The 22 best episodes of ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’

“Charlie Gets Crippled” (Season 2, Episode 1)

Faced with the harrowing news that father Frank had unexpectedly decided to stop by Paddy’s Pub, Dee and Dennis set out in a rush, hoping to avoid talking to their wealthy but absent dad by racing drunkenly to the local strip club. Shocked by the appearance of Frank in the high beams of Dennis’ Range Rover, Dennis inaugurated the chaos that is Frank by accidentally backing over Charlie, breaking both his legs.

Meanwhile, Dee and Dennis discovered Frank’s midlife crisis meant not only reconnecting with them, but also giving away his money (to charity, not to them). As Dee and Dennis raced to loot their parents’ house, Charlie, Frank, and Mac found that Philly strippers (including future stars Tiffany Haddish and Natasha Leggero) were moved to dispense free lap dances on guys in wheelchairs, a lightbulb moment that ignited the bond between Charlie and Frank. Sunny‘s hallmark offensive plot twists were here in abundance (drunk driving, fake disabilities, collateral damage on those who foolishly get too close to the Gang), but it’s Frank’s seamless integration into the Gang in season 2 that truly kicked the show into high gear. —Dennis Perkins

“The Gang Gets Held Hostage” (Season 3, Episode 4)

Always Sunny has long boasted a fine roster of supporting weirdos orbiting the crew’s Paddy’s Pub HQ. And none are more uniquely disreputable than the McPoyle clan, the perpetually clammy, milk-guzzling, creepily incestuous former schoolmates led by the exquisitely repulsive Liam (Jimmi Simpson) and Ryan (Nate Mooney).

Here, the McPoyle twins (joined by deaf-mute sister and probable lover Margaret, played by Thesy Surface) burst into Paddy’s to take the Gang hostage at gunpoint. Always prepared to throw each other under whatever Philly city bus is most convenient, the appearance of three sweaty, heavily-armed McPoyles sent the Gang into immediate panic and betrayal mode. Alliances were quickly formed and broken, Frank (on the hunt for his will in the bar’s air vents for some late Die Hard-esque fun) had to confront the terrors of Charlie’s “angry room,” Dee came down with rapid-onset Stockholm syndrome, and Dennis, popping off his shirt at the first opportunity, attempted the unthinkable with Margaret to save his skin.

It all ended up being a lot less deadly than it seemed, with Frank, Dee, Charlie, Mac, and Dennis left contemplating the shambles they’d made of their bar. —D.P.

“Bums: Making a Mess All Over the City” (Season 3, Episode 14)

When the Gang found an unhoused guy (Tracey Walter) masturbating in Paddy’s alley, it was go time — in the sense that everybody flew off in different, ill-conceived directions to clean up the neighborhood. For Frank, Dennis, and Charlie, that meant buying an old police car while unsuccessfully searching for a junkyard guard dog. Meanwhile, Mac and Dee, afte finding that the local neighborhood watch group merely watches for crime rather than engaging in hair-trigger vigilantism, formed a two-person Guardian Angels posse, only to be mugged by the white “crackhead” they choose over a friendly, elderly Black man when looking for directions.

The Gang is never more dangerous than when they have a reason to get heated. And so, Frank and Dennis took to shaking down the populace after Frank sprang for two police uniforms, Dee beat the hell out of the unhoused masturbator, and Charlie seized upon his undercover Serpico cop role to attempt a series of stings on his fellow corrupt fake cops. Charlie Day’s gift for unhinged, chaotic babble got its first true airing here, as Charlie, in a fake beard and Pacino poncho, ranted to anyone he saw about the system being rotten to the core. —D.P.

“The Nightman Cometh” (Season 4, Episode 13)

That Charlie Kelly is a musical prodigy is just another of the crossed wires inside his unsettling hellscape of a mind, as evidenced by this tour de force musical interlude where Charlie’s tortured childhood and scarred psyche inform his latest composition: a creepily symbolic stage extravaganza called “The Nightman Cometh.”

With the Gang (and honorary sixth member Artemis, played by Artemis Pebdani) clamoring to bring Charlie’s tale of unrequited love and nighttime predation to life, the play opened another window into Charlie’s soul as an oft-abused man-child whose lifelong lack of love metastasized into an unstable stew of denial and obsessive need. The final twist (that this was just another ploy for the Waitress’ affection) was merely the last layer stripped away by Charlie’s saga of a helpless, lonely boy molested in his sleep, a theme as obvious to the rest of the Gang as it is lost on him.

