Callbacks

Last night’s King of the Hill (yes, I watch it instead of Bob & Doug) was one of their better recent episodes, a solid and funny story about Hank that actually told us something new about how he relates to his father, his friends and his family. But even if it hadn’t been a particularly good episode, I’d probably have been favourably disposed toward it because it had so many callbacks to earlier episodes. It was full of references to things that were established in the first few seasons of the show but haven’t been mentioned since: Dale’s gay dad, the generic army-guy nicknames of Cotton’s war buddies, Luanne’s skill as a mechanic, Hank’s stepmother Didi (who hasn’t been seen on the show since approximately 200-ought-2). Sure, it had its share of continuity errors, like forgetting that they did a whole episode about Hank’s dad wanting a burial plot, but it ended with a joke that went all the way back to the first season: in some of the earliest episodes, Hank would end the show by riding up on a lawnmower and giving us a PSA about some issue raised in the story we just saw (an issue that nobody except Hank cares about), and in this episode he rode up in exactly the same way, in animation that might well have been re-traced from the first season’s tags. (Note: this kind of fourth-wall breaking is a little different from other examples mentioned in the earlier post, since this occurs after the episode proper is over, and is the equivalent of an actor stepping forth after the show to deliver a message.) It was like a little nod to people who have been watching the show since the first year.