Season four’s last major flaw is both its most frustrating and its least damaging. In “Borderline Personalities,” George Sr.’s first focus episode and the second overall for the season, George Sr. and Lucille hatch a plan to beat hated rival Stan Sitwell (Ed Begley Jr.) on the contract for a massive wall on the US/Mexico border. The wall and its status (who is building it, whether it is getting built at all, who supports it and who stands against it) becomes one of the major factors in season four’s plot. And it goes nowhere. Part of this is attributable to George Sr.’s episodes suffering the worst of the season’s pacing problems, but mostly the wall exists in the space between the world around the Bluths and the Bluths’ personal development, where it gets stuck.
Funny things happen because of the wall (the series’ climax involves a literal horde of angry Mongols stiffed on their wall construction fee), but nothing ever happens with the wall itself. George Sr.’s crisis of masculinity and his brother Oscar’s increased confidence are partially connected to the wall and feature some of the season’s best moments of writing and acting (Jeffery Tambor nails the two brothers, who remain themselves even while taking on each other’s character traits), but the wall itself remains a dead end. The wall drifts out of season four’s narrative before a brief resurgence of importance in “Blockheads,” which marks the only time a directly-wall-related plot point is funny without assistance from one of the Bluths’ character arcs or a separate plot point (the moral of the story? If you hire a literal horde of Mongols, pay them the money they have earned. And also probably do not refer to them as a horde. The Bluths have issues with race). Otherwise, it is a dead end. More good comes of it than the pacing, and the issue it is based on (US/Mexico immigration) is more timeless than the more specific and dated political commentary elsewhere in the season, but it comes across as a missed opportunity in what is otherwise a pretty strong season.
And that is true. Arrested Development season four is, for all its flaws, kind of fantastic. This is due to a few specific reasons, but they all trace back to the thing that made Arrested Development great in the first place; its characters. The Bluths are a triumph of writing and acting. By rights, they should be some of the most hatable television characters this side of Clay Davis and Joffrey Baratheon. They are, by and large, terrible people. When they are not impossibly ignorant of their immense societal privilege, they flaunt it. They are so casually racist that they wonder if the Mexican community thinks Cinco de Mayo is anything other than a day to come in and work for them, and create a holiday of theirs that is specifically designed to destroy Cinco de Mayo and get their servants back to work, Cinco de Quatro (where everyone ultimately ends up and most of season four’s plot points come to a head). They are an arrogant, corrupt collection of nitwits and jerks whose bad behavior starts to sink into their generally decent kids in a big way, and they all inspire incredible amounts of empathy.
Each Bluth receives their own episode or two in the spotlight, and they spend most of that time doing increasingly terrible, arrogant, selfish things. And more often than not, these terrible, arrogant, selfish things blow up in their faces and leave them even more alone and damaged than they were before.
Lucille may be a criminal mastermind and a strong contender for the coveted “Most Abusive Fictional Mother Since Margaret White of Carrie” award, but she finds herself abandoned and written off by everyone. She plays a terrifying villain in Tobias’ musical adaptation of Fantastic Four, because she is as bad a person in real life as her character. And this has been eating away at her in a way that she is running out of ways to deny. Michael, free of the position of “the Good Bluth Son” spirals into over-possessive terror at George Michael’s increasing independence and adulthood. When the opportunity to find success as the producer of a Ron Howard-directed biopic of the Bluths presents itself to him, Michael happily cuts a series of deals with his estranged family for their life rights that he subsequently reneges on when their awful behavior manifests more openly than his own, in a desperate attempt to be his own, successful man and impress a beautiful woman (Isla Fisher).
The Bluths dig their own graves and seal their own fates, and as awful as they are, their occasional hints of decency and the overwhelming amounts of isolation and despair they bring on themselves inspire genuine sympathy. The Bluths are horrible people, and frequently get worse through the season (even George Michael, who discovers a great command of the Bluth family lying ability). But despite all the pain, all the absurdity and all the despair they bring on themselves, they just keep trying to find a way out and find themselves. That is understandable, and to some extent even likable. It is a triumph of characterization.
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