S3 E6: Blood Actually Adventure
The Great North, The Walt Disney Company, 2021.
Halloween at the Tobin house comes with one very dangerous family tradition: Moon is allowed to eat as much candy as he wants.
No limits, no pacing, no meaningful adult intervention. By 2:00 p.m., his pupils are vibrating and he’s singing about going door to door until he physically collapses. Which he does. Beef carries him off for a nap with instructions to leave a couple of mini Snickers in his pillowcase, because quitting Halloween candy cold turkey would be medically irresponsible.
Candy is also Moon’s chief argument in the episode’s other great Halloween crisis. The Tobin kids have finally ordered new costumes after years of recycling the same sad collection (Judy has spent five Halloweens trapped inside Slimer) but a storm delays the shipment and only one costume arrives: a cat unitard nobody actually ordered. Naturally, everybody needs it. Moon believes maximum cuteness will increase his candy haul. Ham wants it because Crispin is going as a laser pointer. Judy is desperate to escape Slimer and improve her romantic prospects. Wolf wants to drink milk from a bowl on the floor. Beef agrees to judge a full family cat-costume talent show and eventually reaches the only decision a responsible father could make: he puts the costume on himself and declares, through song, “The winner is me.”
Meanwhile, Honeybee is having a much rougher Halloween. A storm grounds her flight to Fresno, where she and Jerry have never missed their family’s enormous annual Shaw-o-ween party. The Tobins’ traditions (Hamburger Helper, mall trick-or-treating and one pumpkin on the porch) do little to console a woman whose parents decorate with realistic medical-supply bones. After a series of dreams featuring Possessed Patsy, Guy Fieri and the Grim Reaper, Honeybee decides the solution is obvious: recreate Shaw-o-ween in Lone Moose. She fills the Tobin house with enough gore to horrify people who regularly deal with Alaskan wildlife, including actual eyeballs purchased from the meat market.
The problem is that Jerry never wanted Shaw-o-ween recreated. Honeybee eventually learns that while Halloween is her favorite family tradition, years of severed-hand gags, fake corpses and relentless jump scares have made her brother dread it. His ideal Halloween involves Twitches, The Devil Wears Prada, cheerful decorations and a Frankenstein candy bowl that dispenses Skittles when you press the bolts on its neck. Honeybee finally gives him room to be “Jerrified,” while accepting the horrifying truth that some people genuinely prefer a light-up BOO sign to a bowl of real eyeballs.
So yes, the Halloween candy is technically the food of “Blood Actually Adventure,” particularly once Moon turns unrestricted access to mini Snickers into an endurance sport. But the episode is really a whole buffet of incompatible Halloween tastes: Moon wants sugar until unconsciousness, Judy wants to stop being Slimer, Honeybee wants anatomically accurate terror, and Jerry would like everyone to please sit down and watch Tia and Tamera Mowry without anyone throwing a femur at him.