The musical itself was a grotesquely illuminating treat, from Dee’s improv about how, despite a song lusting after Dennis’ “baby boy,” she’s not a pedophile, to Mac’s gut-busting turn as the cat-eyed, karate-kicking Nightman, to Frank’s inability to enunciate Charlie’s already sketchy lyric “boy’s soul” as anything but “boy’s hole.” —D.P.

“Paddy’s Pub: Home of the Original Kitten Mittens” (Season 5, Episode 8)

After Charlie’s concept for Paddy’s-hawked knitted cat booties inspired everyone to backstab each other over competing merch ideas, we saw how a single inciting obsession was the starting pistol for the Gang to top each other’s awfulness. Besieging the one lawyer in Philly unlucky enough to be on the Gang’s radar (Brian Unger) with ludicrous money-making ideas (Charlie’s mittens; Frank’s liquor-shooting mouth gun; Mac and Dennis’ comedy “dick towel”), the Gang’s dreams of sweeping up at the upcoming merchandising convention led to escalating shenanigans.

From such beginnings came developments like Frank bursting in and shoving a loaded gun in Mac’s mouth while a sex worker hurled tequila in his eyes, Dee and Charlie attempting to extort the lawyer into taking their case (after Mac ate the contract granting Dee 100 percent of the bar’s merchandising), and Dennis offering to “frame bang” the lawyer’s estranged wife in her sleep to get him to switch sides. When the Gang’s collective greed and desires are engaged, it’s deeply unwise to be in the way, although Unger’s deliciously deadpan attorney ultimately used their obsessions against them by swiping Charlie’s original idea, and obtaining a group restraining order to boot. —D.P.

“The D.E.N.N.I.S. System” (Season 5, Episode 10)

Finding out that Dennis has a “comprehensive approach to seduction” is enough to chill anyone’s spine, and the lockstep sociopathy of his manipulative method of bedding unsuspecting women was laid out by Dennis to Mac, Charlie, and Frank like a Bond villain. Sadly for him, once the horrified Dee challenged him to “re-D.E.N.N.I.S.” his most recent discarded conquest, Dennis discovered that both Mac and Frank had formed their own systems for picking up the pieces of Dennis’ shattered former lovers.

Once the “delicate ecosystem” of Dennis, Mac, and Frank’s predation in the same pond of misfortunes was disrupted by Dee’s challenge, things got comically ugly. Dennis’ stubbornness saw him going as far as to hire a fake grandmother to back up his lies to the sweet pharmacist he was re-pursuing; while Dee, suspicious thanks to her brother’s machinations, wrecked an innocent date with Travis Schuldt’s dull-witted but adoring soldier boyfriend, Ben; and Charlie, having completely missed the point of Dennis’ scam, hired a carny to simply stab the Waitress. (Dee got it instead, naturally.) “The D.E.N.N.I.S. System” ended in the sort of cacophonous comic chaos that always results whenever the Gang takes their insular absurdity into the wider world. —D.P.

“The Gang Buys a Boat” (Season 6, Episode 3)

Having come into some money, the Gang decided it was high time to take their talents to the high seas — or at least as far into the Philly harbor as their decrepit houseboat could take them. There was a bounty of destructive shipboard shenanigans (Charlie and Frank couldn’t wait to harvest some delicious bottom-dwelling sea life, while we got the first sight of Dee’s inflatable tube guy dance), but the episode will forever be remembered for “the implication.”

The running theme of Dennis’ possible sociopathy is one of the show’s deepest wells of comedy, and his conversation here with Mac about his plans for at-sea seduction dunked down into the depths. Glenn Howerton has a way of turning out all light in Dennis’ eyes that’s as chilling as it is hilarious, as when he impatiently explained to Mac that, of course the women they bring onto their boat will consent to his lustful wishes, not because of any overt threat, but because of “the implication.” Thankfully, the houseboat burned down before Dennis’ schemes could manifest, but it’s a testament to Sunny‘s high-wire comedy act that a glimpse into the creepiest recesses of Dennis’ soul can be so illuminating — and funny. —D.P.

