Posted by Dustin on 01.04.2012 at 8:44 pm

“Parenthood” returned last night with Zeke pressuring all the families to take a road trip to see his 86 year old mother. Zeke was feeling a little guilty not having seen her in awhile, and she hurt her hip recently, so he was fearing time wasn’t on his side. It was her birthday, so he orchestrated a caravan of Bravermans to see her. Nobody understood what it was really about though . . .

Unfortunately right before they were to leave, Max blew up at Kristina and called her a bitch when she turned off his videogame as it was time to go. Her punishment was that he couldn’t go on the trip, which meant she couldn’t go, and neither could Nora. Adam wanted to figure out some other punishment, knowing it would freak Zeke out, which it did. However Kristina said she never follows through with Max’s punishments, so this time she was. Good for her! Of course it didn’t last that long. Max eventually apologized and made nice, so she decided to fly them all down to Grandma’s to meet the others there. Do we think Max has really learned anything? I fear Max has just learned if he sucks it up and apologizes when he does something wrong . . . he’ll get out of his next few punishments. Well at least she made the small steps in actually sticking to her guns for awhile.

The road trip, of course, was almost a disaster. None of the kids really wanted to go, they were only doing it for Zeke. They didn’t understand why it was such a big deal to their dad, as none of them seemed to have fond memories of their grandma. Their mom had to explain to them how much this meant to him, because Zeke has never in his life been able to please his mom. She’s basically always found fault with him. At one point the kids decided to turn around and go home, but they did end up at Grandma’s house in the end.

I loved the parts of the road trip featuring Crosby in the back seat of Julia and Joel’s car with the kids. He was such a big kid and having so much fun with them, and clearly annoying the hell out of Julia who was trying to write a legal brief. It was great because every time he cracked a joke and annoyed Julia, we saw that Joel was holding in his laughter!

It wouldn’t be an episode of “Parenthood” without something awkward happening. Drew walked in on his mom and Mark having adult alone time at the very beginning of the show. They didn’t see him, and he had to endure a lengthy car trip with his mom and picturing her doing the nasty all the way. When she found out she was of course horrified.

The previews for next week have Sarah confronting Mark about how he mentioned having a baby with her, but then never spoke of it again. I have a bad feeling of what is to come! Jason Ritter was only supposed to be on for part of the season, so I see his being written off fairly soon with this episode being the catalyst. Of course perhaps things behind the scenes have changed and NBC plans to keep him? I don’t know, I haven’t read anything about if as of late. He was supposedly having a new show at NBC developed for him when he signed on to do another stint on “Parenthood.”