Review: Stuart Fails To Save the Universe, "Spoiler: Stuart Makes a Wallet" | Season 1, Episode 4

How much predictability do you want in your sitcoms?

Almost certainly you don’t want utter unpredictability. The appeal of any genre, and the reason the vast majority of creators work within them rather than inventing entirely new forms, is that they provide conventions—frameworks of expectation that let the audience relax into something familiar. But you don’t want complete, boring predictability either. Audiences like having their expectations subverted and undermined. Surprise is a seasoning, and like all seasonings, there’s a delicate balance between not enough and too much.

The end tag to last week’s episode, where Stuart finds himself in a mental hospital, left me worried. I couldn’t decide whether my worry fell on the side of “uh oh, I know how this is probably gonna go” or the side of “uh oh, I don’t know what they’re going for.” On the one hand, if each universe we visit is a cultural trope being mined for parody or meta-references, plenty of mental institution stories come to mind. On the other hand, the setting is weirdly tangential to the nerdy touchstones that have been established as the norm in SFTSTU. It’s more evocative of exploitation (Shock Corridor), psychological drama (Suddenly Last Summer), or absurdist comedy (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). 

“Spoiler: Stuart Makes a Wallet” surprised me, in a good way. For the first time in the series, this week’s universe is employed primarily to show the effect of the premise on our protagonist—not just how they react to the situation they’ve been thrown into, but how it feels to be unstuck in reality. And without getting too serious about a sitcom premise, I find it poignant to have the creative team acknowledge the powerful urge to escape the merry-go-round, refuse the quest, and settle into a version of your life that grants your conscious wishes.