Gloria’s plan for a perfect family getaway on a snowy mountainside to celebrate her first Christmas as a legal American citizen is repeatedly complicated by the weather (which is dry, warm, and snow-free), and an unexpected guest, a strange woman who apparently spent every single Christmas with her family, who promptly abandoned her and went off to vacation on Hawaii.
Gloria accidentally wins a family seminar at a school auction (she’d intended to bid on another package, one for a home organizer according to Jay, but wasn’t wearing her glasses at the time), which sends the entire Pritchett-Tucker-Dunphy clan into an embarrassed tailspin.
Tonight’s Modern Family is all about the illicit. To the surprise of absolutely no one who’s watched the show in the past four years, Luke is arrested (for the shockingly extremely minor misdemeanor of driving without a license and without an adult present because he was hoping a girl would share a grief make-out session with him) and has to deal with the punishment meted out by his disappointed father and extremely blasé mother, who thinks Phil is being too harsh, even refusing to address his son by his birth name.
Claire takes Haley and Alex to work as part of Take Your Kids to Work day (…even though two of them are post-collegiate), and gets to lead the company while Jay’s busy taking care of Joe - but her employees get in the way of a positive experience by constantly searching for and needing Jay’s expertise and noting Claire’s total inexperience.
Phil can’t convince anyone else to help him take care of the duck eggs; he plans to build a coop for them but help isn’t readily at hand, as most of the family thinks the eggs are dead or unfertilized. Phil finds himself manipulating Lily into helping out, teaching her a lesson in maintaining a sense of faith over cynicism and finding the fun in hope.
In a misguided attempt at bonding with Dylan and pleasing Haley, Haley talks Phil into convincing Claire to let Dylan move into her basement mini-apartment. Phil immediately regrets lending his support to the cause when he repeatedly walks in on the two of them in bed together and finds himself trying to convince Claire to get rid of the kid for him, forcing the parents into a game of chicken and leaving Haley and Dylan in the catbird seat.
Alex is so embarrassed by her parent’s presence that she moves to college early to avoid their fawning and Claire’s intense clinging – but within hours of showing up to dorm with Haley meets her nerdy, super-smart, hyper and much-younger roommate and almost wishes she were back home again.
When we rejoin the Dunphys, Phil’s called Alex after his robot body was kidnapped. On his advice, Haley and Claire race off to find Andy…with surprising consequences.
This week, Alex finally graduates high school with honors…and Phil is stuck in Seattle after an ear infection gained during a business trip makes it impossible for him to fly home in time, forcing him to attend the party that takes place afterwards through Skype and a robotic servo (sidenote: how much money did Skype give ABC this season?).
Alex is forced to celebrate her senior ditch day (and thus wreck her perfect attendance record) by Phil, Luke and Haley, who first lie to her about Luke being sick to get her in the car, then try to take her to Magic Mountain. But an unexpected detour to an old theatre that Phil literally built with his own two hands shakes things up, and he enlists the kids in wrenching out some cement footprints the children left in cement when the foundation was laid years ago.