The household is full of mystery in this week’s episode “Spies and Lies.” As the title indicates, Mel spies, while Ryder lies.
When Joe starts ignoring some of his duties as nanny/housekeeper, Mel assumes that his girlfriend is the one calling all the time and distracting him. However, she becomes suspicious when she overhears a strange conversation he has with presumed “girlfriend” Tessa (Shvona Lavette Chung). Rhonda questions Mel’s decision to hire Joe without running a thorough background check, which pushes Mel to burst in on Joe and Tessa. What she finds is not a love nest, but a situation room. One wall supports a map covered with notes about where they suspect Mel’s brother-in-law might be hiding with their money. While Mel is of course hurt and wonders if Joe only became her nanny so he could search for her brother-in-law, she quickly focuses on how this search is taking over Joe’s life.
Meanwhile, Ryder’s more expensive belongings have been disappearing. Naturally, Mel, and Joe once she brings the situation to his divided attention, presume that a bully has been targeting Ryder. Too distracted by the search for Ryder’s father to think his plan through, Joe threatens a random bully-type kid at school…but ends up with the wrong kid, and the wrong shoes. Mel and Joe think they have the culprit when they spy Ryder giving his scooter away to another boy. However, when they try to intervene, they discover that guilty Ryder has giving his expensive belongings to the kid, whose family also lost money in the scandal.
Afterwards, Joe and Ryder help each other realize they can’t let the scandal take over their lives, that they need to move on.
This episode has two great story lines. It was good to see Ryder get a good story of his own, which gives me hope that maybe the show might devote equal time to him and Lennox in the future. More depth is added to his character here, since up until this point he has been portrayed as the “normal” kid, while Lennox is the “troubled teen.” And this also confirms Ryder even more as one of my favorite characters – the fact that he “acted out” by giving away his stuff to someone else affected by the scandal really says something about his personality.
Even though Joe claims he will move on at the end of the episode, I can’t shake the feeling that his story was more of a catalyst than a stand-alone. What happened to Tessa? It’s doubtful that she gave up the search because Joe supposedly did. This might have been the writers’ way of getting the ball rolling on the subject, so that when the season finale arrives, the kids’ father’s arrest doesn’t seem to arise out of nowhere. This really is the logical season finale set up – lots of family drama, but not too much of a shake-up, since the father would go to jail and Mel would still need Joe to take care of the kids (of course, the stolen money would need to be missing so that Joe still needs to be a nanny).
In, “Spies and Lies,” drama (not to mention strong humor) creates an interesting episode that could start up speculation for the rest of the season.
