Always Sunny S12E7 Recap: Projecting Their Rock Bottoms

The Always Sunny gang really peels back the layers on their past traumas this week, only to find they can lower the bar even further.

Always Sunny is a pretty dark show. It’s Seinfeld for us non-student millennials. Week after week we watch as this group of five puts their worst qualities on display for our amusement. They’re rude to one another, they’re not supportive, they outwardly make fun of one another and overindulge in all things wicked (mostly alcohol-related). So to see this gang recap all the terrible things they’ve been through in their lives gives us at least a little bit of an explanation as to why this group just keeps getting weirder.

So many issues are raised in this week’s episode “PTSDee.” Parental issues, alcoholism, addiction, poor life choices, all things the gang are guilty of themselves.  But since none of them are self-aware about any detrimental trauma they’ve suffered, Dennis, Dee, Mac, Charlie and Frank all project their own issues onto one another this week, culminating in an odd ending that only serves to press the reset button yet again.

Dee’s Good Deed

Dee comes rushing into Paddy’s Pub, interrupting Dennis and Charlie. For the past three days, they’ve been watching Mac and Frank play a Call of Duty-esque VR game. None of that matters to Dee, since she found her Mr. Right (of the week). A stripper named Mike (Carter MacIntyre) then comes into the bar, revealing that after he slept with Dee, he realized she was his rock bottom. He knew just moments after, ahem, climax, he wanted to turn his life around and stop stripping. Dee is wounded but maintains her pride, and instead aims to be his ‘rock,” helping him make his Channing Tatum stripping lifestyle work.

Dee has been emotionally battered her entire life. She was told she was a mistake, even though her and Dennis are twins, and her friends have admittedly crossed the line one too many times while playing CharDee MacDennis. So for her to hear flat out that she’s someone’s rock bottom may have been far too low of a blow for her.

Dee really crosses a morality line in this episode (we’ll explain below), especially because she was under the guise of trying to help someone. She wanted Mike to be successful at a low-grade freelance position because she’s so bad at it herself. But because he initially wounded her with his “rock bottom” comment, she couldn’t help but pull the rug out from underneath him at the last moment. Being the most emotionally fragile of the group, it’s going to be hard for her to come back from this one.

Dennis the Daddy

The idea of Dee dating a stripper somehow puts the bug in Dennis’ ear that he should also become a stripper. He and Charlie discuss this after kicking back and watching Mac and Frank doing virtual missions in Fallujah. They openly discuss their own life traumas, including Charlie’s mother’s prostitution and Dennis being statutorily raped at 15 by the school librarian (who looked like Rick Moranis, according to Dee). Still, Dennis presses on in his odd sidequest of taking his clothes off for cash.

We’re treated to a fever dream from Mac watching Dennis dance like Magic Mike in his living room one time. Mac has been having flashbacks from playing the VR shooting game too much, all of them involving his absent convict father Luther. It makes for an odd dynamic when Dennis announces to Charlie that his stripper character is a father. Why? Because according to Dennis, young women want to sleep with their dads. He’s about to enter a party (with Charlie as “his boy”), but gets triggered upon seeing the guest list was nothing but elderly women. He can’t handle the group of “librarians” and backs out, his own PTSD creeping up on him.

While Dennis obviously has a wealth of issues, he takes it to strange new levels this week with all the father imagery. It felt slightly forced in order to keep up with the parental themes in the other plots, but judging by how mentally broken Dennis is, it felt appropriate to heap on some daddy issues to his already crippled psyche.

Clunky Crescendo

Dennis has another kind of forced moment when he wages a war on women after the old ladies at the party just wanted him to “take his d*ck out.” He’s wearing the duster from Season 3’s “The Gang Solves the North Korea Situation,” which Dennis referred to as “very sexual” at one time. Instead, he takes on a stripping persona called “Bad Dad,” as Charlie forever has his back. That means he has to literally maintain his back, taking care of blemishes and unsightly hair for Dennis’ stripping venture. (“Can we stop talking about trauma and cuts on people’s backs?” -Charlie)

So Dennis sets up a private strip session for sorority girls at Paddy’s Pub. Dee believes this is the perfect opportunity for her stripper friend Mike to do what he’s best at, and strip for all the lovely young ladies. She, along with Mike, Mac, and Frank just left support group meeting for (actual) veterans dealing with PTSD. Even though they mostly talked among themselves, most of their issues are out of the way for now. Dee is so confident in Mike’s stripping skills, she also promises to reunite him with his daughter, something he mentioned at the beginning of the episode.

The strip show begins with Cricket as Matthew McConaughey’s Magic Mike character, though Dennis admits the gnarled, flayed and burned Cricket looks more like Dallas Buyers Club McConaughey. Still, the show goes on with Dennis and Charlie as Bad Dad and The Boy. Charlie wields a lollypop made of cheese as Harry Chapin’s “Cats in the Cradle” plays as their stripper song. Dennis is incorrect. These sorority girls aren’t into dads, and he’s promptly booed off stage.

An Actual Rock Bottom

Finally, Mike goes out on stage, much to the crowd’s delight. However, it all comes crashing down when the girl who just had his thrusting crotch in his face is his daughter. There’s a terrible moment where the traumatized young girl shrieks, “My finger touched your assh*le!” Yikes. Why did that have to happen? Apparently it was all Dee’s doing. She got the chance to inflict a rock bottom onto someone else by finding Mike’s daughter and encouraging him to strip for her unknowingly. It was a disgusting act, one that even her gang members can’t believe she did. “I feel so great I don’t want to talk about it,” Dee says before swallowing her feelings back down.

The episode ends just as they’re about to discuss all their traumatic open wounds. Instead, they gulp it all away with myriad shots of alcohol. Though the journey we’ve taken with this crew has been nothing short of amusing, one wonders what really is their rock bottom. Is there ever a tipping point for this group that can justify their terrible natures so successfully? Only time will tell.

Next: 20 Of the Weirdest X-Men Stories Ever

Next week’s episode, “The Gang Tends Bar” sounds like a Valentine’s Day bottle episode. While the bar fills up with patrons, the gang gets distracted by a mystery crate in the alley. Make sure to tune in next Wednesday, February 22nd, at 10:00 p.m. on FXX for more Always Sunny hilarity.