Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Watergate Still Kind Of Bothers Me
By Jacob Clifton | Season 6 | Episode 4 | Aired on 01.29.2007
Simon is...not pleased, as she's walking in. Randy asks how old dumb old Margaret is, and she says she's 26, and Simon questions this, and then she flashes them yet more Big Yellow Montana, because that's where she's got her number stuck to her. She dances around with her number stuck to her fupa and her stupid handbag and the goddamn feathery yellow Big Bird hat, and I have no idea what the fuck she's singing. It's like so telling that I'm more appalled by this -- not funny, just stupid, timewasting crap -- than I usually am about the retards. It's just so worthless, watching her do this is so damned worthless. Simon is bored and this is beneath him, and Paula's as usual misreading the room as she asks if he loved the mess that is Margaret. "I have no idea what this show is anymore. I'm serious. I've got you standing in front of me looking like some kind of Easter Bunny nightmare experiment... Atrocious. Own up. How old are you." She says 33, and he asks again. She laughs, and then she stops laughing, and admits that she's fifty. Paula says she's amazing and she leaves, and that's ten minutes closer to death we all just got.
There's a blonde Ellie May girl like Carrie that gets through, a brunette girl, and an Asian girl with a boyfriend. Or maybe I made all that up, because how would anybody know?
What's more useless and soul-sucking than watching Margaret Fowler gay around in a Big Bird costume? Jamie Lynn Ward (17, Reidsville NC), a girl wearing a t-shirt that says BLUE EYED BOMBSHELL and whom Ryan calls in voiceover a "blue-eyed bombshell," but who...does not seem to me to have blue eyes. What she does have, and in motherfucking abundance, is some obnoxious baggage. She's cute, looks like she could be Dolly Parton's daughter. She tells us that she wants to get a single-floor house for her grandma, with whom she lives, because her dad's paralyzed. What's interesting is that I honestly do think this whole thing is funny. Like, the amount of fake and stupid that this show usually is has gone so exponentially fake and stupid on itself that this episode somehow puts your soul in hock. So while tomorrow in LA I'll be crying for Vietnamese lesbians and Korean War vets left and right, today I'm laughing at just the words "my dad's paralyzed." That's fucking comedy, right there.
"Tell us something interesting about you," says Simon, unlatching the gate of the very awesome monologue that spawned a thousand imitations. "I live with my grandma," she says, starting as far as possible from "interesting" as she can, and working back toward it with a quickness: "And my daddy's paralyzed from here down. He shot hisself, like right here?" She indicates the Federov area on her own throat, "But it's okay!" Everybody stares. "His wife was cheatin' on him? Which was my stepmomma? And he caught her in the act, and it wasn't the first time, so he like, shot her, and he shot hisself, and now I live with my grandma, but it's okay!" It's not okay. It's not going to be okay ever again. Paula pours some refreshing lemonade about Jamie Lynn's entire life: "So the real story is that you're here, now, and the rest of life is just an illusion?" Jamie Lynn's like, "That is the point of the 'it's okay' philosophy, Paula." She sings -- shockingly enough -- "Reflection," though the nose, but it's okay, and Paula tells her she has a very pretty voice "when you're not powering through," and to watch her tendency to get nasally up in her nasal, and Simon and Randy agree completely and wig out about how Paula's just a dumb girl, so how can she know anything about music and act incredibly patronizing about the joke that Paula's a fucking moron and this goes on for a million years as Susan B. Anthony turns over in her grave for us all, but it's okay, and Paula holds up her paws and pants at this praise, like a fucking dog, but it's okay, and they put Jamie Lynn through so we're going to be hearing yet more about the Nikki McKibbin to the power of Pickler that her sad stupid life is, in the weeks to come, but it's okay, and outside her family -- those of them that are left -- go wild.