Like any show with a cult following, Arrested Development is a show you can’t leave alone; better, it is a text you can’t put down. I use the word text intentionally, for Arrested is verbose—not quite in the style of Gilmore Girls, but rather in a hypertextual kind of way. The show compels and rewards re-watching because of the incredible amount of internal referentiality the dedicated viewer can find in the series.
For instance, much of the hilarity of Buster Bluth’s (spoiler alert) eventual dismemberment comes from the fact that it happens at the hand (mouth, actually) of a loose seal. The joke is rich: Buster earlier in the season had won a baby seal plush toy from a claw machine, and the careful viewer will now look back on that event as a foreshadowing of his prosthetic hook. But the joke is even more complex and punny, for what defines Buster more than anything else is his vexed Freudian relationship with his mother, Lucille (“loose-seal”), and his romantic involvement with his mother’s nemesis, Lucille 2. And for those who remember Season 4, the very first episode (“Flight of the Phoenix”) features a bronze seal (insignia) falling (coming loose) from the wall in a dramatized courtroom during a production of “The Trial of Captain Hook”—another allusion to Buster’s predicament.
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