Episode Report Card Aaron: D+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT I'm not dead yet! (It's just a flesh wound.)
By Aaron | Season 2 | Episode 10 | Aired on 05.04.2002
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Strega: Good point. Maybe we should hold off on that one.
Jessica: But I still don't understand why we're doing this. Besides, what if he wakes up?
Strega: Haven't we already discussed this? He likes FRED, for God's sake. And you know what else he told me? He actually thinks Moronica and Dawson would make a cute couple.
Jessica: Oh, yeah. This freak's going down.
Aaron: [Snore.]
We open this week as an individual whom I've elected to provide absolutely no information about whatsoever (lest said information be in some way construed as prejudicial) keels over and dies. Yep, that's it. Just an anonymous heart attack. No evisceration, no decapitation, no cat shoving curlers into the bathtub. Hell, we don't even get an ironically detached musical selection. I guess this was supposed to be a metaphor for the ultimate banality of death, but in the end, it was really just banal. Why hast thou forsaken us, oh God of wacky death scenes? I did, however, like the symbolism of the spilled recycling bottles. Farewell, Benjamin Sisrai. Ashes to ashes, plastic to plastic.
Perhaps in response to last week's introduction of the new quadratic grading formula, this week's StC value is but a mere three seconds. We fade up on the posed corpse of a middle-aged woman, and pull back to reveal Claire snapping a few photos of her. This artistic enterprise is interrupted by the ringing of the doorbell, and Nate runs down the steps to meet Lisa in the foyer. She's got some papers for him to sign, and she also blames her supermarket freak-out from the previous episode on "the hormones." Having spent an extended amount of time these past few months with a number of variously pregnant women (and no, none of the children are mine, thank you very much), I've taken to blaming pretty much everything that goes wrong in my life on "the hormones." It's a great excuse; you should try it. Anyway, Claire quickly joins them in foyer, and she's a bit shocked to see Lisa's belly. In what will become one of this episode's many recurring themes, Peter Krause does an excellent acting job with minimal script support, as he contorts his face into an endless array of expressions, all intended to demonstrate just how uncomfortable he is with the thought of Lisa telling his sister who the daddy is. Heh. That's the sort of conversation you usually only hear in West Virginia. Or Cleveland. Claire takes the time to plug eBay (which, for the moment at least, is NOT a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL Time Warner), and then runs off to school.
Elsewhere, David is sipping coffee and reading the paper in Keith's living room. Except I guess it's his living room now, too. Either way, he's not happy to have spilled some coffee on the couch, and he quickly moves to cover it up when Keith enters. "Do you think that chair seems right for that space?" wonders Keith, in reference to David's TV chair, which is newly ensconced about six inches in front of the set. Yeah. Thanks, Vern. You got any other decorating tips? Then again, my chair is about six inches away from the TV itself, so I guess I shouldn't say anything. In fact, I'm currently sitting within about three feet of one TV (32 inches) two computers (both fully functional), a TiVo, a VCR, a digital cable set-top, a DVD player, my X-Box, two printers, a complete set of Simpsons figurines, eight surround-sound speakers, and about ten thousand dollars' worth of digital video gear. The best part is that this job makes it all tax-deductible, although I am surprised I don't have cancer yet, what with all the radon they must be giving off. Flick. Ahhhhhhh. Anyway, Keith also makes a crack about how much he loves Steve McQueen movies, and while I peruse Steve's IMDb page in an attempt to decide whether I should go with Blob jokes, junkie Bullitt humor, a crack about making my own Great Escape, or just simply the obvious "queen" reference, David quickly agrees to return the videos they've rented, and the scene is over.