Tonight’s ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ Episode Reveals That Frank Was A Way Worse Father Than We Thought

Two weeks ago, Frank Reynolds committed the worst instance of emotional battery against Sweet Dee in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia history. Tonight, we learned that the only change in Frank’s treatment of his not-daughter Deandra since her childhood is that he’s added the word “emotional” to the mix.

To a certain extent, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia fans can excuse some of the Reynolds twins’ glaring personality issues based on how they were raised. After their mother Barbara baby-trapped the wealthy capitalist Frank instead of raising her kids with their biological father, the humanitarian and philanthropist Bruce Mathis, Dennis and Dee were left to learn their behavior from The Warthog, who turned them into crass, selfish and obnoxious narcissists like himself. Among his many parenting missteps, Frank’s fatherly discipline methods were notoriously cruel — the Christmas morning fake-out is, of course, a classic — but, until now, we believed that there were some lines that Frank refused to cross with his wife’s kids, if for no other reason than the fact that his “bastards” towered over him by the time they turned 13.

But in tonight’s new episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “Thought Leadership: A Corporate Conversation,” The Gang’s new business scheme to get in on the ground floor of competitive slap-fighting revealed that Sweet Dee was the perfect ringer for the sport because of her low self-esteem and conditioning from “years of getting slapped around by Frank.”

God only knows what Barbara was doing to her daughter, especially with all those now-buried diamonds on her claws.

Honestly, the most shocking part of the revelation that Frank regularly beat Sweet Dee while she was a child is that he resorted to such ordinary and brutish means of traumatizing his only daughter. This is the man who just faked his own death and forged some childhood drawings to make Sweet Dee cry over a cake — you’d think that Frank would at least use some bizarre and absurd bludgeoning instrument for his physical abuse, possibly something that he found underneath a bridge or in the sewers.

But although it’s disturbing to imagine Frank “slapping around” a young, insecure, scoliosis-ridden Dee, the beatings make complete sense in hindsight, knowing what horrific abuse Frank would inflict on Dee upon returning to her life once she was an adult. Over the last two decades of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Frank has set Sweet Dee on fire, he’s prostituted her for political favors, he tricked her into thinking she was going to be a successful, Conan-starring comedian and he’s bombarded her with daily put-downs on her appearance, her intelligence, her talent and her resemblance to a certain class of creatures in the animal kingdom.

Considering how Frank (and the rest of the Gang) has treated her for decades, if Sweet Dee didn’t know how to take a hit, she probably would have walked in front of that bus by now.