Even without Frankie and Mike pushing him, Axl got himself a job. He is now Brick’s school bus driver, which means he is making money and still has time to go on interviews. As his bus driver, Axl finds out that Brick isn’t having the greatest start of the school year, especially after his breakup with Cindy. When Axl hears that Mike doesn’t want to go to Brick’s Career Exploration Day, he stands up for his little brother. And when that doesn’t help, Axl goes to Career Exploration Day himself, only to be followed by Mike who decided to help out Brick after all. They both embarrass him, but at least he got the credits for having someone at school.

Sue and Lexie are back in college, but when they get to their apartment, they find out a man is living there. Sue and Lexie sublet the apartment to Derrick and Andy (the guys that got Axl, Hutch and Kenny evicted from their house 2 years ago) for the summer and they made an Airbnb out of it. The man has rented the place until November and has no intentions of leaving it before that, which means Sue and Lexie are homeless and have to sleep in their cars. Lexie wants to get help from their parents, but Sue wants them to solve it themselves. Things get more complicated when Sue finds out the man is her statistics professor. She doesn’t want to get in trouble and backs off, but when she tells Sean about the situation, he goes over to their apartment to fix it. After threatening to tell the school that the professor is ‘living with a student’, Sean gets the professor to leave the apartment. Sue is annoyed that Sean helped her out because she doesn’t need the help of a man, but Sean tells her it has nothing to do with that. They just always help out each other.

Frankie gives Nancy an old scarf that’s just lying around and to return the favor, Nancy bakes her an apple pie. Frankie tries to get more of Nancy’s food by giving her crappy stuff from the Heck house and it works, until she receives a pepper steak that doesn’t quite live up to all the other food Nancy has been making. Frankie goes over to Nancy to tell her about it, but Nancy breaks down and tells her that she’s feeling down. Frankie feels guilty and decides to cook Nancy something, which was all part of Nancy’s plan, who can’t believe she got away with it.

It doesn’t happen a lot, but some episodes of The Middle just don’t really work for me. Sadly, this episode was one of them. The episode had some classic The Middle moments (only Frankie would trade stuff for food), some hilarious lines and some great callbacks, but it just wasn’t as good as most other episodes of The Middle. It didn’t seem to have as many laugh out loud moments, and the two smaller storylines didn’t get enough time to really develop.

The biggest storyline, about Sue and Lexie’s apartment, did have a great ending though. The moment between Sue and Sean in the end was sweet and possibly one of the biggest openings for the show to start a relationship between the two. And now that the snow globe has returned to the Heck house, it seems like we will soon see Sue and Sean getting together.

While I didn’t like this episode as much as I usually do, I am excited to see what will be next for the Hecks!

The Middle’s next episode airs October 17th at 8/7c on ABC.