“Charlie Kelly: King of the Rats” (Season 6, Episode 10)

Even Charlie has a breaking point, and in this richly funny episode, the rest of the Gang feared that he had reached his, when, emerging from the basement streaked with rat gore, Charlie pondered, “Sometimes I wonder, though, if our lives are really more valuable than theirs, you know what I mean?” “They are,” Dennis responded firmly, although he, Dee, Mac, and Frank started to wonder if they’d finally pushed Charlie too far. When the Gang decided to pull together a surprise party to cheer their friend up, it came from equal parts concern and worry that, at the very least, they would have to do all the “Charlie work.”

What resulted was a wacky — and almost touching — tour through Charlie’s mind, as Frank insisted on including the “bridge people” he and Charlie had been hanging out with at Charlie’s party, while Dennis, Dee, and Mac plumbed Charlie’s alarming and near-illiterate dream journal for clues about what he’d truly like. Their guesses as to what “denim chicken” and “worm hat” might actually refer to were as hilariously wrong as they were sweetly appreciated by the fascinated Charlie. —D.P.

“A Very Sunny Christmas” (Season 6, Episode 13)

There were a few elements working against It’s Always Sunny‘s only Christmas special. First, it was a Christmas special, and holiday sentiment is a landmine for a show like Sunny. Toss in a few higher-profile than usual guest stars (David Huddleston, Pablo Schreiber), and a double-length running time, and there were potentially show-breaking pitfalls everywhere.

Luckily, Sunny stuck the landing as all four younger members of the Gang, realizing their holidays were ruined by bad parenting, split up on separate missions to rectify things. Which does not work in any sense, as a PTSD-stricken Charlie bit the nose off of a terrified mall Santa, and Dee and Dennis’ Christmas Carol-style redemption arc for their father was thwarted by Frank’s swindled but forgiving old business partner refusing to play along.

Programmatic as Christmas specials usually are, “A Very Sunny Christmas” made room for some light gunplay and Dennis telling his supposedly contrite father to “f— yourself in your fat f—ing ass,” delusional animated epiphany or no. The episode feinted toward genuine rapprochement before yanking the rug out, leaving the Gang pelted with an industrial-grade indoor blizzard and then happily hucking rocks at passing trains, as was Mac and Charlie’s childhood tradition. —D.P.

“CharDee MacDennis: The Game of Games” (Season 7, Episode 7)

The whirling buzzsaw that is the Gang’s awfulness is a danger to everyone in the greater Philadelphia area, but some of their most inventive chaos is caused when they have no one to torment but each other. Out of such isolated ennui was born CharDee MacDennis, the absurdly complicated, multimedia board game they invented — and that perennial losers Charlie and Mac have never won once in 18 uniquely destructive and booze-soaked contests. And since the game’s many activities include categories such as “physical challenge, pain, and endurance,” and “emotional battery and public humiliation,” the Dennis-Dee vs. Mac-Charlie rivalry has never been more feverish.

One of the Gang’s most repressed truths is how interdependent they are, which is to say, nobody outside the core five can stand to be around them. They feed each others’ worst impulses in a self-perpetuating cycle of sadism and masochism that’s ingrained enough that the Gang has its own insular codes, which emerged here in the form of one deilrious gauntlet of pain and chicanery, all passed off as just a fun way to pass a dull afternoon at Paddy’s. —D.P.

“Charlie and Dee Find Love” (Season 8, Episode 4)

In a show that traffics in dark comedy, no episode comes anywhere near the brutal, illuminating darkness at the end of this one. After a fender bender introduced Dee and Charlie to a pair of seemingly too-good-to-be-true rich siblings, we were primed for the other shoe to drop. After all, these rich, beautiful people couldn’t possibly see past Dee’s uncontrollable urge to panic-gag and Charlie’s uncontrollable desire to shove grotesque amounts of cheese in his mouth, right? Even with the other guys’ admonitions not to, under any circumstances, be themselves, Dee and Charlie’s improbable success in charming these scions of the Philly upper crust had the guys — and us — both baffled and anxiously awaiting an ugly twist.

But when it came, it wasn’t Alexandra Daddario’s lovely Ruby holding the knife — but Charlie. Dee, being Dee, fell into the cruel Trevor’s predictable rich guy prank-trap, much to the rest of the Gang’s indifference. When the reveal came that the smarmy Trevor (Josh Casaubon) had humiliated both Dee and Mac, Ruby tearfully confessed that she had really fallen for Charlie, leading to a speech from Charlie that even Dangerous Liaisons couldn’t match for cold-hearted ruthlessness. —D.P.

