Sometimes sitcoms are little more than a few entirely unrelated ideas forced to occupy the same half hour of television. Such was this week's episode of Better Off Ted. After last week's strong season opener, the show seems to have repeated Season One's sophomore slump. I recall giving that particular episode a harsh rating and casting doubt on the series as a whole. While tonight's episode wasn't nearly as flat and I've learned just how good this show can be, I still found "Lawyer" to be a bit off its game.

I think the reason this episode wasn't the procession of laughs that Better Off Ted can be is that it was too distracted with its many plot points to concentrate on jokes. This show is at its best when its episodes are thematically cohesive, or at least find a way to bring all of disparate pieces together in the end. This format allows running gags to weave through different stories seamlessly and it allows the show to feel like more of an ensemble piece than it actually is.

Our three plots tonight, as delineated in the title, are as follows: Lem has an office romance with one of Veridian's lawyers, but the company still bills him for the time he spends with her as legal consultation. The results aren't nearly as funny as that sounds. Meanwhile, Linda tries to find a way to work on a children's book about a lemur that looks a lot like Phil without evoking Veridian's "everything our employees create belongs to the company" clause. It's a bit of a slog getting there, but the payoff of this thread is actually pretty awesome. Finally, the ostensible A-plot involves Ted and Veronica using Rose to get classified info about the comings and goings of people in their department.

I'll admit, as much as I like the absurd corporate humor on this show, I thought the "you're fired" SWAT team was a bit over-the-top. The Veridian atmosphere is funny when it seems more misguided than outright evil. I'm always happy to see Rose show up because she may be the only kid in TV history to not be shrill for most of her screen time. Still, she was a bit under-utilized tonight. Isabella Acres does a great job of delivering adult-like lines and her character is better when she's incisive rather than, as in this episode, a simple plot device.

It's clear from the outset that Linda's book is never going to really materialize. That would violate the TV Comedy Character Desire Principle. The TVCCDP states that protagonists can never get what they want because too much success isn't funny and a character must remain chained to the status quo until contracts are renegotiated. How this particular plot resolved was still fun, though. Linda finds out that the publishing company that bought her story actually just intends to use her Phil-lemur as a marketing tool to sell beer to children in Asia. We viewers get to be privy to the resulting hilarious commercial.

And as for Lem and his expensive fling, it didn't dive deep enough into its own absurdity to really pay off, though Lem explaining to the lawyer that it's not sexy to just say the word "purr" was funny its own way.

Best Moment: Veronica busting into Ted's house late at night to pump Rose for information. I enjoy what bizarre parental figures those two represent whenever Rose is involved.

Biggest Laugh: The Asian beer commercial and also much of Linda's conversation with Veronica afterward.

Episode Rating: 3/5- Not bad, just kind of a "meh" episode this week. It never went full-tilt silly but it also didn't make any clever jokes about corporate culture.