Month: February 2025

Another week, another Going Dutch. This week, they celebrate Christmas in the Spring for stupid reasons. Let’s just get into it. But first, on Animal Control this week, Frank and Shred catch a penguin and Victoria and Patel drive a dog to Canada.

I actually watch Animal Control as a way to detox after watching Going Dutch. I can believe that Joel McHale is weirdly intense, animal control is just a kind of cop I don’t have to feel conflicted about watching on TV. It’s not like it’s a particularly good show or anything, it’s fine most weeks, but it’s at least a show that exists in a world that makes sense to me. I like that it cares about animal welfare, it can be funny to watch people chase after CGI animals.

Anyway. Here’s well over 2000 words on this week’s Going Dutch.

Dutch Notes

• Denis Leary is woken up by an entire Christmas situation outside his bedroom window, having apparently not noticed it setting up in the night. There’s live animals involved. You slept through this?
• Carolers walk past his window, singing: “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle door de nacht. Oh wat fijn het is te zijn,” and then something Leary talks over. This is nonsense. It just about scans but it’s a weirdly literal translation. We mostly don’t sing this song in Dutch, though there is a widely shared Dutch version easily available online.¹Which probably doesn’t clear legal, but still.
• Walking into work, Leary finds people blowing weird Swiss horns again, always with the horns, we don’t do horns, and Jan dressed like Sinterklaas, holding a big bag full of oranges. We never really associated oranges with Sinterklaas or Christmas where I’m from, more with Sint Maarten, but I know that’s a thing, a very regional thing, and that me being from Friesland paints my understanding of this country.
  • The oranges are a thing but they… should be mandarin oranges, they should be mandarijntjes,
• So it’s a weird combination of Sinterklaas and Christmas, on the Third Tuesday of Spring, got it.
• Jan explains why this is happening: “During Second World War, Stroopsdorf couldn’t celebrate Christmas because we were under enemy occupation. And after we got liberated, we decided to celebrate in spring instead. So now we celebrate Christmas twice a year. Twice Christmas.”
  • The Netherlands has no meaningful Christmas tradition before WW2. Sure, people probably celebrated it to some extent, but we had Sinterklaas, and life in pre-War Netherlands would not have had space for a second major gift-giving holiday only twenty days later. It’s only English and American influence AFTER WW2 that gets us to celebrate Christmas.
  • Sinterklaas as a celebration was not banned by the Nazis, the Nazis Nazified it, involving soldiers and the Jeugdstorm in things like the national intocht, the parade when Sinterklaas’ boat arrives in the country. The Nazis would’ve wanted you to celebrate Sinterklaas.
  • Americans often refer to Sinterklaas as “Dutch Christmas,” and though, sure, that’s an easy way to explain it through comparison, it’s not. It’s its own fucking thing. (Its own problematic thing.)
• When asked why he’s dressed “like a pope,” Jan explains he’s “Dutch Father Christmas, known as Sinterklaas.” Again, though, yes, they’re comparable, it’s its own thing. Jan, being a Dutch person, would either not refer to this as Christmas or be dressed as Santa Claus.
• Jan continues to explain that Sinterklaas distributes oranges and puts candy in children’s shoes, which Leary automatically extrapolates to “so you’re a fruit peddler, who’s got a foot fetish, is that the idea?”
  • One, your own Santa breaks into people’s houses and his reindeer discrimination is openly celebrated, throw no stones, American.
    • Jan adds “At least it’s not as idiotic as your Santa Claus, that grinning mascot for your country’s obesity and the whore to your corporations, yes, I said it, whore.” I agree on the corporate thing, though it’s not like we don’t use Sinterklaas in commercials, but come the fuck on, now we’re fatshaming Santa? Find better stones to throw.
  • Two, Americans have this sickening habit of automatically sexualising anything and everything they can associate with sex. You can’t post a picture or video that happens to include your feet any more without Americans and those melted by their brainrot cracking jokes about Onlyfans and Wikifeet. Your profoundly backwards prudishness is a disease, it’s destroying you, and it’s hurting the rest of us. Perish.
