Episode Report Card Drunken Bee: A | 4 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Father Never Knows Best
By Drunken Bee | Season 1 | Episode 4 | Aired on 10.23.2006
Friday. Coach Taylor waits outside his wife's office at school. She's surprised to see him, and when they go in his office he "apologizes" in the expected way, "I'm sorry that you are mad at me." Tami gets what he's doing, so she lays the sarcasm on thick and is like "I'm not-- I'm not sure that that's an apology" and so on. The two keep sparring, talking over one another, and the argument escalates into them debating who has the harder job -- Tami, who has to do more than just tell kids where to run a ball for 30 seconds, or Eric, who has the whole town on his back. It's a totally stupid fight. Which means it is exactly the kind of fight married people have. Nothing gets resolved, and as Eric leaves her office he announces to the kids in the waiting room, "Watch out, she's in a pissed off mood today." Heh.
Depressingly Realistic Rehab Facility. Herc wheels himself in after, apparently, playing rugby. He towels off a bit and snarks to Jason about having a missing girlfriend. Jason tells him to shut it, that he doesn't know anything about him. But Herc is all "Au contraire mon frere!" and starts describing what the next few months and years will be like for Jason. Now is the golden "everybody rallies around you" phase, soon enough the cards and letters will stop coming, three months after that the girlfriend will decide that they're different people now, two more months after that the lawsuit will be underway and Jason will lose people he's close to "to pay for fun things like colostomy bags." By now, Herc has moved closer to Jason and is ramming his wheelchair against Jason's while he describes the likely downward spiral Jason can't yet comprehend. Jason is telling Herc more and more urgently to shut up, but Herc keeps on, saying that two months after that, Jason's parents will announce that the stress of it all had driven them apart. Jason is livid by this point, Herc has raised his voice, and finally Jason screams at him "Will you SHUT UP?" while picking up his arm and knocking his glass of water off his wheelchair tray. Hear that? He picked up his arm!
Herc, Inspirational Wheelchair Guy, leans back and looks upon his charge wisely, "All in a day's inspiration, my friend, all in a day's inspiration." Not really. But he does look intently at Jason and say "Good. I knew you had some fight in you" and then turns and leaves. Jason looks down at his hand, lifts it up a bit and is able to flex his wrist a bit.
Under the burning hot sun, the football team runs stairs on the bleachers. Coach Taylor lectures them about how he said there would be no retaliation, then lets them stop after ten laps, asking them who wants to confess about who went on the raid last night. Nobody does, and hell they shouldn't. I would've thought Coach Taylor would be a guy who understood that you don't rat your pals out, so I don't know why he's pushing so hard to get names. He makes them run ten more laps. The camera pulls back to give us a gorgeous long shot of the bleachers with the boys like tiny ants running up and down.