably going to sound grumpy and picky and complaining like Detective Polehaus sometimes does, but I feel like there was a lot more potential for this episode. I have thoughts about other things that could have been done with it.
For example, Allison’s line about everything being fake. It is seen in this episode that she and her dad make videos together and are they’re pretty popular online. Her dad is even starting to look for sponsorships so they could maybe make money from the videos. Although nothing is said about this, I assume that Alison gets along well with her dad. But is that real? Does she really have a good relationship with her father, or does she feel obligated to make videos with him? She admits that she stages her videos with him. But what if she stages everything about her life? This is actually something that does tend to happen on social media. I think it would have been interesting if we saw an angle about Allison and her family.
Another thing is the title of this episode. When it was first announced, I thought that this episode would be something like “The Treasure of LeMonde!” The title gave me feelings of adventure or treasure hunting. I was slightly disappointed that it wasn’t those things.
I'm not going to go as far to say that this episode was wasted potential, I just think there are other things that could have been done with the characters in it that would've been more interesting. But hey, maybe in the future. It has been confirmed that the cast of this episode will feature in another Club-exclusive episode in 2023, so I look forward to hearing that.

I feel like I've been sounding a little too negative, so I'll end with some positive thoughts. There were two things that I undoubtedly really liked about this episode from the beginning:

1. The music! Tyler Michael Smith does an excellent job with the scene transitions and everything else music-related in this episode! I particularly liked the music in the scene with Molly in Detective Polehaus’ office.
2. More angles of Detective Polehaus! We’ve been seeing a lot more of the personality of Detective Don Polehaus in recent episodes, and I like it!

Overall, although I’d need to hear this episode a few more times, I think it was fine.