“The Gang Gets Analyzed” (Season 8, Episode 5)

This episode saw each successive character come in for a brief but uniformly intense session, all supposedly to determine who was going to do the washing up from the Gang’s therapist-advised clearing-the-air dinner; Kerri Kenney-Silver’s impossibly patient yet increasingly alarmed therapist sent each member’s protective neuroses into overdrive.

Mac went first, the shrink’s well-meaning questions eliciting one of his most wrenchingly self-aware outbursts, before he yanked it back with panicky violence. Charlie, too, revealed just enough vulnerability about his perpetual place as the Gang’s designated rat-killer and slime-cleaner, before desperately reverting to incoherent parroting of the therapist’s sympathetic advice. Frank’s pistachio-spitting intransigence melted almost immediately into a tortured backstory of being sent to a childhood “nitwit school” and entering a doomed romance with a girl with no lips.

Dennis, leaning smugly on his undergrad psych courses, fashioned himself as a Hannibal Lecter-esque colleague, ultimately revealing both that he’d been feeding the formerly obese Mac diet pills, and a nude drawing of himself and the therapist. Kaitlin Olson made Dee’s own session a masterpiece of wide-eyed neediness, obsessively lying about her past and then demanding the shrink praise her for her acting prowess. —D.P.

“The Gang Broke Dee” (Season 9, Episode 1)

Kaitlin Olson’s boundless comic range got its finest workout in this episode, where it did, in fact, first appear that the guys’ incessant abuse of the Gang’s one female member had broken Dee. Seen swilling hooch in her pajamas and stuffing herself with week-old discarded cake, Dee anticipated the guys’ every insult with dead-eyed clarity. After a lifetime of being on the receiving end of more abuse even than Charlie, it looked like Dee was prepared to pack it in.

Cooking up a two-pronged strategy to boost Dee’s spirits, the guys first tried to set Dee up with what Dennis called “average, if not below-average men,” and the others’ urged her up on a stand-up stage, reasoning that, without her (likely delusional) flicker of hope, she might not choke as badly as usual.

Both plans looked like they were working, as Dee wowed the crowds and scored a stint on Conan. When the entire thing was revealed as a Frank-bankrolled plan to hoodwink her, the big reveal saw Dee emerging not onto Conan O’Brien’s stage but in front of a jeering crowd at Paddy’s. It was the sort of mammoth hoodwink that only the Gang could imagine. —D.P.

“The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award” (Season 9, Episode 3)

The Always Sunny fandom has always taken perverse pride in the show’s near-complete lack of Emmy attention. So this episode served as the Gang’s uproarious middle finger to a television industry that prefers more middle-of-the-road, inoffensive crowd-pleasers, as the Paddy’s crew swallowed their pride and entered the Annual Bar Association’s best bar in Philly contest. The Gang did some research at the previous year’s winning pub, Sudz, where the bright colors, contemporary pop hits, and electric blue fish bowl-served cocktails all vied with the photogenic staff’s quipping and flirting for maximum customer comfort-laughs.

A thinly veiled broadside like this could run out of steam fast if it weren’t for how deliciously the Gang’s hurried attempts to ape the most popular trends tickled the central theme. But Paddy’s isn’t Sudz, and the Gang’s efforts to soft-pedal their antics to be more in line with those mainstream bars devolved into typical Sunny-style hostility and off-putting grossness. Ultimately, it was Charlie who provided the episode’s true coda: Sitting at his ready keyboard, Charlie belted out the defiantly anthemic “Go F— Yourself” as Dee, Dennis, and Mac all shucked their effortfully respectable facades and joined in hocking loogies at the horrified industry types. —D.P.

“The Gang Saves the Day” (Season 9, Episode 6)

“The Gang Saves the Day” saw Dennis, Dee, Mac, Frank, and Charlie being pinned down during a convenience store robbery, with the resulting five segments revealing how each member imagined they’d handle the situation — if they weren’t busy cowering in the junk food aisle.

