The more things change, the more King of the Hill stays the same, and there’s a whole lot of change in “Return of the King.” This belated 14th season has flouted animated-sitcom norms by not only acknowledging that significant time has passed within the show’s world but also aging its characters accordingly. Bart Simpson could never. But King of the Hill was always something of an outlier amid its animated contemporaries — as immortalized in a brief gag in South Park’s “Cartoon Wars Part II” that I still think about often — so it feels correct that its return is also confidently forging its own path. This King of the Hill may look, and occasionally sound, different, but like the ever-steadfast Hank, it knows exactly who it is and where it came from.
That said, updating the status quo after a 15-year hiatus requires some table setting, and “Return of the King” admittedly sags a bit under the weight of its reintroductions. But that could just be me comparing it to the rest of this ten-episode season, which, spoiler alert for future recaps, is very good. And “Return of the King” is not a bad episode by any means; in fact, given the high level of difficulty here, it may just be the best-case scenario.
Let’s start where the episode does, with the Saudi Arabia of it all. Well, technically, the episode starts on an airplane that’s delivering Hank and Peggy back to the States, kicking off with some narrow-urethra humor to assure fans that King of the Hill hasn’t forgotten its comedic roots. We are also assured by the weird pride in Peggy’s voice as she informs the passengers waiting for the bathroom that Hank’s urethra has shrunk with age to the size of a 7-month-old’s — “like that movie, Benjamin Buttons” — that the great and powerful Kathy Najimy remains locked in to the character’s unique charms. This introductory scene also raises a question: Did King of the Hill’s writers send the Hills to Saudi Arabia because an Aramco contract makes sense for a dedicated gasman like Hank, or because they wanted to see how Najimy would work her magic on Peggy’s pronunciation of “Saud-eye Arabi-eye”? Por quien no las dos, as Peggy might say in Espa-nol.
On the ground at Dallas Fort Worth, Hank is so relieved to be back in Texas that he kisses the floor of the nation’s second-busiest airport. But while Hank’s love for his home state remains unchanged, Texas will not extend him the same courtesy. Cue a wave of gags in which Hank is bemused by everything from boba to hybrid-car engines to all-gender bathrooms. (“Peggy, are we all-gender?” “Things have changed since we’ve been gone, but I believe I am female presenting.”) Look, does it make perfect sense that Hank would have so little awareness of ridesharing apps at this point? Perhaps not, but King of the Hill sidesteps this line of inquiry by presenting the Aramco base, as seen in flashback later in the episode, as what Hank imagines life to be like in the ’50s. But if he really had access to Fox News and — scandalized gasp — CNN on the base, wouldn’t some bathroom controversy or another have made it onto his radar? This episode’s writers, King of the Hill co-creators Mike Judge and Greg Daniels and new showrunner Saladin K. Patterson, have made clear that they approach the show’s politics from a character-first perspective, and it arguably makes sense for an all-time stick-in-the-mud like Hank to have kept his cultural blinders so firmly in place that this is all genuinely surprising to him. I think the season gets better about this disconnect as it continues, but these early scenes of reacclimating require a certain amount of just go with it.
You know what makes it easier to just go with it? Adult Bobby! Bobby technically aged over the course of King of the Hill’s first 13 seasons, but he always hovered in that pre-to-early-teen stage of life. (You could say “pubescent,” but Hank would hate that.) Aging him up to 21 is the revival’s best move, opening up a whole new dynamic between Hank and Bobby that pays off beautifully as the season continues. We don’t see much of that in “Return of the King,” though, since Bobby is too busy running both the front and back of the house at Robata Chane (“a traditional Japanese barbecue with a fusion of flavors and techniques from the German traditions of the Texas Hill Country”) to answer Peggy’s calls. But he’s not too busy to accept an invite to a campus party from a table of university students who are impressed by his decision to skip college and follow his dream of running his own restaurant, where he also sweeps the floors … But he’s still busy enough locking up and washing off the fish smell that he arrives late to the Beta Theta house … But not so late that Amber, the girl who loved his mackerel-and-mustard-pretzel dish, isn’t pleased to see him, particularly once Bobby assumes his hereditarily ordained position manning the grill.
