Modern Family - En Garde - Recap
(Here's Desi's recap of tonight's episode of Modern Family: "En Garde")
Modern Family was amazing this week. Between the red leotard and Manny's sport of choice and one-liners, I was actually constantly LOLing. The family starts the episode at a sporting event in a high school gym. Having been a wrestling brat I expected to see someone rolling around in a onesie, but instead the camera pans over to Manny... wielding a sword. Cameron has a camera on a stick (because he doesn't make home movies, he makes "home films") to capture all the action as Manny advances to the championship round. Claire and Phil are left to wonder if they'll ever have kids that are the champions of anything since Haley spent the meet rubbing her phone battery on her head to charge it with static electricity at her sister's suggestion and Luke believes that one season of baseball equals 6,000 hours.
Mitchell seems jealous that Jay is there to encourage his step-son in fencing whereas he was never there for "Fire and Nice": Mitchell and Claire's figure skating team. I almost fell out of my chair laughing at the picture of a twelve-year-old Mitchell in a bright red pant-length leotard and thirteen-year-old Claire in a dress that Dorothy and her Oz friends would admire. Mitchell admits to Cameron that his jealousy is "not a good color on me... like you in yellow."
On Phil and Claire's quest to make one of their kids good at something other than marrying the someone who is the best, Luke is taken out for a father/son game of catch. Phil spends more time chasing the ball than Luke does throwing it, and Claire says in her (very Kate Gosselin-like) interview that he is the best at something: Luke is the best at being her son. (She doesn't mention that he is her only son.)
The family reconvenes at the fencing competition, but Claire and Mitchell stay outside after Cameron convinces them that they need to talk about the grudge Mitchell has held against Claire for quitting their figure skating team. She tells him that she always felt bad about having quit because Mitchell loved it so much, but that she did it for his own good so he wouldn't be embarrassed by dropping her in competition.
Everyone else watches Manny in the competition as the presumed mother of his competition sits next to them, all matching in "Who's the Manny?" shirts designed by Jay. Gloria starts talking to her and finds out that the girl's parents both died and that she is the girl's nurse from the local children's hospital. The family unsuccessfully tries to get Manny to throw the match but he wins easily, and they are left with a giant trophy and a lot of guilt. Upon leaving the gymnasium, they find Mitchell and Claire practicing their figure skating routine on the pavement. Cameron drops the camera only to do a lift with Mitchell, jealous of the Fire and Nice choreography, while Jay puts Manny's trophy up next to a picture of the figure skaters in their prime.
I'm so thankful that the writers are making Jay a more useful and less irritating character, and the heart he shows at the end shows that he loves Claire and Mitchell just as much as he does his step-son. And the tags at the end of the episodes get better every week with Cameron attempting to perform a skating lift by jumping into Mitchell's arms. (I don't think that's going to work.)