by Noah Brown, staff writer
Yep, you guessed it. Two and a Half Men is back for another season. RUN FOR THE HILLS! Ha ha, just kidding. The season starts out with Walden (Ashton Kutcher) attempting to propose to Zoey, which backfired big time, something I suspect to be related to Michael Bolton in some way, seeing how Walden has hired him to sing while he proposes.
After this, and discovering that she had broken up with him to see another man less than an hour later, Walden spends the next few episodes trying to recover from the break-up, leading to Melanie Lynskey returning as Rose makes a (somewhat) shocking reappearance as she briefly becomes involved with Walden.
Less than a full episode later, she reveals that she is still the same mentally unstable psychopath we all know and love. This is demonstrated when she sends her pet ferrets (formerly named Charlie) to attack Walden, she pretends to be pregnant to scare Zoey away, just as she and Walden were about to get back together, and then, not surprisingly in the slightest, she begins stalking Walden. At the same time, Jake (Angus T. Jones) is struggling to settle into the army as a cook (Due to his culinary talents being revealed in an early season 6 episode), and spends the season interacting with Alan (Jon Cryer) and Walden through internet video chats, coming back to visit them at the house every few episodes, and bringing all sorts of chaos with him, mainly with the women he finds or brings with him.
A few weeks after the incident with Rose and Zoey, Walden and Alan try an experiment of sorts: to see if Walden would still be able to land a woman if they didn’t know he was rich. So, they create a fake persona for Walden: an Alan-level broke man by the name of Sam Wilson (which, ironically, is the real name of the Marvel superhero Falcon). Thanks to this, he began dating a clothing store worker by the name of Kate, who has no idea that he is rich, and he tells her that Alan is the rich one. He soon moves in with her, and finds that she is a talented fashion designer, with the only problem being that no one gave her a shot. So, under the cover story that Alan is investing in her, she goes to New York for her fashion show. The only problem is, around the same time, Walden begins binge eating from the stress and guilt of living a double life, so he and Alan fly to New York, where he told Kate the truth, and Kate end up breaking up with him.
Two episodes later, she comes back and ends up sleeping with Walden and not “Sam,” before revealing that her fashion career was forcing her to move to China, with Rose as her manager. But later in the season, things start to get ugly. Alan’s relationship with Lyndsey starts to hit the rocks, while we soon learn that Herb had a moment of weakness (technically 36.5 moments of weakness, seeing how Judith walked in on 37), and Judith leaves him, taking their daughter with her. With less than five episodes to go in the end of the season, Lyndsey end up breaking it off with Alan for good, and Jake announces that he is being transferred to Japan in less that 2 weeks.
Realizing how long it would be before he saw his son again, Alan took Jake on a road trip to the Grand Canyon.
Okay, funny stuff over, time to get serious. As evident in season 9 and continuing to be shown in season 10, now that Charlie Sheen has left and been replaced by Ashton Kutcher, the show is taking off in a direction that seems somewhat more, and I use this term loosely, clean, as is evident with a lack of cursing beyond son of a bitch.
To be honest, the show never showed the forbidden word during the Charlie Sheen era, but they sometimes came close, but that’s besides the point. Now, the show is mainly about Walden slowly becoming like a smart, handsome version of Charlie, only he smokes pot instead of obsessively drinking (most of the time), like Charlie does. The season has 3 main focus points: Walden recovering from his breakup with Zoey and dealing with the whole Sam Wilson ordeal, Alan’s relationship faltering and eventually ending, and Jake adjusting to life in the army. The show mainly focuses on Alan continuing to sponge his way into the house, and Walden adjusting to life as a bachelor in Malibu.