The resultant sleepover at Amber’s place, complete with mid-hookup butt-dial to Peggy, is KOTH’s most direct acknowledgment yet that things have changed, and it’s admittedly a little jarring to hear the sounds of Bobby “What are you talking about?” Hill getting it on. (Insert Hank Hill Shudder of Discomfort™ here.) Then again, Kid Bobby often had more game than one might assume, so it checks out that Adult Bobby would be able to charm Amber with zero desperation or manipulation on his part; I’m proud of the kid man. I’m also proud of his slightly disappointed but in no way defensive or angry reaction to Amber telling him it was a onetime thing. Awkward as he could be, Bobby was a respectful and unusually self-possessed kid, and it’s gratifying to see those qualities seem to have followed him into adulthood.
This is further confirmed as he’s leaving Amber’s place and bumps into, would you believe it, Connie, who attends UT Dallas but is at Amber’s school visiting “a friend.” We’ll put a pin in that euphemism to return to in future episodes and for now focus on how nice this reunion is. It makes sense that Bobby and Connie would lose touch given their vastly different life paths in a city as big as Dallas, but their obvious delight in reconnecting underscores that their connection was always rooted in something deeper than mere neighborly proximity. Connie has clearly been through some changes of her own over the years (I wonder how Kahn reacted to her not attending an Ivy), but she and Bobby fall back into their old rapport so easily I suspect she’ll soon be taking him up on his invite to visit Robota Chane.
That brings us back to Rainey Street and the final third of the episode’s character-check-in triad: the Alley Gang. Boomhauer’s reunion with Hank is first and characteristically the most normal, even if his current situation, helping care for his girlfriend’s (!) son (!!), Luke Jr., is decidedly un-Boomhauer-like. Even faced with a disengaged teenager who can’t understand him, Boomhauer remains his dang ol’ unflappable self, but as he warns his friend, Dale and Bill have both changed, man. We soon learn the unsettling specifics of how, but not before getting a proper introduction to Brian Robertson, a.k.a. Hank’s dream tenant. When he wasn’t busy monitoring Hank’s water heater, Brian grew fond of hanging out in the alley and made his way back for a coffee with Boomhauer (the rare sighting of a beverage other than Alamo beer during an alley hang).
Despite his proselytizing for solar panels, Brian seems to have great new-friend potential for Hank, but their burgeoning bromance is interrupted by Hank’s old friends as the dulcet tones of Stephen Root caterwaul across the alley from the “wall hole” in Bill’s home. We out-of-housers would call it a “window,” but Bill has been confined to his bedroom since 2020. He seems to have spent the pandemic doing what so many of us did, streaming and ordering in, and then just … kept doing it until he “finished Netflix.” I don’t love King of the Hill doubling down on the ol’ “Bill is fat and disgusting” gag this way, but I do believe Hank’s promise that he’ll help his friend get “back on track.” After all, with Brian having maintained his house and lawn so meticulously while he was away, Hank needs a project.
What he does not need are the ravings of Dale Gribble, but he gets them anyway, as the dulcet tones of — okay, let’s just get this out of the way. Johnny Hardwick died in 2023 having started recording this season, and Toby Huss stepped in to take over the role of Dale. With Huss’s previous KOTH characters being long gone (Cotton) or recast (Kahn), this seems like a smart solution to a real bummer of a problem, but to call it seamless would be inaccurate. Dale’s opening lines, as he falls out of the trash can he’s been hiding in, sound like Hardwick to my ear, but everything after that is noticeably different. I like to think the show kept those first lines as a tribute, a sort of auditory passing of the torch.