• Leary’s reaction to the explanation he asked for is to threaten to physically assault Jan with oranges. Great safe workplace you’ve got here. Captain Daughter explains to Jan that this happens because Leary hates Christmas. Sinterklaas is not Christmas.
• This is gonna be a problem with the entire episode, so I’m just gonna end it at this bullet point: The intermingling of Sinterklaas with Christmas iconography drives me fucking insane. These things mean things. I don’t mind a winter-themed sweater or two, but candy canes? Reindeer? A Christmas Carol? Tell me where exactly Dickens mentions the steamboat, motherfucker.
• Captain Daughter tells us Leary will try to cancel Christmas, so Jan says Leary “will take away Christmas, like the fuzzy green grump of legend.” I don’t think we really care about the Grinch outside of one or two movies. I saw Grinch merch at the Primark this year, not seen a single one of those sweaters out in the wild.
• Joe Morton is back, he loves Christmas, and will be portraying Santa at some point soon.
• Meanwhile, Denis Leary surprises Captain Daughter by… not actively hating Christmas, but wearing a cheap Santa hat and greeting her with a “ho ho ho.” Captain Daughter is confused, asking if there’s a gun pointing at him right now, but then Catherine Tate walks in — clearly he’s doing this because the local head of the Chamber of Commerce / owner of the local brothel / Leary’s girlfriend wants him to.
  • Once again, the Chamber of Commerce does not have that kind of position here, and though we are indeed more open to sex work than many other places, in reality, the Catherine Tate character would be considered the owner of something other local business owners would consider an unpleasant nuisance.
• There are now two locals, Jan and Catherine Tate²Neither are played by Dutch actors, of course., actively condoning this absolute buffoonery with their presence.
• Captain Daughter expresses typical American discomfort at the mention of her father’s sex life, which is followed by the following exchange between Leary and Tate: “She’s so repressed.” “I know. It’s her mom.” The fucking audacity.
• Real Dutch license plates in the parking garage.
• Tate’s accent work, a lot of weird S sounds, really bugging me this week.
• I’ve written over a thousand words and I’m only seven minutes in. Oy oy oy.
• Captain Daughter goes to Catherine Tate’s house, which you can tell is in the Netherlands because it looks like an Irish style of architecture with hastily planted tulips in the backyard.
• Missed opportunity for a Samson en Gert joke.
• “I rang the doorbell but you weren’t answering.” “So you decided to surprise me through the back door.” “Hm.” You are your father’s daughter.” Awful joke, truly dogshit joke, which I’m only typing here because, one, it’s not the back door, it’s the backyard, and two, god-fucking-damnit, it’s so normal here to just walk into someone’s house or backyard if you know them. I don’t like it, either, but this is not a weird thing for Captain Daughter to do, and it’s profoundly weird for Catherine Tate to be annoyed by it.
  • Tate doesn’t get on with Captain Daughter, which she reiterates repeatedly, because this show fully believes every Dutch person is either direct to the point of obscene rudeness or a flamboyant homosexual.
• Captain Daughter gets Tate a gift for Twice Christmas and tells her exactly what it is before she can open it. Is it a Dutch thing to thing gift spoilers are rude and weird? Because I think that’s rude and weird.
• Captain Daughter is trying to get to know Catherine Tate in that weird, overly-polite people-pleasing American way. This would land poorly on us, but we would try to be polite to you about it. We would think what Tate says to Captain Daughter, sure, but we’d also offer you coffee or tea and put out some cheese cubes.
• “We are making venison.” Deer meat signals to me mostly that a person is posher than this Catherine Tate character is, but okay. I think she’d say deer meat, though.
  • Please follow me on a journey.
    • Oh my god, the deer is still currently alive.
    • She’s asked Captain Daughter to kill it and handed her a knife.
    • Absolutely not a thing this Tate character would do.
    • We have butcher shops, the supermarket carries this stuff.
    • I think I have this meat knife. From IKEA, though.
