Baskets Season 3 Episode 7 Review: Women’s Conference

This Baskets review contains spoilers.

Baskets Season 3 Episode 7

As far as Baskets episodes go, this is a jam-packed one. Christine and Martha go to Vegas, Ken comes to Bakersfield, and Dale drops his lawsuit. Some of it feels a bit sloppy but there are good laughs and sweet moments peppered throughout.

The trip to Vegas is a good plot device to get Christine to ultimately learn a lesson. After basically forcing Martha to accompany her for a girls’ weekend, she then pressures her into a strip club outing. “I thought you wanted to live a little!” says Christine. “I never said that,” replies Martha.

Martha is then forced into an unwanted lapdance, which ends with her taking a quite painful-looking fall off the stage (I love Martha and found this moment genuinely distressing). The next day Martha tells Christine that she’s a bad listener, which is all Christine needs to understand she must go home and patch things up with Dale. Martha lays Christine’s lesson out for her perhaps too word-perfectly, but the plot builds to it well enough to work regardless.

The Dale plot is messier. It’s kind of just Dale, Ken, and Chip… doing stuff. Dale steals some items from Christine’s house as compensation for her running up his credit card bills. Ken tries, and fails, to talk him out of suing Christine. Chip and Ken then drive out to the campground where Dale is staying and they have another conversation. The latter scene is meant to be Ken changing Dale’s mind some, but it’s too slight. It’s just odd there’s the whole drive up to Dale’s campground for what amounts to about four lines of dialogue (though Ken telling Chip in the car about all the names he went through before becoming the Carpet King is funny).

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In the end, the conflict of Dale’s impending lawsuit is wiped away (as is Dale’s back pain) when Christine admits she made mistakes and should’ve listened to Dale about finances. The resolution seems sudden and quick; it only gets away with it because this is Baskets, a series that makes a point of reminding us that its problems are rarely as dramatic as they might seem. Dale is, after all, Christine’s son. How long could he really sustain being such a jerk?

Though technically a lot goes down, in typical Baskets fashion, the plotlines are overall simplistic. I wish Dale’s plot had been not so slapdash and that Marsha had had more lines. Still, it was pleasant and fun enough to watch Christine and Martha at the women’s convention. Oh, and I do need to give special attention to the amazing, very current throwaway gag where we cut to the end of a seminar at the women’s convention run by four old white guys and one proclaims, “That is what it’s like to be a woman in today’s business world.”