It's never a dream. Never. No matter what you are doing, the answer should never ever in a million years be it was all a dream. It's lazy, sophomoric, and just plain cheap.

Sorry to ruin it for you, but most of this week's episode was just that: A dream. As in, it doesn't really matter what happened in it. It was a giant cop out.

Last time, we left Alan (Jon Cryer) in a mental institution after falling under the delusion that he was Charlie. Interesting, at the very least, and I was intrigued to see how they would develop that this week.

Not at all, apparently. The show picked up a month later, with Alan leaving the institution, cured and back to his normal, not-Charlie self. Why bother explaining his recovery, or better yet, his mental break? Nah. Not needed. Role the tape, run the script, we've got ratings to hit.

What followed was a series of unfortunate events for poor Alan, to the point where anyone with half a brain could tell something was amiss. Jake (Angus T. Jones) got his girlfriend pregnant (and they are going to name the baby Frodo!), Walden (Ashton Kutcher) is sticking it to Lyndsey(Courtney Thorne-Smith), and revealed to Herb (Ryan Stiles) that him and Judith (Marin Hinkle)'s kid looked an awful lot like Alan(who is the father, but Herb didn't know that). Alan tried to finally end it all, turning the car on in the garage, only for it to break down before he could end the living nightmare. Walden also kicked him out of the house, Herb shot Alan, and yada yada yada, it all ended up being a dream and not really mattering at all anyways.

Now that I've shit on the poor storytelling here, the good news: The jokes were more plentiful then they have been all season. Perhaps it was them piling up in succession on Alan, who, despite having the ‘tools to cope' from his time in the big house, continually unraveled. In fact, everybody seemed to pass around the laugh stick, with Jake, Walden, Berta (Conchata Ferrell), and even Alan all having their share of laughable moments. It was a shame that the story was a flop, because otherwise the writers may have fooled me that they were actually on to something in this post-Sheen apocalyptic world.

But I don't watch "Two and a Half Men" for epic story arcs, and at least the laughs were out in form. The show still needs to find a groove though, because now we spent two weeks on a mental break that seems to be irrelevant, and no clue to where things are going to settle from here.