    • Oh, good god, she stops Captain Daughter before she can.
    • She absolutely would have, because she’s an insane American people-pleaser.
    • This character would not do this prank, pranks are the opposite of the directness she’s supposed to practice, it’s utterly insincere, and I do actually hate pranks.
    • But I did, I did go on a journey here for a second.
• More nonsense Christmas song lyrics, this time for Deck the Halls: “Zie het huis met dennentakken / fa-la la-la la-la la-la.” Way too literal.
• Joe Morton makes a decent Santa.
• Hanging out on the base even though in a previous episode he was accused of being a spy is “little Dutch boy” Geert, who has asked Santa for “a body pillow for humping,” in Santa’s words. I’ve met enough little dudes who, yeah, they would ask for that. Fair enough. Don’t like Joe Morton telling him “if you were dog they’d have neutered you for less.” It’s already weird enough that there’s a randy 12-year old running around on this base, don’t tell him you’d have him neutered.
• Captain Daughter crashes Tate’s Twice Christmas party with no gift, which she brings up because she’s desperate to prove she’s not a people-pleaser, but then still hands her a gift. She then just walks in.
  • Not a Dutch thing, more a me thing, but if I’d communicated my distaste for a person’s presence in my life as thoroughly as Tate had done to Captain Daughter, and they refused to take no for an answer, I would not allow her entry into my house and would remove her if she took it anyway, which nobody would think was unreasonable.
  • Everyone at Tate’s party looks Irish.
• Dana was invited to the party, and we hear some Dutch from her conversation, “dat is super leuk,” pronounced as poorly as may be possible, to the extent that it’s the only subtitled Dutch in the episode — the subtitlers have gone for “That’s super look,” because they thought she was speaking English. Her next line, “Oh, hoe gaat het!” is left unsubtitled.
• Dinner at Tate’s house is gourmetten, which she pronounces like she has several entire bricks in her mouth. Y’all know about gourmetten? Little pieces of meat on either a plate or little pans? This is something they get right on paper, this is a thing we do. Like, we did this in December, like we do most years.
  • The plate she puts down is insane, though, it’s huge slabs of meat all in a pile. Just get twenty little packages from the Albert Heijn, what the fuck is this.
• Captain Daughter: “Are we guests at this dinner or are we working it?” Surely there are contexts Americans know about where you cook the food at the table. Maybe Captain Daughter has never been to Korean barbecue.
• Captain Daughter: “The whole spread is… Bad. Yuck.” Actively hateful. Worse than her dad. You force your way into somebody’s home and start hating on their culture’s holiday dinner tradition? It’s not even that fucking weird?? Captain Daughter, you are from the home of the turducken.
• One of the party guests is called Beatrix, a name she shares with former Queen Beatrix. I’m sure it happens, but I feel like we don’t really name our kids after the royal family, whose names are far too posh for most people. Beatrix apparently “makes chairs that are uncomfortable for people to sit in,” because “human comfort is not the reason for an object to exist.” I might’ve gone to art school with Beatrix, I think I might-a sat in one of her chairs once. Not really a mindset the Dutch have, though.
• “When I place my butt on one of Beatrix’s chairs,” says another mysteriously-accented guest, “the beating life of its creator’s enters me.” Tate’s guests are just art weirdoes, maybe. Now she’s in the art scene, too? Why is this one character instead of seven?
• Here’s the actual gourmet setup, and, okay, fine, I would accept this if it were in, like, a commercial.
• Captain Daughter naturally slams her hands into the burning hot pan-less gourmetstel, which is a different model than the ones in the middle of the table, weirdly positioned on the corner of the table where only Tate would really be able to reach it, and clearly just there for Captain Daughter to hurt herself with. This is just hacky.
• Danny Pudi’s B-plot is about using all the resources of the American army to spy on his ex-wife’s new boyfriend, which is just pathetic and sucks, but I don’t gotta cover it, so.
• Miserable.
• You know, they never bring up Zwarte Piet.

