Episode Report Card Aaron: A | 1 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Dead End
By Aaron | Season 2 | Episode 13 | Aired on 06.01.2002
And continuing with our parade of returning minor characters, here's Dr. Dick (not to be confused with last week's Dr. Dildo) explaining to Nate that his anvilitis has worsened considerably over the course of the season. There's a great deal of medical babble involved with that, but the only really important part comes when Dr. Dick lies and says he never told Nate that the anvil was in a "not overly eloquent" portion of the brain. You can thank the previouslys for pointing that one out. He also schedules Nate for surgery that coming Saturday, but not before warning him that there's a "high risk for paralysis, loss of speech, vegetation, or death." Dr. Dick looks so young in some of these shots that I'm frankly surprised they didn't just cast Neil Patrick Harris and be done with it. I guess there are only so many anvils you can have in one scene.
The Palace of Promiscuity. Brenda and Grant are sitting at the kitchen counter, enjoying a huge gourmet sushi feast that I absolutely refuse to believe Brenda prepared herself. She spends most of her time here cracking on the losers at Sluts Anonymous, but Grant seems to take it all a bit more seriously, especially when he reveals that he was "spreading gonorrhea all over Los Angeles last year." Ew. And also, ow. "So when did you admit you were powerless?" inquires Brenda, and Grant quickly answers with a degree of specificity that would be frightening to anyone who's never participated in a twelve-step program (or counted the seconds until the first appearance of a corpse on their favorite TV shows). "And now your life is just one long hot fuck with God?" she continues. Ew. And also, ew again. Grant claims that he's an atheist, but he demonstrates his prayer technique anyway, and to no one's surprise, it consists mainly of thinly veiled flirting disguised as a plea to his higher power. "Well, I'm not going to stop drinking or smoking pot," says Brenda in response, and then she also throws an extraneous "fuck" into the next sentence, just so we know she won't quit swearing, either. Yeah, right. As if that one was ever in doubt. You take away the pot and the swearing, and this show's episodes would only be seven minutes long. "You know, I'm curious," says Grant. "How does having compulsive sex with strangers, no close relationship with friends or family, a job that you hate, and a broken engagement feel manageable to you?" "I didn't say my life wasn't unmanageable," replies Brenda. "I just said that I hadn't admitted I was powerless." From here the scene devolves into psychobabble, which allows Rachel Griffiths to do that thing where she turns her head to the right and scratches her neck whenever things get too uncomfortable for her. It's a nice touch of acting consistency, and it almost makes lines like "I don't want to be one of those horrible people that walks around in pain all the time" nearly palatable. Yeah. I said "nearly."