Mac kicked things off by imagining himself as a gravel-voiced, badass, martial arts superstar, as his heroic battle against an army of ninjas revealed that, even in his wildest fantasy, his friends can’t help but point out his weakness at post-kill wordplay. Dee, who died ignominiously in three out of the guys’ four fantasies, disarmed the robber, then shot the guys herself before parlaying her stint in witness protection into a lucrative career as an actress. Frank snapped into action, eating endless hot dogs while he waited for the cops to kill the robber.

Dennis’ vision was of being shot in the head himself, only to rebound with a training montage, a sexy rehab nurse/girlfriend, and, after said nurse’s breasts were “obliterated” in an accident, mercy-snuffing her with a pillow. And if Dennis’ flash of heroism involved his pathological narcissism, Charlie’s episode-concluding animated fantasy was another lyrically loopy glimpse at how he really sees things. —D.P.

“Charlie Work” (Season 10, Episode 4)

It’s risky to upend a show’s dynamic, but this episode — in which we saw just how vital Charlie’s perpetually under-appreciated toil at Paddy’s truly was — was a whirlwind of behind-the-scenes surprises. Masterfully constructed as a real-time depiction of all that Charlie has to go through for Paddy’s to pass its annual health inspection, it was a tour de force for Charlie Day, who co-wrote the episode with Mac and Howerton.

Seeing the bar flooded with chickens as part of the others’ ill-timed latest scam, Charlie went into “Charlie work” overdrive, since not only was the inspector on the way, but it was also a hard-nosed replacement inspector for their previous, more lenient one. In addition to the chickens, Frank flushed his shoes down one of the toilets, Dennis and Dee kept blowing fuses with the scheme’s need for a power-sucking vacuum sealer, and the basement was choked with carbon monoxide. What ensued was a seamlessly constructed one-take, steady cam, 10-minute, Birdman-style masterpiece, with Charlie juggling not just the inspector, but also the befuddled steak delivery driver, the Gang’s frenzied incompetence, and the fact that Frank has painted his bare torso completely black. —D.P.

“The Gang Tends Bar” (Season 12, Episode 8)

It was a busy Valentine’s Day at Paddy’s, and Dennis had just one small request of his friends: “Can we just do the one thing we’ve never tried?” he begged, exasperated. “Can we just do our jobs?” Mac assumed Dennis was suggesting “some sort of booze for money scam,” which Dennis was, but only because that’s what a bar is.

Dennis’ sudden obsession with actually running the bar had roots in a cleverly seeded reference to a long-ago Valentine’s tradition involving a suggestion box full of anthrax, but his rejection of the holiday was speculated as being in line with his supposed sociopathic lack of human emotion. The endeavor ultimately showed how the group’s interdependent dynamic made for constant self-incrimination and insensitivity masquerading as selflessness.

It was when Mac, after Charlie incited another anthrax attack by Dee over some tapeworm medicine-laced chocolates, wheeled in a crate to the suddenly empty bar that the episode spun its most masterfully gonzo twist. Pulling out the rocket launcher Mac had bought him on the dark web, Dennis was genuinely overcome, caressing his bucket-list war weapon in stunned gratitude, while Mac beamed in what, on any other show, would be heartwarming friendship. —D.P.

“Time’s Up for the Gang” (Season 13, Episode 4)

It’s hot button time again, as the Gang found themselves summoned to a sensitivity training seminar when Paddy’s was cited on an internet “Shitty Bar List” as an unsafe place for women. Dee, imagining herself exempt, entered with popcorn and a gloating “Time’s up!” chant, but, as usual, no member of the Gang could escape public scrutiny when it comes to terrible behavior. The outmatched moderators did what they could (a Dee-Mac role-play exercise resulted in the single most explosively funny sight gag in Sunny history), but when it was revealed that the entire seminar was masterminded by one Dennis Reynolds, Megan Ganz’s outstanding script twisted into much darker and more illuminating territory.

Here, Mac, Dee, Charlie, and Frank (whose old-school sexism saw him speed-dialing his attorney after accidentally whipping out his dong) were mere amateurs in the face of Dennis’ Bond villain-worthy scheme to get them to “tighten up” their ships when it came to skirting issues of consent. After putting on a PowerPoint presentation explaining how he elicits (or manufactures) just enough evidence to keep him on this side of the law, even the rest of the Gang had to admit: Dennis can out-evil the worst of them. —D.P.

