Review: Stuart Fails To Save the Universe, "Spoiler: Dexy's Midnight Runners Get a Royalty Payment" | Season 1, Episode 7

Either this show has found its rhythm juggling pace, comedic ideas, and moving the story along, or I’ve just adapted to its style. Because despite the bare-minimum fifteen-minute (!!) runtime of “Spoiler: Dexy’s Midnight Runners…”, and only spending maybe thirteen of them in the telepathy universe, this one didn’t feel underdeveloped or rushed through. We even get rapid-fire callbacks to previous episodes, which gives this a satisfying sense of being part of a whole. I would think that this means the last three episodes are going to bring some emotional threads together, anchor the season in something more cohesive than universe-of-the-week. I would think that, but we’re going to start the next episode with our heroes in a centaur universe. So who knows.

The telepathy premise gets a surprising amount of space to breathe for such a short episode. Bert’s meandering train of thought about a telepathy movie (“it had that girl in it, the one who’s married to what’s-his-name in real life, Phoebe Cates! No …”) get sidetracked for just a second by the conversation going on without him, and then come right back (“What Women Want!”) which causes confusion because Phoebe Cates isn’t in that. (Also I thought I was the only person in the world who remembered What Women Want, whose trailer features Helen Hunt being unable to stop looking at Mel Gibson’s crotch, an image involuntarily seared into my brain.) I laughed out loud at some of the changes that get rung on this premise: Stuart thinking “Well, we’re screwed” and immediately saying the same thing out loud; the salient observation that you can telepathy with your mouth full of Quizno’s; and best of all, the Dexy’s Midnight Runners ploy of the title, where they all mentally sing “Come On Eileen” to block broadcasting their plan to steal from the CalTech engineering lab.