Episode 'Modern Family' Season 2, Episode 24 (Season Finale) - 'The One That Got Away' Recap

It's Jay's birthday, and everyone in the family has their task to get done for the party while Jay goes fishing. Of course, when you're dealing with the Pritchett-Dunphys, nothing ever goes that smoothly, does it?

Phil runs into his old nemesis Glen (a guest appearance from the very funny Rob Huebel), who used to beat Phil in everything...cheerleading and close-up magic. But when Phil runs into Gloria at the mall, he gets an idea: make Glen think that Gloria is his wife to make him jealous! Even that backfires, as Glen reminisces about Claire Pritchett, and how gorgeous she was...and that seems to snap Phil out of his Gloria crush once and for all. In fact, the end of the episode features him yelling "I've got Claire!" as a call-back to earlier this season when he awkwardly yelled "I've got Gloria!"

Speaking of Claire, she and Mitchell go to their old house to try to re-create a photo from their childhood as a gift. Unfortunately, to do so involves tresspassing on a stranger's property. Even more unfortunately, that property has a very mean guard dog, and the two get stuck in a treehouse in rather ridiculous costumes.

We get a quick look back at some of the events of the series, but from a different angle: the kids are working on a video of interviews with family members that were taken throughout the year. That includes Haley in her inappropriate cat costume for Halloween, Phil tripping on the bad step (again), Cam in his clown costume, and others. A pretty creative way to re-visit the season's highlights, if you ask me.

Cameron, meanwhile, spends the day helping Manny out with a girl he likes by giving him advice. The problem is that the girl plays on the softball team ("Nobody's perfect," quips Cam) and sports aren't Manny's thing. "I have a tennis racket in my room that I only use as a bubble bath frother!" He exclaims. This storyline ends up being a cute one as Cam clearly wants a son (and he and Mitchell agree to have another kid at the end), and also provides the funniest moment of the episode as Cam feeds Manny lines in the middle of the bakery, getting him kicked out (saying "You're the prettiest girl in the sixth grade and I love talking to you online" is bad out of context).

Jay, meanwhile, never gets to fish as he has to do damage control for everything, including talking Cam down ("Why are you crying? How did you get kicked out of the bakery? Yeah, that'll do it"). He picks up the dog, gets his own cake, and returns home to practically no presents...the kids' video is about three seconds long, and Gloria gets him a "sexy phone" instead of a saxophone. Ah, malapropisms!

But Manny saves the day by putting the fishing boat into the pool so that Jay can relax on the water for a bit. The old Jay would have complained about it, but the new Jay doesn't. "I miss the old Jay," he sighs.

It's a warm and fuzzy season finale, but not nearly as warm and fuzzy as this show can get. It seems as though they were very determined to tie up loose ends with Phil and Gloria and settle Cam and Mitchell's struggles with Lily, even though I'm not sure any of us were all that worried about either.

Oh well. Even when it's not at its best, "Modern Family" is still one of the funniest shows on TV. I could watch Ty Burrell mess up his coin tricks for hours and still laugh.