Episode Report Card Djb: B- | 1 USERS: D YOU GRADE IT Untitled
By Djb | Season 4 | Episode 12 | Aired on 09.11.2004
George sits at the kitchen table chatting merrily while an apron-clad Ruth stands at the stove and looks angry at everything that moves, everything that contains a vowel, and everything in her grandmother's attic. People? At everything. "Two hours? Great!" George chirps. "Let me know when you're on the ground and I'll come meet you." George ends the call and informs Ruth, "My daughter is on her way to Hawaii ,and she has a layover this afternoon. Would you like to meet her for lunch?" She'll only be in for a few hours before she's off to her pharmaceutical conference, but wouldn't it be a time! Ruth lightens when she discovers that George wasn't on the phone with an ex-wife, a bunker specialist, or a figment of his imagination.
"I'm not the person who's supposed to be here," a frazzled-looking blonde tells Nate and Rico in The Room Where People Are Sad. "We've been divorced for ages. He must have a new wife or a girlfriend." They assure her that she was the only person listed as Bradon't's emergency contact, and she frets, "He worked at the same place for twenty-five years. I'm sure he just forgot to change the form." But why go for a perfectly logical, tactically-based solution when there are allegories afoot. "Maybe he still loved you," Rico suggests, thinking entirely about himself. Mrs. Brandon't pauses for a moment and then proclaims that she's "moved on." Rico's upset because it's about him and Nate's upset because it's about him and Mrs. Brandon't's upset because she's under the misbegotten notion that it's about her, and Nate forcefully asserts the fact that "there are decisions about the funeral that have to be made." She loses her temper a bit now, shooting back, "Well, I don't want to make them! Now, there must be someone else who can deal with this, 'cause I can't believe it. How can you get killed by an elevator?" Nate obliges: "Well, there were three other people trapped inside and he tried to get them out, and the elevator tore him in half." At which the woman begins spontaneously puking, and we get to see a fair bit of it. Man. Nate's deadside manner just keeps getting better and better with each passing season, doesn't it?
You know that trick with the magician and the box and the cutting? Here's where it stops being funny. Downstairs, David tends to two separate tables, each featuring one half of the former Mr. Kenneth MacDonald Henderson. Nate marches in and announces, "I hit a new low!" What'd you do, Nate, cheat on Brenda with your Lisa pillow? No, no. He just "made the bereaved vomit." David turns off a loud whirring machine and props up his safety goggles, telling Nate the guy is embalmed and that he doesn't want to send the guy somewhere else. Nate tells him that they worked it out, and the turns the topic to the fact that he feels it's "weird" that they don't "sew him together." David reminds Nate that once Brandon't is dressed and in the casket, "You can't even tell the difference." And if you don't like the funeral director's handiwork, maybe you'd better become a funeral director yourself and...oh, wait a sec!