It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia isn’t known for its nuanced plots. That probably won’t change in the future, but what this week’s episode gave viewers in the form of “The World Series Defense” was a show set-up with a narrative frame looking back at past events.

The literary device, most commonly referenced in film by Citizen Kane, occasionally services television shows well. Pretty frequently, these frames lead up to a series of flashbacks and wind up working as a sort of clip show. “The World Series Defense” does at points seem scattered, but it’s unquestionably all new and (almost) all hilarious.

Opening on the gang walking into court, dressed reasonably well – even though Charlie looks like he wants to sell you a lime green Yugo – this episode veers back and forth, in and out of the court room. Positing that he shouldn’t have to pay an incredible amount of parking tickets, Denis launches into the story that kept him and his friends away from civilization for almost a week.

It all begins with a flash back to the previous year’s World Series in which the Philadelphia Phillies played the Tampa Bay Rays. There’s a home game, game number five, to which Danny DeVito’s character has tickets (another example of Frank being used as a starting point to a story). When preparing to leave, however, Frank realizes that he doesn’t have the tickets. So, instead of everyone missing out on tailgating Frank, Dee and Mac head back to the apartment in order to hunt down the missing tickets while Charlie and Denis are off the game.

Once arriving at the apartment, though, it seems to be cordoned off due to being fumigated. As expected someone goes in – Frank. But when he doesn’t return Dee and Mac enter the poison filled building. Oddly enough no one gets abandoned even as Frank is clearly passed out on the floor. The selfish nature of these characters is disregarded for a brief moment as they head down to the game sans tickets.

Meanwhile, Charlie and Denis are busy swilling something they refer to as ‘riot juice’ and looks akin to windshield washer fluid. In order to get tickets – and unfortunately, this wouldn’t have only occurred to either while intoxicated – Charlie pushes Denis in front of a car in an attempt at extortion. The attempt fails, though, as the driver watched the whole thing from its inception.

Anyway, Green Man makes an appearance and is summarily trounced by Phillies fans: Charlie’s dream of stardom is again smashed. But while all of these disparate plot points – and corpses - are related to viewers, the show sporadically returns to the court room and its indignant judge.

Fans of the show should decry the fact that IASiP usually clocks in at under 20 minutes of actual show, but this weeks economical use of form made it seem deeper than normal. Of course, not ever week’s episode can be as well conceived as this one, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expect it to be.