Episode Report Card Djb: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Drowned World Tour
By Djb | Season 4 | Episode 1 | Aired on 06.12.2004
Nate "It's Pronounced Krauz-uh, And Also Try And Roll The 'R' A Bit, If Possible" Fisher sits, bloodied and broken, as a hand dabs his mulched, oozing face. But can the vague sting of bactine also heal...a broken heart? Let's go see! "I'm sorry," Nate tells us, unaware perhaps that we've already gone ahead and forgiven him for Cybill, because, really, he's done more good for the world than bad since then. The shot pulls back and we learn that the hand belongs to Brenda "G'Day, Mate" Chenowith, who responds, "Don't be." She dabs and he grouses, and all is status quo. She tries for the idle-chatter approach, except for the part where every pearl of dialogue on this show is intended to be meaningful enough to crush a Chevy Impala in the past, asking, "Where'd you get yourself so messed up?" Nate tells her that "it doesn't matter," because he totally doesn't remember any of last season either and he just doesn't want to embarrass himself in front of his new friends either. Thanks for having my back, Nate.
Death be not hungry. We're inside the gloomy kitchen of the Fisher house, where even the cookie jar is just a metaphor for the coffin-like final resting place...of cookies. Claire "Angst For The Memories" Fisher rants to David "We'll Catch Up Some Other Time" Fisher and Keith "Your Last Name Is Charles?" Charles, yelling, "When do I get to self-destruct? When do you?" She proclaims herself tired of Nate's "bullshit" because it's HBO and she can, dammit. She cuts herself off abruptly because nobody likes a whiner, and then immediately recants her abrupt silence, remembering that "wanting to be liked" is a cheap societal illusion that belongs to the pedestrian milieu of Saturn drivers and communications majors. Ideology firmly entrenched, she lands a whopper: "I'm just sick of everything being so fucking awful, all the time." She takes a definitive swig of champagne out of a champagne flute -- seems like a particularly odd time to break out the New Year's Rockin' Eve, Fisher Style! china, but even The Addams Family took dancing lessons in one episode and a wedding is still a wedding, I guess -- and stands up with a maximum of self-righteous determination. As she gets to the door, David offers to take Maya for the night, and Claire keeps it up, noting, "No, it's okay. I'll do it. It's obviously my 'thing.'" She softens it up with a polite enough "good night" to David and Keith, and David calls back a tonally odd "Sweet dreams." This is all exactly the opposite of what happened on the day my own mother got remarried, which has to be one of those unquantifiable little perks of not having grown up in a family of ghouls.