Episode Report Card Drunken Bee: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Open Relationships
By Drunken Bee | Season 2 | Episode 8 | Aired on 11.29.2007
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Tami's in the center of a number of hot messes -- her sister thinks she's not satisfying Coach, Coach is jealous of Glen (yes, that Glen), and Noah from SVU is continuing to educate her daughter. Tami tells Noah to stay away from Julie with his subversive Garpian literature and Julie goes ballistic. And when Coach tries to pull the same trick on his wife, telling her to stop hanging out with Glen so much, and then her sister asks her how she would have felt if their mother had done something like that to her, Tami (and we) come to a strange and unusual conclusion: sometimes, Tami can be wrong.
Smash continues getting wined and dined by recruiters. After a long weekend of the good life with the thuggish galoots at University U., he finds himself about to seal the deal with a lovely lady when one of his prospective fellow teammates walks in on Smash with his girl. Hijinks ensue.
Matt is still hot for Car-low-ta even though the Gidget-haired Lauren is all up in his business all the time. So he takes Smash's advice and tells Lauren he'd like an "open relationship," causing her to break up with him, leaving him in the clear to hightail it back home and lose his virginity to our favorite sassy Latina domestic.
Tim bonds with his ferret-keeping, tighty-whitie-wearing new roommate by huntin' and drinkin' and unknowingly helping keep his meth lab flush with pseudoephedrine. This last item doesn't sit so well with Tim once he realizes, and so he forces Coach's hand and charms himself back onto the football team. Please raise your hand if you were hoping against hope for a Timmy Riggins meth-head storyline (visions of Ryan Gosling on crack Half Nelson-style, swoon).
And the puzzle of the Tyra/Landry murder storyline gets wrapped in a stinker of an enigma when the murdered dude's brother shows up wanting to meet with his dead brother's victims. What? This of course makes Landry feel worse, thinking about this guy having a family and all, and so at the end of the episode Landry marches into the police station to turn himself in. And I have to take a moment to address the previews for the next episode because I believe it marks the low point in somebody's idea of what the hell viewers of Friday Night Lights are interested in. Which happens, actually, to be more about awesome yet somehow simultaneously inappropriate high school English teachers, not whether it was "murder" or "manslaughter." WHO CARES. God, I thought this storyline was going to be over tonight but it looks like we're not out of the obtuse woods yet. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Open on the fourth quarter of a miserable Panther defeat, 37-0. In the stands, Tami's sister Shelly mutters that Tami isn't getting laid tonight. Because Tami is obviously feeling so randy, holding her baby while standing in a sea of stale peanut shells watching a high school football game. Shelly tells her sister that "they" say that "anything less than three times a week and...." Tami snaps that she's "tired, tired," and Shelly switches subjects from Tami's lonely vagina to Julie's underage one: "Look, there's Julie with that cute little English teacher she has a crush on." Tami's eyes go feral as she stares across the stands at Julie standing next to Noah. Shelly informs her that Julie said she thought he was cute and open-minded and "cultured, very cultured." Tami doesn't it like it one bit.
In the locker room, the boys get dressed down by Coach. He leaves the room and Smash takes about ten seconds before he opens his locker and delivers a Shakespearean ode to his own beauty, "Now that's a good lookin' man right there, wipe it down, wipe it down." Borrowing, of course, those "wipe it downs" from Shakespeare's famous lost foolscap octavo. The other players get mad at Smash for being so cheery after such a dismal loss but Smash doesn't care. He calls over to Matt, asking what the quarterback is doing that weekend only so he can blab what he is doing: getting recruited by McNeil University, "where your cup is never empty and the girls never say no." Smash declares that it is going to be "like Cabo in my pants."
Cut to Matt making out with Lauren in his car. She tells him that her parents are gone for the night and asks him to come in and stay over. It's kind of like Reykjavik in Matt's pants, though, and he begs off, saying that his grandmother would get worried if he didn't come home. His strategy, Icelandically odd-minded as it is, pays off, as Lauren finds him even more attractive for not fucking her. (She here diverges from Ol' Dirty Bastard who, you may remember, went on record saying that he does have a problem with you not fucking him.)
Matt arrives home to find Car-low-ta scrubbing down the stove with spray bleach and rubber gloves. He approaches her and attempts to ask, sexily, whether she "spilled some spices there." He really missed an opportunity to take that line to the next level of sexiness by adding, "you know, like maybe some red hot chili pepper flakes?" Talk about swoon-worthy. Car-low-ta shuts Matt down before he even starts, telling him that they are not even going to think about or talk about "it." She leaves the room and Matt sighs and thinks about the many spices he could have named to symbolize the heat he feels between them.