We get the groundwork for Rose wanting a kid, but Greg getting his act together is something he does for himself. But this episode excels because Greg’s decision to grow up has nothing to do with Steven.
His head has always been in the clouds, and now he’s in a relationship with someone that’s literally magic, so he has no incentive to reflect on himself barring a dire situation. This episode works because Greg is realistically irresponsible. Moreover, I appreciate that his flaws come from the same character traits that kicked off this relationship, which so far has dominated his flashbacks: Greg is a dreamer and a romantic, which works great in Story for Steven, and he takes the relationship seriously, so he matures on that front in We Need to Talk, but now we see that he’s so focused on Rose that he’s ignoring every other element of life as a functioning adult. Nothing in Greg the Babysitter diminishes any sense of authenticity about Greg’s feelings for Rose, because for all his flaws, he doesn’t take advantage of Rose or their relationship. The problem of House Guest is that this emotional core is tainted by him wronging Steven in a way we’ve never seen before or since (compare his feigning of an injury to his negligence in Maximum Capacity, where he instead makes a mistake and is immediately regretful). Neither is great, and younger Greg is still old enough to know better, but ignorance is far more digestible than purposeful shadiness from this character.īoth House Guest and Greg the Babysitter stay somewhat true to Regular Greg by making him driven by love, whether it’s paternal or romantic. But the key difference is the level of intent: even looking past the age and maturity gap between these two Gregs, the Greg of House Guest chooses to lie to his son despite seeing how hard Steven takes it, while Douchebag Greg’s actions stem from sincere cluelessness. By that metric you might think I’d dislike Greg the Babysitter as well, because boy oh boy is Douchebag Greg unlikable. This is the second episode where Greg is awful for the bulk of the runtime, and the first, House Guest, was so bad that it earned my inaugural “No Thanks!” rating (a brutal assessment, I know). When tasked with babysitting, he does what he wants instead of focusing on what a baby might need, and when the kid goes missing, his search includes a pit stop to the arcade to play video games.
Douchebag Greg slums around and mooches off a single working mother, depriving her of her own food and taunting her for working to feed her child.
Taking responsibility as you age: good.Īs with Annoying Steven early in the series, this lesson is achieved by presenting us with Douchebag Greg. (But to be clear, this is a story about growing up. Fortunately the plot does a good enough job of showing that it makes up for all the telling, but still, it’s so on the nose that Vidalia calls Greg out when he belatedly repeats the moral it in response to an unrelated statement. Greg is no stranger to hammering out the lesson of a story, but here it’s made so explicit so often that it threatens to weaken the actual plot. Lack of infant variety notwithstanding, this is a great episode, if not a subtle one. Right off the bat, this episode’s greatest weakness is that we don’t see Baby Buck and the Baby Pizza Twins as we do in Lamar Abrams’s promo art.
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