Anyway, Dale fills in Hank on how his winning mayoral bid during the “pandumbic” turned him into an “election-denier denier” because after 36 hours in office he realized, “Any democratic process that would put me in office doesn’t deserve the title fair.” All in all, it’s a nice little synecdoche for the real-world sociopolitical turmoil KOTH is largely glossing over with this revival, delivered by the character who most embodies it. But like so many of Dale’s misadventures, it doesn’t have any real significance or impact on the status quo. He can’t even do anything about the “floppy fence posts” in the road that are offending Hank with their inability to be a real barrier.
Back in their same old bedroom staring at that same old crack in the ceiling, Hank and Peggy grapple with all these new changes and begin to entertain the idea that maybe they were happier in Saudi Arabia. (They were definitely wealthier, judging by the size of their truck and household staff.) Hank assures Peggy it’s just jet lag talking, but those whispers of doubt grow louder as he is presented first with the offer of a plush new gig converting an Aramco oil tanker to propane — which comes with a 30 percent raise, a house with a bowling alley, and a new “sword” that is definitely not a new wife — then with several more indicators that the town of Arlen has moved on without him. Faced with so many bike lanes, a billboard for a microaggression lawyer, and the final insult, Oklahoma-style barbecue, Hank seeks refuge at the Mega Lo Mart to purchase an emotional-support spanner wrench.
What he and Peggy get instead is reassurance in the form of a cookie. Now, I could point out that the Girl Scouts have not actually renamed Samoas because Caramel deLites is “more respectful” and that the cookies are still produced under both names by two different bakeries. But such pedantry would itself be disrespectful to this scene, which puts a perfectly KOTH-ian button on the episode’s main conflict: Change can be a good thing, especially when made with good intentions, and it doesn’t mean there aren’t still things you can count on, like the Girl Scouts selling cookies for $5 and Hank being interested in a stranger’s new Sawzall.
This would have been a fine place to end, but “Return of the King” has one last reunion to attend to and it appropriately takes place over a grill. Hank’s response to his son’s offer to take over because he’s “a professional” now — “a professional comedian if you think I’m gonna let you take over for me” — is a sweet nod to Bobby’s foregone childhood dream and an enticing preview of this new father-son dynamic. That boy who ain’t right has done good, and while Hank’s never going to stop worrying about Bobby, or at least his tire pressure and brake fluid, he can recognize his son’s growth as the positive change it is. Now, he just has Bill, pantsless and pathetic but at least out of the house, to worry about. Some things never change.
Musings
• A few more character check-ins: Joseph is Bobby’s roommate (fun!) but does not appear in this episode; Nancy and John Redcorn are co-hosting an online real-estate series called Selling Arlen, but it remains unclear whether Redcorn is, as one commenter guesses, tapping that; Chane Wassanasong is Bobby’s partner in the restaurant, but he’s too busy with his duties as president of Alpha Alpha to work there; and the Vogner Char-King now comes with Wi-Fi, a touchscreen, and preset profiles, but Hank removed all of it.
• Sadly unmentioned are Luann and Lucky, who were written out of this revival after the deaths of Brittany Murphy and Tom Petty, legends both. I suppose it’s more respectful to have the characters quietly move away than attempt to recast two such distinctive performances, but I would have appreciated some sort of confirmation that they and Gracie are doing well, wherever they are.
• Shout-out to the great Pamela Adlon for making Bobby sound older but still unmistakably Bobby. No one could make that second C on hashtag thicc sing like her.
• Keith David as Brian Robertson: A-plus, no notes.
• Yes, of course I Googled how long it would take to “reach the end of Netflix,” and I found what I’m assuming is the same article the episode writers did, which puts the figure at four years, two months, eight days. You’d be right to be skeptical of that given that titles are always coming and going from the Netflix catalogue, but it aligns nicely with the timeline of Bill’s self-quarantine, so I will now stop overthinking this simple gag.
• Star-rating disclaimer: This is a 3.5-star episode in my heart, but Vulture’s CMS does not allow for half-stars. So I am rounding down because the season is basically all uphill from here.
Related
The Hills return to find a very different Rainey Street, but lucky for us, the important things stay the same.
