'Modern Family' Season 6 Episode 18 Recap: Spring Break

After nearly a month-long wait for a new episode, ABC’s “Modern Family” returns this week for spring break. Claire needs to do some spring cleaning but she is finding it difficult because Phil is sentimental about all of his stuff. Alex and Haley head out to an outdoor spring festival while Mitch and Cam deal with parenting and other issues.

As Claire is looking for things to throw out while spring cleaning, she unearths Phil’s old banjo. Phil reveals how much he loves to play it but his less than adequate skills has prompted Claire to keep it away from his sight. It turns out that Luke is really good with the banjo, so Claire decides not to throw it away. Phil gets annoyed by how easily Luke learned how to play the banjo, so he invites Luke out on the trampoline to teach him the Dunphy signature move called the “Dunphy Twist.” To Phil’s dismay, he’s lost most of his limber jumping skills over the years, but Luke is able to do the twist on the first try. He starts to feel inadequate and competitive against Luke.

When Claire sees that Phil is feeling useless and upstaged, she uses his insecurity to manipulate him into doing chores. Meanwhile, Phil is still feeling bad about having been beaten by Luke on the banjo, so he tries to take it away from his son. In the process, he hurts Luke’s eye with a broken string. They head to the hospital and Phil apologises to Luke, saying that he feels like his son can do everything better than him now. Luke confesses that he’s not really so great because he didn’t go on a school trip because he’s embarrassed by how a girl spread a story about how he could not unhook her bra. In the end, Phil feels a little better seeing that he can still help out his child and be the dependable father that he wants to be.

Meanwhile, Cam will be singing in his faculty follies but finds out that another teacher has chosen the same song. Senor Kaplan has listed “Memory” from the musical “Cats” ahead of him. Mitch decides to step aside and let the other guy do it. Unfortunately, while preparing, Kaplan encounters a series of mishaps backstage, which leads people to believe that Cam is sabotaging him because of the song rivalry. Kaplan eventually says that he wants to give Cam the part after getting hurt several times. Cam feels embarrassed because everyone thinks he tried to steal the song by injuring his colleague. Out of embarrassment, he totally messes up the song. Gloria finds out that Kaplan intentionally made it look like Cam was sabotaging him so that he could pretend to graciously step down for Cam since he realised that the song is too difficult. After Cam embarrassed himself, Kaplan thought that he had gotten away with it. Unfortunately for him, Gloria turns on his microphone so the whole faculty hears his confession. The whole thing ends up in an onstage brawl, which Gloria thinks is better than a telenovela.

While Cam is dealing with the follies, Mitch is heading to camp to pick up Lily. He believes she held up two fingers in a photo to signal to him that she’s having a miserable time. On the way there with Jay, their car breaks down and the two of them end up arguing about what to do. Jay says Mitch is silly for picking up Lily but Mitch insists he wants his child to know that she can depend on her dad to rescue her when she sends out a distress call. He brings up his resentment towards Jay when he refused to pick him up when he himself was a lonely, miserable child at camp many years ago.

Mitch arrives at camp and sees that he was wrong about the signal because Lily is doing fine. He ends up being asked to tell a ghost story. Unfortunately, his story is lame and the kids got bored. Things only changed when Jay snuck in from the bushes and pretended to be a ghost to scare the children. Mitch thanks Jay for finally having his back during camp. Jay also apologises and admits he should have rescued Mitch many years ago.

Elsewhere, Alex and Haley are at an outdoor spring festival. Haley gets Alex drunk and she goes wild. Haley starts to worry and wonders what’s really going on. With the help of Claire’s snooping skills, they find out that Alex got wasted because she didn’t get into Harvard. She says that she spent her entire life trying to be perfect and she ends up in a field with 6,000 idiots. Haley makes Alex feel better and tells her that in real life she won’t come out on top all the time but she needs to learn to dust herself off and keep going. When the girls return home, Claire attempts to comfort Alex but is surprised to see that Haley already managed to sort things out. "Modern Family" returns next Wednesday at 9 p.m. on ABC.

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