Plot: The group deals with various problems as a result of Halloween.
Breakdown: I still haven’t watched anything else in the 6Teen series besides the first episode, the Christmas special and now this episode, but it continues to be a show that I’m largely just okay with it. I don’t have a bad time watching the show, but it doesn’t latch onto me so much that I feel compelled to watch the rest anytime soon.
In this Halloween special, we have fewer plots running at once than the Christmas special, so it flows a bit better, but it’s still not a great episode. Caitlin is trying to get some guy she’s been dating for a little while, Talon, to finally kiss her. I don’t care about this plot at all because Talon comes off as a big jerk throughout most of the episode.
He acts like he barely even knows her despite the fact that Caitlin said they’ve been on three dates so far, and he always has an attitude when he’s talking to her like he’s not, in any way, romantically interested in her. However, near the end, he changes entirely and suddenly becomes a very sweet guy because…..I dunno. She wore a Halloween costume and embarrassed herself by wearing it in front of a bunch of people who weren’t wearing Halloween costumes, even though….ya know…..it’s Halloween. And then that’s resolved by Talon basically saying it’s okay to wear Halloween costumes because it’s Halloween, and everyone suddenly flips on THEIR heads, stops laughing at her, and then they put on the costumes they were wearing in front of everyone in the mall a few scenes ago.
No. I have no idea what the hell all that was about. Her costume wasn’t even an embarrassing costume. It was just a feathery Vegas showgirl outfit.
The buildup doesn’t even have a payoff because he never kisses her. He kisses her on the cheek, but she clearly wanted a kiss on the lips – she even read up on signals that a guy gives when he wants to kiss someone, one of which being staring at their lips.
There’s more to this, but we’ll come back around to it in a bit.
Jen’s storyline involves her being aggravated at having to dress up for Halloween because her boss loves Halloween and requires them to dress up. The bigger issue is that her boss is also a crazy person who keeps scaring customers by waving a realistic-looking and sounding chainsaw in front of them. I’m not entirely convinced it’s not a real chainsaw, but the blades don’t move so there’s that.
I will admit that the coach’s chainsaw thing was kinda funny in a dark way the first time he did it, but it got really old and more concerning the more he did it – and he was constantly doing it. Maybe I am just being a stuffy old person, but I just kept sympathizing with the poor customers who had to put up with that. The one thing I vividly remember from a haunted hay ride I took when I was a little kid was one guy with a chainsaw chasing after the wagon. And that was while I knew I was in a staged haunted hay ride, safe in a wagon with others, including my parents, while the guy clearly couldn’t catch up (or, well, wouldn’t). These poor customers have a guy waving a realistic-looking and sounding chainsaw right in their faces, causing them to pass out or suffer other accidents.
You’d think this guy would be getting more shit for doing this. He’s literally causing several people to pass out, one of the customers in the store was a pregnant woman, and Jen said she had to call for an ambulance twice that night. She gives him a taste of his own medicine by scaring him with a mechanical mouse, which you’d think would just end their plot entirely. I figured he’d respect her more for giving him a scare and he’d understand that you can go overboard with scaring people, even on Halloween, but no. It kinda goes that way, but then Jen suggests helping her help her friends prank the security guard.
Which brings us to the third plot – Jude, Wyatt and Jonesy are trying to pull off a prank on the security guard like they do every year, but he’s not falling for any of them. Their attempts are realistic enough but also quite lame. They stick a tag in his pocket so he’ll set off the alarm in any store he sets foot in, but, like….he’s a security guard….so who cares? Also, he finds it after the first time he trips an alarm and doesn’t react or care.
Next, Jude dresses up as a security guard and tries to trick him, but this obviously doesn’t work.
Then they try to scare him with a remote controlled mouse, but it not only doesn’t work, the thing also runs out of batteries almost immediately.
After several failures, they concoct their master plan, which is to get him loaded up with coffee, close the other bathrooms in the mall, forcing him to go into the bathroom they set up, then they kick in the door and take a picture of him on the toilet, which isn’t creepy or a major violation of someone’s personal boundaries at all.
Oh and Jonesy also puts butter on the toilet seat to make whomever sits on the seat fall into the bowl.
Jen comes in with her boss to spice up the plan. When the security guard comes in, he’ll also give him a good scare with his chainsaw before they take the picture.
Then Caitlin comes into the fray. After Talon dresses up as discount Batman and they go on their date, Caitlin says she has to go to the bathroom, but all of the bathrooms are full of people for some reason – they never explain how the boys did that, but whatever. They also don’t explain why no one else would be heading to other bathrooms. They did somehow block the main bathrooms for the mall, but certainly there are many other restrooms and even restrooms in the stores and restaurants. They couldn’t have blocked them all.
Caitlin is lead to the trap bathroom, which obviously means bad news for her. For some reason, Caitlin doesn’t turn on the lights when she gets into the bathroom nor do her friends, who are hiding behind the stalls, ever peek and notice that this girl in a flapper outfit is probably not the security guard.
I really thought that they’d scare her and she’d pee her pants or something, but no….
She goes into the stall and does her business, clearly making noises before going in and while being in the stall, but no one seems to notice these teenage girl sounds are not middle-aged Christopher Walken impersonator security guard sounds. Then the coach guy/Jen’s boss, scares her by kicking open the door and waving a chainsaw in front of her while wearing a Jason mask, then Jonesy, who I guess is still not getting the hint from the girl screams takes a picture of bare from the waist down Caitlin who then also falls into the toilet bowl because of the butter. Jen stops it, but…..it’s already done. She was already scared, the picture was taken and she fell into the toilet.
This is just awful. Caitlin didn’t do anything to deserve this. Technically, the security guard didn’t either, but because this is a tween/teen show, boring rule-abiding adults=bad and need and to be picked on for doing their jobs.
It’s bad enough to be humiliated like that, but they took a friggin’ picture of her half-naked on the toilet. That’s a million layers of no.
The frosting on this awful cake is that they never apologize or even say they’ll destroy the picture. The boys don’t care at all, they brush it off rather quickly and even laugh at her, and then they go off and try to figure out how to prank the security guard again immediately afterward.
The security guard, by the way, just went to the bathroom in a nearby store, because that’s an option.
Don’t worry, though. The security guard will get his just desserts for being a minimum wage guy doing his job. Jude, Wyatt and Jonesy put a chocolate cupcake on his chair and he sits on it, making it look like he pooped his pants. Because the height of comedy is doo-doo. Bear in mind, this show is meant for teenagers, not six-year-olds.
Overall, this episode wasn’t the worst, but it wasn’t all that entertaining for most of the runtime, and the ending prank on Caitlin just seemed awful for no reason. The fact that Jen tells her boss to tone down the chainsaw scare tactics only to immediately tell him to do it to someone else kinda negates whatever message was in there, even if the target was a stoic tough guy, and the boys don’t get any punishment for doing something so terrible and violating like that to Caitlin. She might not be the most likable person, but she didn’t do anything to deserve that.
There’s also something at the beginning that I can’t tell if it’s an animation error or a joke. Caitlin is carving a jack-o-lantern and she accidentally cuts the mouth and nose off……..like….a nose and mouth were cut into the pumpkin, clearly all the way through, but she cut them off, leaving behind a completely untouched area of the pumpkin? It’s the pic I used for the main image, take note of the fallen piece near the bottom. It’s quite weird.
……Oh and I had to check the Wiki/Fandom page for the spelling of Talon’s name. Turns out she later dumps him because his idea of actual kissing is licking her face…….I wish I hadn’t known that.
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The Anime Madhouse 