Whoa, within the first minute of this episode Jason already has his hands full. Mike’s dog-sitting, and the dog is out of control (sidenote: Jason seems to hate dogs, which is completely inconsistent with his overall character), and Carol’s in a funk because she heard from an unreliable source that the boy she likes said she looked like a gummy bear. But their problems are no match for Jason—aka superdad—because he’s putting out fires right, left and centre.

Maggie, however, isn’t so sure Jason’s actually capable of sorting through the kids’ plethora of daily problems. Surely, Jason must’ve missed something in the process and the kids actually need their mom. Right? Wrong. It seems what we learn in this episode is that Maggie might be a) a bit of a control freak and b) a little bit jealous of Jason’s success on the home front.

Maggie really starts to feel unnecessary when Superdad single-handedly deals with the fallout from Mike’s dog sitting failure. You see, Mike lost the dog he was sitting, then tried to replace it with a different coloured dog that he dyed to match the colour of the original dog, which was fine until it rained and the owner realized it was a different dog. But in a shocking turn of events, this actually made the owner crazy happy because it turns out that, like Jason, she also hated her dog!

But then we get to the straw that really broke the camel’s back for Maggie: Carol blows right past her mom and goes straight to Jason with more boy troubles. Maggie finally unleashes a torrent of pent-up resentment and jealousy. I think her exact words were that he was ‘edging her out’ of her territory. Yikes.

Jason, being a psychiatrist, quickly get to the heart of the matter—that Maggie is actually upset because she feels a little bit guilty for going back to work and kind of wanted Jason to fail a little bit in the parental department. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but Maggie is able to see what Jason’s saying, they have their heart to heart, and all is good in Seaver land once again.  All felt particularly right in the world for me, as the Seavers were back to resolving issues in their kitchen, which just felt like a return to true Growing Pains formula.

At the end of this episode, I’m left wondering:   

• Aren’t gummy bears kinda cute? I think I’d take it as a compliment someone thought I looked like a gummy bear. 
• Would it be fantastic or completely awful to be married to a psychiatrist? One of my friend’s mom’s was a psychotherapist and I always thought she was trying to look into my soul, but that probably says more about me than her. 
• Once again, at what point will Ben be involved in a legitimate storyline?