Episode Report Card Couch Baron: B- | 373 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT It's a Gi…Boy!
By Couch Baron | Season 3 | Episode 5 | Aired on 2009.09.13
Back in the delivery room, the nurse is telling Betty to push, but Betty, doped up and not really loving it, groggily says she can't. The nurse snaps, "Either you can do it or we will. But it's gonna come out some way!" That's the kind of homespun wisdom against which it's hard to mount an effective argument, and rather than try, Betty heads off into another dream...
...in which she's walking down the hallway of the hospital, still in her gown, and then...she's back in normal clothes, walking into her kitchen. Hmm, not sure I get why the transition was necessary there, especially since they clued us in with the Soothing Music Of Drug-Fueled Dream Sequences, but this is why I'm a producer and not a director. Anyway, she finds the "mystery" man in the janitor's outfit mopping the floor with his back to her, and he stays turned away from her for a while until he turns to reveal he's...her father. Well, that was worth our time, especially since Ryan Cutrona was billed as a guest star. She girlishly asks if he misses her, and he tells her of course before cautioning her that no one knows he's there. We then see that he's mopping blood or strawberry jam up from the floor, which prompts Betty to ask if she's dying. Gene replies, "Ask your mother," and calls off screen, "Tell her, Ruthie!" We cut to the corner, where a brunette woman I wouldn't have picked for Betty's mother based on my memory of the painting we saw of her tells her to shut her mouth. "You'll catch flies." Ruth is standing over a seated black man whose eyes are closed, which made me vaguely think at first we had stepped into David Lynch territory, but when I notice there's blood on his collar and Ruth goes on to add, holding out a blood-soaked rag, "See what happens to people who speak up?" I realize that this is probably meant to be the earlier-mentioned Medgar Evers, who I'm sure would be tickled pink to know that his death served to make a point in a show about white people and their petty dramas forty-five years later. Ruth counsels her to be happy with what she has, and Gene adds that she's a housecat. "You're very important, and you have little to do." When both your parents are dead and yet they're still meeting up to tag-team your self-esteem, it's time to get back into therapy, I think.