The Middle Visits Disney World As Only The Middle Can

There's a very good, very obvious reason that so many sitcoms eventually send their casts to Disney World: Disney owns ABC. (It also owns Touchstone, a producer of non-ABC sitcoms that went to Disney World, like Golden Girls and Blossom.) And still, I was kind of bummed out when I learned that even The Middle would be sending the Hecks to the park. It's not that I have anything against Disney or its resorts: one of the most fun vacations my family ever took was when my parents took my sister and me to Disney World in 2007, when the youngest of us was twenty-five. It's that the Hecks are not...Disney World people. Fortunately, the show found a way to stay true to its characters even with the change in scenery.

The Heckishness of the Hecks' trip to Disney World starts with the way it actually comes about. In the season's penultimate episode (let's count this week's two-parter as a single finale), Sue enters a Hands On A Hard Body contest sponsored by the car dealership that formerly employed her mother, Frankie. Defying all her own history, Sue actually wins! But the prize isn't a car: it's a car trip, to Disney World. So, already, the win feels like a loss, and the prize is kind of a letdown. Disney World is fun, but you can't drive to college in it.

Then, the actual trip is a shitshow. Despite Frankie's attempt to rally everyone to be vacation winners -- their least Heck selves -- by changing their outlook and instituting a behaviour-modification safe word ("Orlando!"), the twenty-hour drive gets extended by eight hours so that Brick can go meet his online girlfriend in North Carolina, though before this encounter can occur, Sue gets rattled trying to navigate a drive-thru and damages the driver's-side door so badly that it will no longer open. The evening ends with the Hecks getting chased out of the house by the girlfriend's hillbilly parents (the perfectly cast Courtney Gains and, of course, Dale Dickey); and the "Orlando!"-est moment of the episode -- Mike deciding that Sue should be the one to drive them into the actual Orlando city limits -- is undercut by the reveal that when Frankie redeemed their prize online, she actually bought them tickets to DisneyLAND. Is the park in California better than the one in Florida? Definitely not. Would that drive at least have obviated even the possibility of the disastrous Greenville interlude? Yes. Yes, it would.

The latter half of the finale two-parter suggests the tension between what Disney overlords wanted to include in the episode and what the show's actual producers knew a Heck trip to Disney World would entail.

Disney: A kindly Guest Services dude honouring the wrong tickets.

The Middle: Sue immediately derails any fun anyone might have hoped to have by passing out at the sight of Cinderella's Castle; Brick takes more than an hour to decide what kind of embroidery he wants on his Mickey ears hat; Sue's pre-planned line-beating strategies come to nothing, plus she gets injured again.

Disney: Guest Services gets the Hecks a baller hotel suite.

The Middle: The suite is SO NICE that the Hecks -- who burned the whole previous day with their various misadventures -- accidentally sleep until 3 PM and have to race out of there before they get charged for another day; their exit is so hasty that they barely have time to steal toiletries (but they manage to, don't worry).

Disney wins overall, as Disney always does: Mike and Frankie have a romantic meal in the fake Paris at EPCOT Center; the kids manage to be nice to each other long enough to go on a bunch of rides together; everyone reunites in time for fireworks (and they get a pretty killer spot to watch them, on a bridge and without anyone near them, as NEVER HAPPENS). But the episode still ends with the Hecks sniping at each other as they make their way back to Indiana in their newly fucked-up car. It may be called The Magic Kingdom, but not even magic could turn the Hecks functional. THANK GOD.