Episode Report Card Sars: D | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT First Encounters Of The Close Kind
By Sars | Season 3 | Episode 10 | Aired on 12.14.1999
Cut to a lecture hall, where Joey sees A.J. walk in. He comes over to her and tells her she picked a good class to visit. "Don't tell me you're in this class," she grumbles, and he shrugs, "Kinda." Joey grudgingly offers him a seat, but he says he can't sit down, and Joey remarks that the "professor's really late." A.J. tells her that they do that a lot, and that a "poor undergraduate teaching assistant" then has to lead the discussion. He means himself, it seems, because he proceeds to do just that. Yeah, that happens all the time. At Harvard. Where fifteen or twenty applicants compete for each TA slot at the graduate level. Who wrote this episode, a Yale graduate? Anyway, A.J. makes a big show of saying that the professor has gone to a semiotics conference, and an even bigger show of announcing the presence of high-school students in the class (which looks severely underpopulated for a lecture for English 101, as it says on the blackboard), and says he thought they'd take a break from their "great books discussion" to ask some of the high-schoolers what books they "consider great." "Great books discussion"? A.J. calls on Joey. She crosses her arms and says combatively, "What's my favorite book?" "You read, don't you?" A.J. sneers. Joey, for reasons I don't understand, chooses not to plant a size eight in A.J.'s doughy ass, instead answering firmly, "Little Women." A.J. smugly rips on it, calling it a "less successful version of Jane Eyre"; Joey defends it, outlining a few of the plot points, none of which I remember from either the book or the three film versions I've seen. Dear writers: please call a construction company and get a backhoe out there to remove that rock you all live under. Everyone IN THE WORLD knows the plot of Little Women -- except, apparently, you people. Get the Cliffs Notes, and a clue; Joey's summation was riddled with errors. Signed, the English-speaking world.
A.J. then asks the class if they think the book qualifies as a great book, "worthy of inclusion in the literary canon," or just as a "perennial American classic." "Perennial"? A girl with horn-rimmed glasses deems it "completely anti-feminist in spirit." Survey says? EHHHH! Another girl pipes up that the heroine gives up her dream to get married and start "popping out babies." Um, not in the one I read. Survey says? EHHHH! A guy pipes up, "Alcott's a minor writer," and grouses that she wrote "purely for money." "Minor writer," yes, but on the sell-out question, survey says? EHHHH! And by the way, Piping-Up Guy, if you want to accuse a writer of impure motives, try pointing that finger of yours at Dickens. But first, shut up. All of you. A.J. sums up, in an infuriatingly patronizing tone, that "we can't say a book is great just because we identify with the hero or heroine." Joey glares at him, but she says nothing.