Modern Family, "Egg Drop": adapt and adopt

Quick Take: Modern Family, “Egg Drop”
"Am I worried that they might write it all down and just do it themselves? Quite frankly, I hadn't thought about it until just now..." - Phil

Review: Modern Family, “Egg Drop”
(S0312) It’s business as usual at the Dunphy house as Claire gears up for a competition with her dad while Phil fumbles his way through another gimmick for work.

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Luke and Manny are assigned the infamous egg drop for their class project, but instead of being able to discover the joys of gravity in the curriculum-appropriate way, Claire gets wind that Jay is lending a hand, and so commandeers the project herself. Even though they’re both bluffing each other, they arrange to see whose contraption works best by the end of the day.

The end of the day turns out to be too late for Phil however, who single-handedly organizes, introduces, and leads an investors’ presentation for his new partnership. If the bite of having his partners bail on him wasn’t bad enough, Hayley and Gloria are also in absentia, skipping out on their choreographed roles and ruining Phil’s presentation for a mani-pedi. Hayley isn’t worried though, because she thinks that Phil places Gloria on a pedestal and won’t get mad at her. When Phil literally places Gloria on a pedestal in order to sweep up confetti, she over Phil’s not being angry with her, which leads to a totally baffling reconciliation.

Mitchell and Cameron are house-bound this episode as they host a future teen-mom looking for parents to adopt her son. Not wanting to miss their opportunity, the husbands each turn on their over-embellished charm, which seems to work for them. Teen-Mom makes some equally-exaggerated promises by the end of their meeting, but when Mitchell leaves her and Cam alone to acquire the celebratory cider, she can’t help but go back on them. A lingering comment pushes Cam to sing to T.M. without Mitchell’s accompaniment, but his lyrics – though apparently well-sung – move her so deeply that she decides to keep her unborn son.

When Claire and Jay each test their kids’ projects to the same results, they decide to extend the drop. Luke and Manny are observably upset, and the three-storey walk gives the competitive father-daughter duo time to talk. They think that the boys wanted to do the project on their own, but when they come back down to talk to them, Manny breaks from the pressure and reveals that he and Luke orchestrated the competition guise in order to get out of doing the assignment. They were all competing for second-place, however, when Alex reveals the "obvious" way to protect the egg, by using plastic-bag parachutes and a bendy-straw shock-absorber

Despite the simple formula that underlies most of each season, the show continues to take new shapes and forms that match the members of the Modern Family together in a way that rarely disappoints. A simple plan between Luke and Manny managed to carry most of the “Egg Drop,” and if Cam and Mitch’s efforts are any indication, there’s a new family member on the way by season’s end for more than one episode to be built around. And that's not to mention the plethora of guest-stars, most recently last week's return of Benjamin Bratt as Manny's biological father and Gloria's ex, Javier.