It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: "Thunder Gun Express" Review

Note: Full spoilers for the episode follow.

Hey guys, first off, apologies for the lack of review of "How Mac Got Fat," as I was away on vacation when it aired. Would love to do a review of it still (even a very short one), so I'll see if I can make time for that before the season finale.

Meanwhile, "Thunder Gun Express" was of those episodes that took a while to get going, but got increasingly funny and clever as it went along.

The idea of the gang all racing to see the mega-blockbuster Thunder Gun Express in the midst of an Obama visit to Philadelphia that had the streets jammed up was a fun one – and allowed for the occasional Sunny episode that takes full advantage of the Philadelphia setting (and the couple of weeks they spend shooting there each season). Hey, now I know that Schuylkill River is "the depository of all the unsolved crimes and murders in Philadelphia." Thanks for the info, Frank!

Frank's time as an impromptu boat tour guide was hilarious, as he began to simply tell the baffled tourists stories from his life ("One of the things I like to do most is banging whores.") – Specifically situations from previous episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It seems this season that the Sunny writers have decided to get a bit more self-aware, as we're seeing more callbacks and acknowledgements of just how outrageous the situations these guys get into are. And hey, it's Season 7 – I say why not have fun with that kind of stuff?

Charlie and Dee's time in the sewers was also a standout sequence, as we learned of Charlie's foolproof method of not getting your clothes dirty as "piss and s**t flow over you," which is to get naked and hold your clothes above your head. The implication that Charlie was very familiar with this ("It's more refreshing than you think") was hysterical, and Frank later confirmed it was just a regular part of their wacky adventures. I wonder if I'm the only one who thought of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, as Charlie described what happens in the sewers? Except just replace the words water, piss and s**t with "toxic waste."

I felt like Dennis' bits were probably the weakest this week, as he listened to tapes of himself with women and realized he does take an awfully long time to close the deal when he's seducing ladies. It never really came to life and Mac's casual racism aside ("Who's the brown girl?"), the inclusion of the beautiful Latina woman Dennis had a car accident with didn't really bring much either… well, except for a movie theater hand job for Dennis.

That's okay though, since everything else was really great. And I have to commend Kaitlin Olson for her amazing delivery – so perfectly both freaking out and yet holding it all in -- of the line, "It's bad, isn't it? That's s**t in my hair, that's why," when Dee replied to a woman complaining about her horrific smell.

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