Episode Report Card Owen: D | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Devil's Music
By Owen | Season 2 | Episode 4 | Aired on 10.20.1999
P3 Nightclub, hereafter referred to as P3 After Dark. Outpatients wandering around the sparsely populated place. Cut to Selma and Thelma, sitting on barstools, chain smoking and bad mouthing Homer. My bad. Cut to a glum-looking Prue "Queen P" Halliwell and Phoebe "Tattoo Who?" Halliwell, still sitting on their asses (natch) like last week. Prue is wearing an outfit last spotted in an underground Czech disco circa 1983 -- black pedal-pushers, a black tube top covered by a loose mesh sleeveless shift woven out of sparkly Easter basket grass, and a babushka (!?!) holding back a handful of cornrows on her head. Phoebe is dressed rather demurely for once in a black tube dress with embroidered flower décolletage. The camera pans around the club revealing some hard-core alcoholics and a bartender reading the paper, and we get it -- business is slow. Pheebs: "This place couldn't be more dead if I was embalmed." That line was obviously a gimme, so I'll pass. Prue responds with some exposition about taking "an offer" from a guy named Barker. Phoebe wants assurance that the guy's not a loan shark. Prue assures her that he's offering them a "no-interest loan [they] can pay back any time" and says he "won't miss the money." Of course, the two Ps agree not to tell their sister. Piper "Steve Rube-Belle" Halliwell approaches and asks them, seemingly for the first time, if they like the name of the club -- "P3, get it? The Power of Three?" Phoebe almost opens her mouth to bitch about what a dud the place is, but Prue shushes her. Piper tells the other Ps that the place will "pick up." Phoebe wants to know when exactly. Piper says it's "hard to predict, it's not like starting a restaurant." (Didn't Piper explain to Yuppie Rob in the first ep this season that nightclubs are less risky than restaurants? Yeah. I thought so, too.) Piper placates the Ps by telling them they won't get called on the loan and they won't "lose the house." She goes off to work. Phoebe is suddenly alarmed at the possibility of losing the manor, so maybe she should have found out what a mortgage was before she signed one. ["Well, another one, since they took out a second on the house to give Piper the check." -- Sars] Prue tells her that they'll take Barker's offer, giving time to Piper to "pack the place." Pheebs pouts and whines in a baby voice Kelly Taylor wants back, "Where is everybody?"
Cut to another nightclub -- a building with some bad F/X titles imposed on the sides, one stating "TONIGHT: DISHWALLA" and the other "BUTTERFLY'S COCOON." I cave in and agree that the name of Piper's club could have been much, much worse. Some alterna-rockers are playing, and the adenoidal singer is trying his best as assorted poseurs do the sorority sway and the frat-boy two-step. This band must be Dishwalla. Since I really have no idea what the young people are listening to these days, I researched this recap for you, dear readers, by asking my music industry publicist friend Sara about the band. Her response, verbatim: "Who? Dishwalla? What the? Oh, yeah. They SUCK." Leo "Return to the White Lighter Lagoon" Wyatt wanders around the crowd, searching, searching.
Cut to some guy who looks like Blossom's dad, escorting a Brainless Groupie backstage. He explains that he's the band's new manager. BG, making Phoebe sound like Ruth Bader Ginsburg: "Man, I can't believe this! This is like the most unbelievable thing that's ever happened to me!" She's wowed that he "picked" her. He says she seemed like a "good soul" and she said the magic words -- "[she'll] do anything." Hey, didn't I see this on video when it was released as Hellraiser III? Isn't there a reason why seven years have gone by and I didn't rent it again? The manager lets BG into the dressing room and tells her the band will be "down in a minute." BG thanks him -- for the ensuing gangbang, I guess. He says, "Don't thank me yet." BG looks around the room, sees something, and screams. The manager enters the room. He tells an unseen presence, "That's it. No more." Camera cuts to a tall guy, wearing over his head a black shower curtain with crab-leg shell fingers poking out, telling the manager that they "have a pact." Shower Curtain Guy exposes his chest to reveal BG within, stretching her face and hands through Saran Wrap. This fails to get the pearl-clutching response from me that the producers were going for.