Category: Analysis & Commentary

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.

This week’s Going Dutch actually engages with its setting again — the base, who are used to playing basketball, invite themselves to play a game of korfbal against the Dutch. Korfbal, we are told by the local effeminate homosexual, isn’t, as Leary and Pudi believe, “basketball without everything that makes basketball good,” but “a real man’s game.” In the B-story, Captain Daughter reconnects with her high-school sports alter ego “The Rocket.”

Meanwhile, on this week’s Animal Control, the ongoing story about them having sex for profit honestly pleasantly bisexual turn, a raccoon turns out to be a very charming squatter, and a fundraiser for Animal Control accidentally turns into a roast.

Dutch Notes

• They consistently spell it “korfball” with two L’s instead of “korfbal.” They pronounce it that way, too. Come on, man.
• The game involves a “korfboy” who blows “this big midwinter horn” after every point. And during the breaks, we’re told, he plays jazz on the horn. Look, I’m aware of korfbal, but I don’t go to sports. This isn’t a thing, right? This feels like we’re getting mixed up with far more Germanic cultures again.
• Euthanasia joke. Apparently we’re a country “so full of quitters,” and you can extrapolate the rest of the crude shit he says from there.
• Corporal Papadakis, the heavier-set soldier whose weight Leary insists on making fun of constantly, says to Catherine Tate that he believes “age is nothing but a number.” Her reply to this is “Age is a number, and that fact is not in dispute.” I get that Dutch directness comes across a certain way, we’ve been over this, but are they just writing her like she’s a Vulcan now? Mindboggling.
• Apparently “everyone in town” is talking about the korfbal game, because they’re excited to see Leary lose. I’ve never lived in a small town that has something like this nearby, and I understand that life in, say, a factory town does tend to orbit around the factory — but this really feels like an American writer incapable of understanding that life in their proximity somehow does not revolve around the Americans. There are other ways to get here.
• The Catherine Tate character continues to not make sense to me. The “head of the Chamber of Commerce” generally isn’t a thing, but I also don’t get why she’s spending so much time on the base. A lot of this would work better if she was the mayor, or on the gemeenteraad.
• Colonel Papadakis turns out to be good at the kinds of moves the Americans are struggling with, which is surprising to Captain Daughter because Colonel Papadakis is a heavier-set fellow.
• I swear he used to pronounce it correctly: Jan can’t pronounce his own name this week.
• The korfboy — korfjongen? I don’t know what they imagine we call this kid — yells “Korf!!” and then blows his Swiss horn. His pronunciation of “korf” is alright. At halftime, Captain Daughter tells the korfboy “blow that thing one more time and I’m gonna shove it down your throat.” She apparently thinks shit talking is an acceptable thing to do to a 10-year old boy who is part of the local ceremony of this game, and is then apologetic when he starts crying, which, come on, this kid would just tell the American to fuck off. His horn jazz is alright, but not a thing that exists at all.
• The audience at the game is full of people holding Dutch flags, faces covered in Dutch flag makeup. Several of them are upside down or weird in some other way. This also isn’t really a thing we do outside of, like, major sports events, and wouldn’t be happening at this extremely minor America vs the Dutch match in a local gym. I appreciate how turned off they are by Team Base’s chant of “Kill the Dutch,” though. Way too intense. Calm down. Go touch grass.
• “Hup, hup, hup, Holland!” Incorrect. It’s two hups.
• By halftime, Team Base have scored 13 times, which I don’t think is how korfbal works? There has, at this point, been a lot of talk about how they don’t have any way of learning a foreign sport in an hour, and now they’re mostly just playing basketball?
• Catherine Tate indicates that she doesn’t appreciate Team Base’s American approach to korfbal, explaining, quote, “the violence, the woman running in circles, unequal to the men on her team. This is not korfbal.” The American approach really isn’t meeting the game where it’s at — they’re treating a friendly game with the local community like it’s the fucking Super Bowl. Do you have to be this intense? What do they put in the water over there, jeezus.
• Like, this game is so casual and friendly that there’s a pregnant woman on the absolute brink of labour on the team. What are we even doing here.
• In the end they take a dive because I guess Denis Leary is dating the Catherine Tate character and they’d break up if he continued playing it American-style. They bench Papadakis, who switches teams. Even as somebody who’s not a sportso, I would find that unacceptable.
• At the same time she’s apparently dating Denis Leary, Catherine Tate is “having sex with” Bram the baker. Leary finds this out on the field. This isn’t even a Dutch note, it’s an healthy personal and sexual relationships note: People you’re having sex with should for the sake of their own health probably know you’re having sex with other people. She’s apparently having sex with eleven people. Not in the context of the brothel she runs, I don’t think, she’s just poly. Extremely bad business to not be upfront with him about that. Sus behaviour.
• “So you’re a baker.” “Puff pastries and profiteroles.” No real baker can afford to limit themselves to just two types of pastry. What are we, French?
• This article in the picture is machine translated. We don’t use phrases like “ugly American aggression” or “local heroes” that literally translated.
• Look, real, actual comedy could be derived from this premise. The Americans are really intense, and go way too far, they should face literally any kind of pushback for this, and then have to adjust to local expectations. But the only pushback is a woman threatens to withhold sex from the biggest, loudest man, and Team Base’s reaction, to half-heartedly play “poorly,” is immediately undercut by Papadakis switching teams and just beating them in the American style. The moral of the story is “yeah, America is the best.” Sucks shit, man.
• Showrunner Joel Church-Cooper, please just reach out. You need a Dutch consultant. I could be that person. I’ll work for whatever you legally have to pay me.