• 1
  Which probably doesn’t clear legal, but still.
• 2
  Neither are played by Dutch actors, of course.

This week on Going Dutch, a general gets promoted, Denis Leary wants to get promoted, and Major Shah attempts to get back in the dating pool. You could write this in a fever dream and do a better job.

Meanwhile, on Animal Control, there’s some Super Bowl nonsense, and a prank war escalates. Elsbeth is about a murder witnessed only by the 2005 Reed Richards from across the pond on one of those international camera-based art installations. Haven’t seen it yet, but this week’s Severance is probably another really good one. Oh, and Yellowjackets is back.

Anyway, none of this week’s Going Dutch involves anything Dutch, so no Dutch Notes this week. Huzzah.

Non-Dutch Notes

• If you were interested in this show because Danny Pudi is on it, but were then put off by my notes, first of all, two of you have thanked me for my service, thank you, but also, this show massively underserves him. Even when he gets a spotlight B-plot, what little he gets to do is not playing to his strengths at all, our boy can go so much weirder than he gets to do here. Not to whitewash him, but this part should really be played by a Griffin Newman type.
• Multiple people in this one express modern sexual attitudes — Jan talks about his kinks, Major Shah’s date turns out to have a boyfriend and they’re into cuckolding — but it always feels like it’s being written by 47-year olds from Ohio who heard young people talk about sex once and thought that was great fodder for making fun of. Every main character is always a huge, American prude about everything.

I’d like to see this through to the end of the season, but I gotta admit, this is rough. I actively dread new episodes of this show. Do I keep going? What is the value of life if this is what I’m doing with it? Is television dead and is Going Dutch dancing on its grave?

This week on Going Dutch, the base puts on its quarterly war games so Leary can pretend he’s a Real Man and that any war America engages in is still about doing the right thing instead of protecting the financial interests of the ruling class. At the end of the war games, they notice a drone flying over them and decide to hassle a local to make sure he’s not a spy.

Meanwhile, on Animal Control, everyone is very passionate about trivia night, and Patel realises he’s hot as a bartender. I… do watch better TV than this, I promise. Check out Severance if you haven’t. Paradise has a good reveal at the end of its pilot. I probably like Elsbeth more than you do, but still, that’s good TV.

