dennis is seriously such a fascinating character. i don't have time to go into it and i don't feel like organizing my thoughts but this episode and the high school reunion duo are soo good for character analysis. a loser who is a joke to people around him, partially because he immediately moves to devalue others/place them lower than him on some scale whether that is looks, intelligence, wit, etc; and that pre-analysis (or lack of an analysis) of his doesn't let him see that these people either are better at these things than him, or really just don't care about any scale/ranking because they already take him to be a loser/ridiculous. despite this, he is at least a little bit everything he claims to be. he is decently attractive by conventional standards, he does have decent wit and intelligence as seen in his somewhat-successful predictions of behaviors thanks to ivy league education (ex. the D.E.N.N.I.S system, mac and the pen, etc.), and whatever else. he has knowledge of common moral boundaries, ex: rape and murder is wrong, sleeping with someone under the age is wrong, but as long as those evils only exist as a threat or as a horror in the mind, he's willing to use them to get as far as he possibly can. god this guy is so interesting. you find him incredibly annoying, like you do mac, but dennis has this denial and fear of being all the things he says he hates (ex. a loser, freak) and becomes almost childish when faced with the realization he could be these things that you feel a degree of pity when these emotional moments appear. woww. hoping that 'the gang gets tested' in s18 is another one of these where they discuss what could be going on up there in the brain with the gang because i am very interested in how the writers view what is wrong with them