Yesterday was Friday, which means the day before was Thursday, which means another evening of Fox’s dreary Thursday comedy line-up has aired. Animal Control had an A-plot about Joel McHale being kindly asked not to bone a rich lady but doing it anyway, and a B-plot about Ravi Patel getting asked to throw the first pitch at a baseball game but getting upstaged by his lady coworker.

And then, this week’s Going Dutch. Joe Morton visits the base to insult Denis Leary by tasking him with guiding traffic during a tank exercise. To prove he can still get his dick hard he’s still in his prime, Denis Leary decides to steal one of the tanks. In the B-plot, to prove she’s better than him, so does the base’s other commander, his daughter.

Dutch Notes

• The tank exercise is in “rural Germany,” to see which tanks need to be replaced. Which means this episode is almost entirely set in unspecific fields, because it’s only episode two and I guess we’ve already run out of material on half the premise.
• And yet.
• “I met this Dutch weirdo named Baas smoking hookah at a art gallery showing.” I’m gonna blame the subtitles for this one, but “Baas” means “Boss,” it’s not a normal Dutch name, you’re thinking of “Bas,” which is usually short for “Sebastiaan.” Not everyone smokes weed, which is what I assume she means when she says “hookah,” not an actual hookah pipe, because that would be ridiculous, and we’re actually pretty strict about not fucking smoking indoors. Yes, even weed. Later, there are “Baas Baby” jokes.
• In exchange for helping The Daughter with her own tank heist, “Baas” wants “an immersive experience of American excess.” This, to The Daughter, means throwing a party Danny Pudi describes as “an eighth-grade graduation party at Mar-a-Lago.” Solid joke about how corny the American aesthetic defaults to. This includes the following things:
  • Many American flags and stars, red, white, and blue balloons.
  • A popcorn stand.
  • A statue of a cowboy wearing American flag shades.
  • A statue of an astronaut wearing an American flag top hat. Behind him, a Warhol-style print of four Statues of Liberty.
  • An arcade-style basketball hoop game.
  • Towers of hot dogs and hamburgers.
  • A statue of the Statue of Liberty.
  • A mid Hulk Hogan impersonator.
    • The celebrity impersonator, a classic symbol of the American disease. They crave proximity to fame and fortune, but finding themselves unable to access these things, surround themselves with cheap, bad, frequently tasteless copies of them.
  • Jan doing “improv comedy,” a mean-spirited mime-adjacent act.
• “Baas” is played by American actor Lolu Ajayi, who is actually based in the Netherlands, shows up in actual Dutch things sometimes, and does, apparently, actually speak Dutch. He never does here, though. His accent speaking English is more Anglo.
• There’s Catherine Tate again, dressed in a more sensible velvet purple jacket this time. An exchange with Leary. Him: “You’re more blunt than I remember.” Her: “Not blunt. Just Dutch. We believe politeness is deceit.” This idea that we’re… direct to the point of coming across as rude is… Hm. A few layers to this.
  • One, Americans, a lot of Dutch people are just being rude to you. A lot of us are dicks.
  • Two, we are totally capable of being direct and no-nonsense without being or sounding rude.
  • Three, many American cultures are so much about being polite, because you care so much more about how you’re perceived than you do about being useful. This makes some of you fucking impossible to communicate with. Compared to some of your Nice cultures, your Polite cultures, just saying something straight up sounds direct and rude to you only because your culture has driven you incapable of being fucking normal about anything.
    • I had an American teacher once, and this man, you could have shit on your face for the entire class and at the end he might politely tell the whole room we should all consider washing our faces some more going forward, but not in a million years would this man tell you you had shit on your face.
• Tate: “When I was studying for my PhD, I took a job as a long hauler.” She’d say “trucker,” I think. “I’d listen to the required reading on audiobook.” I feel like Dutch textbooks are not as easily accessible as audiobooks as American ones might be, but maybe I’m just looking for nits to pick.
• Tate: “Most of the soldiers in Stroopsdorf are flapdrols.” She will never pronounce a Dutch word correctly. “It best translates as useless turds.” I guess.
• More jokes about sex work. See last week’s post.
• You can tell this Irish street is a Dutch street because of the inaccurate parking sign, the illegally covered sign below it, the bakfiets, and the building that says… something “PRESS” on it.
• The house depicted there is what Leary thinks is Tate’s brothel, but is actually, quote, “a charity office offering social and immigration services to sex workers.” Does that exist? I confess I’m out of my depth on that one.
  • Inside: We hear the first actual spoken Dutch, fragments of “even een afspraak met je maken,” en “fijne avond.”
  • Some signage: Most of it hard to make out, but what I can read tracks fine. Machine translation is pretty okay now. “031 099 989 7200” is not a Dutch phone number at all, though.

Sigh. Okay. (Begging this show to hire me as its Dutch consultant.)

Bonus section:

• One thing I didn’t mention last time: The grounds of the base feature a prominent windmill. Not a real one, a decorative one, not unlike something you’d see at a miniature golf course. I sigh every time I see it.