“The Gang Solves the Bathroom Problem” (Season 13, Episode 6)

When Always Sunny chooses to drill down into a controversial issue, it’s guaranteed that the Gang hits the sewer line, a fact never more evident than in this foray into the transgender bathroom debate where, with typical Sunny aplomb, the show itself emerged smelling like a rose.

Mac’s decision to poop in Paddy’s shockingly clean, barely used women’s restroom set the Gang immediately at odds. As ever, factions were formed, with Mac and Dee queasily allied on the “use any bathroom you choose” team, while Dennis and Frank played smug originalists on the opposing side, while Charlie sat on the fence.

Mac’s manipulative citing of his “as a gay man” allyship with women was undercut when he savagely choked Dee upon her first sign of disagreement. And Frank’s old-school bigotry relied on constitutional blather to couch his three-fifths compromise proposal in what he thought of as solid legal ground. As presented in the Gang’s illogical scapegoating, fearmongering, and overall manipulative self-exoneration, the debate turned into a farce. As the Gang came up with their ridiculous workaround for what they’d determined was the real problem at hand, we saw, to our horror and shame-faced amusement, that they were us. —D.P.

“Mac Finds His Pride” (Season 13, Episode 10)

Always Sunny walks a razor’s edge when it comes to humanizing its characters — we’re teased with glimpses inside each member of the Gang at various points, only for the show to mercilessly yank us back to reality. Mac’s deeply closeted, Catholic-guilty homosexuality had been treated as a joke throughout the show’s run, with the joke never truly being about Mac being gay, but about how his desperate repression had twisted him into a caricature of grasping masculinity.

And, for its first two acts, “Mac Finds His Pride” serves as another go-round in Mac-bashing, as the Paddy’s crew sought his help in drumming up business with some performative Pride Week showmanship. He was unenthused, however, even as the now-out, newly buff Mac has seemingly decided to shut the closet door for good. With Frank’s prodding, Mac unveiled the real reason behind his new physique, as he came out to his father in a mesmerizing 5-minute modern dance routine. Mac’s performance was a stunningly physical, wordless explosion of all those years of “Mac is secretly gay” jokes. Mac will still be Mac, but, as Danny DeVito’s Frank sat, awestruck, and marvels tearfully, “Oh my God. I get it. I get it,” it’s impossible not to agree. —D.P.

“The Gang Carries a Corpse Up a Mountain” (Season 15, Episode 8)

Season 15’s Irish vacation arc culminated in this surprisingly sweet finale, in which Charlie recruited the Gang to help him carry his recently deceased father’s corpse up a mountain and drop him into the ocean below (a family tradition). Their attempts to carry the body led to plenty of bickering, as Charlie accused Dee of killing his dad because of the “banshee curse,” to which she screamed, “Banshees aren’t real” with banshee-like fury. To make matters worse, Frank revealed he never got the COVID shot, spouted various conspiracy theories, and more or less confirmed that he spread the virus to Charlie’s dad, which ultimately killed him.

As the squabbling continued, each member left this arduous endeavor until only Charlie was left to drag his father’s corpse in the rain. What followed was some plum dramatic material for Day, who passionately accused his old man of never being there for him when he was a kid. Right on cue, the rest of the Gang returned to help toss the body into the sea. And lest we linger too long on sentiment, the final scene was hilariously punctuated by the body falling onto the rocks instead. —Kevin Jacobsen

“Dennis Takes a Mental Health Day” (Season 16, Episode 8)

Only a show like Always Sunny could combine the sharp observational humor of Curb Your Enthusiasm with the horrors of Black Mirror in one episode. Such is the case here, where Glenn Howerton delivered a masterclass on the perils of our increasingly technological world.

After his doctor suggested he take medication for his high blood pressure, Dennis defiantly resolved to get healthy on his own. Informing the Gang he’s taking a mental health day, what followed can only be described as a nightmare. Upon renting an electric car that required an app to operate, his blood pressure only rose further when he stopped for tea and discovered he had to download yet another app to pay. He then accidentally left his phone behind as the self-driving car ran a stop sign, which led to a chaotic series of events that culminated in Dennis ripping out a tech CEO’s heart.

Of course, this darkly surreal turn was revealed to be a daydream as we return to the doctor’s office, while the physician marveled at Dennis’ ability to lower his blood pressure by 20 points in less than a minute. That’s our little control freak. —K.J.