TVSquad

Major apologies for being late with this review. I've had a bit of a pain in the gulliver the last few days, but I'm doing better now, thank you very much.

Anyway, perhaps it was because I was sick, or maybe my humor sensors just weren't tuned in properly, but this episode kind of left me cold. I'll admit I loved the whole idea of Orel and the Pious Scouts going on a camping trip but never really exposing themselves to nature, and I loved all the signs at the nature preserve that read, "Warning: Actual Nature" and "No Birds After Six PM," and if you really want to make me laugh, a squirrel committing suicide via hanging is always a good way to go, but the overall theme of this episode felt like something I had seen too many times before.

Of course, it was probably inevitable that Moral Orel would tackle "creationism vs. evolution" at some point, but that argument has been satirized so many times already, and this episode, to me anyway, didn't really have that twisted, Moral Orel-y take on the situation I've come to expect.

Perhaps my biggest beef with this episode was that it shot at a target that was a bit too wide. The idea of the missing link "evolving" into a conservative talk show host is kind of amusing, but moments like that and the book of scary campfire tales (Attack of the Tree Huggers, The Spine-Chilling Lies of Charles Darwin) all felt like easy variations of gags we've all heard before.

The reason I love Moral Orel so much is that it takes certain fundamentalist codes and ideas into areas you would never imagine. I guess my ultimate critique of this episode is that it never made that sudden turn into left field, it just kept pulling me along until I ended up exactly where I expected to be.