Dutch Notes

• To be fair, this does look flat enough to be the Netherlands.
• Leary is a big WW2-head because it’s, quote, “the greatest war fought by the greatest generation, against the greatest enemy that we have ever crushed like a bug.” Look, every country does this, but America regularly overstates its role in WW2. I don’t know how it would’ve shaken out without them, but it was very much a team effort that they waited a long time to get in on. Please read a history book.
• You may recall the previous time Going Dutch engaged with WW2: Leary referring to the Netherlands as “the country that ratted out Anne Frank.” Nuance! Not spotted in the area!
• “When I was a kid, there were Nazis everywhere, okay?” As somebody living in 2025, this is the first time I’ve found Leary relatable.
• “When I was a kid, I’d go to the Oktoberfest every year, just to see if I could see one of these drunk German bastards slip a sieg heil.” First of all, don’t have him say “when I was a kid” twice so soon after each other, find a different way to put it. Second, though I do also relate to this sense of paranoia, here it just comes out as violently xenophobic. It’s giving “Liam Neeson with a bat at night” more than anything.
• Captain Daughter: “In the Netherlands? The biggest threat to the United States is how much better their Kit Kat is.” Okay, look, we dooooooo actually have Nazis. Same as you, same as anywhere. Have you looked at the news? Your shadow president is one, remember? We have ’em like that, too. They are friendly, though, so not much of a threat to the almighty United States, no. (I’ll take the thing about the Kit Kat. She’s right.)
• Upon learning the base organises war games on a quarterly basis, Leary decides to run one, completely impromptu, the next day, because apparently American army bases run completely and exclusively on the whims of the loudest jackass in camo they can find. This seems inefficient, and thus, very American.
• Unfortunately Danny Pudi’s Major Shah playing “the unpredictability of the enemy” does not touch upon anything Dutch and so I won’t really cover it here.
• The pilot of the drone that flies over the base is a known entity to the base — he’s “a little Dutch boy” called Geert. They pronounce it badly, but that is a normal Dutch name. The base is very pleasantly friendly about his drone’s presence, and so naturally Leary declares him an enemy spy.
• We finally get something to work with re: placing Stroopsdorf — Leary says the Battle of Otterlo happened “right down the road,” which means that, even though I’d twigged them as further down south, they’re in Gelderland. Sure.
• The person who opens the door at Geert’s house is a Russian-accented adult man who claims to be his chess teacher. This is never elaborated upon any further, it’s just there to feed Leary’s paranoia — the next person to come to the door is indeed a little boy. Doesn’t sound Dutch, though, and dresses like a slightly posh English lad.
• “Hey, Geert, where are your parents?” “The dentist.” “Parents are at a joint dental appointment in a country with socialised medicine? Yeah, likely story, pal.” Truly don’t even understand this one.
• On the verge of making yet another child cry, his primary personality trait, Leary finally gets a confession out of Geert — he’s secretly been collecting fashion magazines, because “Zendaya makes me feel things in my body.” Just a baffling turn for the child spy plot to take — the boy is horny.
• “Geert, what’s going on?” “Parents are here!” Why would his parents’ first line to him be in English? I know we have a reputation for all switching to English the moment we detect a foreigner, but to your kid?
• “Who are you?” “We’re the US Navy,” Leary lies. These people live next to an army base, these strangers are in army camo with patches that say “US ARMY” on them, and previous episodes gave me the impression life in Stroopsdorf revolves around this army base. I feel like you could get a good three minutes on the news out of them hassling your boy and lying to you about it.
• “Maybe it’s time to admit that here in the Netherlands, we’re not surrounded by enemies.” “Okay, well, you’re just lucky you weren’t here in the early 1930s when an apparently harmless, failed Austrian painter…” This whole man just sucks.
• This is a bad sign for an antique store. Bad signs exist in the world, I guess. I don’t think we have combination antique stores / WW2 museums, though. Why would that be a thing? And since 1944? Did they just open a store for military things and never restock? The whole thing plays exclusively as a museum.
• Leary’s been wanting to go to the antique store all episode to see a gun a “General Patton” once owned.
• Obviously, because the episode needs a win for the show’s loudest jackass, the building full of WW2 things turns out to have a Nazi memorabilia room, because it’s owned by a fucking Nazi. Upon discovery, the location card rebrands from “Antique store / WWII museum” to “Antique store / Secret Nazi shrine.” It’s… kind of still a WW2 museum, though. Incompetent.
• Leary has a moment of growth where he embraces that his constant need for an Enemy to pursue exists mostly inside himself and not entirely within reason, which is then immediately undercut by Captain Daughter’s reveal that the museum has a Nazi shrine.
• The man who owns the museum is apparently “Helmut von Fursterburg,” “the Butcher of Baden.” Of course he’s called Helmut.
• Leary is excited he gets to “fight the final battle of World War II,” and “punch a Nazi.” Look, I’m always on board with punching Nazis, but if this geriatric is the “Butcher of Baden,” he needs to be tried in a court of law and sentenced to whatever we’ve internationally established he deserves for his sins. Also, the final battle of World War II is getting everyone to remember why the Nazis were bad after it slips out of living memory.
• “Probably the final Nazi. I’m gonna be in the history books! Wow!” There are several Nazis still alive, and though I, again, agree they should be dead, I also think this man is an absolute fucknuts American-brained idiot.
• Here’s how this ends: He changes into an aesthetically more WW2-inspired uniform, they all walk into the museum, look for him, and remember he’s a very, very old man. Captain Daughter gives him his Iron Cross keychain bathroom key back and announces she’s pissed on his Nazi stuff. Faced with six soldiers and Leary about to punch him, the man promptly collapses from a heart attack, which means he’s wounded and they need to save his life. Trying to resuscitate him, Leary shatters every rib he has, caving in the chest of an old dead man. At least prove he’s a Nazi first.
• At the end, Papadakis summarises what he perceives as Leary’s take on what it means to be a soldier: “All these things you’ve been teaching me. Stealing tanks, punching old Germans, prostitution, never datin’ ’em. That’s what it means to be a soldier, right?” Leary demands he covers this up.
• There are a lot of Nazis in the world around us. They are everywhere, and anyone can be one. But in the real world, in my 2025, the ones who have an effect on my life, the ones I’m scared of? They look and behave a lot more like Denis Leary than like geriatric seniors.
• How do you fuck up “the episode where they kill a Nazi” this bad.