Warning: Spoilers for Happy’s Place season 1, episode 12
While the show awaits a season 2 renewal, episode 12 of Happy’s Place finally manages to address one of the biggest ongoing problems with the series. “Baby Doll” focuses on Gabby acquiring an AI-powered baby, which grades her on how well she takes care of the fake baby in question. She hands this off to the rest of the bar’s staff, ostensibly because she’s hoping they’ll prove themselves capable of babysitting if she ever needs help as a single mother.
Gabby said she wanted to have a baby in episode 5 and never mentioned it again until now. Isabella is also supposed to be in management training, but that almost never comes up. When it was revealed that Steve was undergoing exposure therapy, that felt like yet another storyline to be dropped. Thanks to “Baby Doll,” it’s now clear that the series has finally settled on taking a direction, albeit with some caveats.
Happy’s Place Finally Revisits Gabby & Steve’s Forgotten Storylines
Gabby’s Baby Was Forgotten For Half The Series
“Baby Doll” was a welcome change in pace when it comes to the show’s tendency to walk away from certain storylines. Fortunately, “Baby Doll” keeps at least two arcs going. Not only does Gabby finally start pursuing her dream of having a baby, but it appears that Steve is also making progress in his OCD exposure therapy. He takes new risks in this episode, and he even talks a bit about how his OCD affects his personal life.
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This development has important implications going forward. Steve’s OCD has always been a low-hanging punchline for the series, as was Gabby’s desire to feel needed. In “Baby Doll,” Steve is able to hug a doll despite the bizarre implications that it’s been held against Gabby’s nipples. Gabby also gets an extremely relatable storyline for any parent, revealing that she only asked the bar to raise her fake baby out of fear that she wasn’t good enough to do it on her own.
Why Happy’s Place Needs To Follow Through With Their Storylines To Succeed
Steve Especially Needs This Character Development
From the very beginning, the main story of Happy’s Place seemed focused on Happy’s death and how that affected both Bobbie and Isabella. After just a few episodes, the show pretty much resolved its main conflict by having Isabella forgive Happy just because Gabby found a hat from Isabella’s graduation. The show is still full of mysteries, such as how Isabella graduated from college with a high school 101 knowledge of psychology, but that’s not a mystery the shows is intent on solving.
Gabby’s fears about parenthood are highly relatable, and Steve reveals that he’s worried his OCD will keep him from ever being a parent at all.
What’s most important about this particular episode is that Gabby and Steve both get some long-needed character development for the very first time. Gabby’s fears about parenthood are highly relatable, and Steve reveals that he’s worried his OCD will keep him from ever being a parent at all. The series needs stories like these if it hopes to gain any good will from viewers. Prior to this episode, Gabby and Steve both felt like archetypes. They now feel like fully fleshed-out characters, and that’s exactly what this show needs. Unfortunately, there’s still one major storytelling gap remaining.
Happy’s Place Still Needs To Continue Isabella’s Management Training Narrative
It’s Unclear What She’s Even Doing In This Bar Anymore
Outside of lingering around and bragging about how she’s put zero clinical hours behind her psychology degree, Isabella seems to have no purpose on this show whatsoever. Isabella was supposed to be training as Bobbie’s co-manager, and she was supposed to do that by shadowing everyone else at the bar. There’s been one scene in which she’s chopping vegetables for Emmett since the episode in which she actually shadowed him, but there are otherwise no signs that she’s actually moving forward in her training.
It’s great that the series is finally improving Steve and Gabby, but Isabella is supposed to be the deuteragonist. Having her rotate around the staff is an easy storyline to work around, yet the series has dropped it entirely. If Happy’s Place can’t give the secondary protagonist a coherent storyline, it will likely spell doom for the series. Moreover, the series is missing the chance to explore her dynamic with characters like Steve, who she hasn’t shadowed yet. It’s not only the biggest dropped storyline, but it’s arguably the one that could give the series direction if picked back up.
