Episode Report Card Joe R: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Godmother
By Joe R | Season 1 | Episode 8 | Aired on 03.02.2011
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Three brothers are trespassing in a mine, looking for gold, when the one goes on a nutter (due to gas fumes), and the upshot is that Brenner and Cole get called in for the rescue. Brenner gets two brothers out, but the nutter has gone running deeper into the mine. Cole finds him just as the dude pick-axes into a gas pocket and explodes the mine. It looks for a moment like Cole might lose his eyesight, but really he's only blinded long enough for Zee to realize how deeply she feels for him.
Keeton, when he's not having tense conversations with Mateo, is trying to get Clark to go to New York for a heart transplant. She's finally convinced after she sees Plastics' patient, an ALS sufferer who's come to the jungle in order to let a magazine-ad quack hook a catheter to his thigh on the pretext that it'll cure him of his incurable disease. After much debate, Plastics makes the executive decision that the catheter has to go, though it takes the pleas of his wife and daughter (as well as a fall to the ground) in order to break the guy free of his delusions, just so he can accept his fate. The cherry on top is when the quack shows up to further peddle his snake oil to the guy, only for Plastics to totally punch him in the face.
Minard has pulled OB-GYN duty, which today means standing by while a Kechuan birthing ceremony is performed. Of course, she's Minard, so obviously she butts in, throws her Westerno-normative attitudes about medicine around and -- again, because she's Minard -- ends up totally right and delivers the baby healthy. Of course, she also mistakenly cuts the umbilical cord with the special Godmother Knife, which means she is now the baby's godmother. She tries to weasel out, but Zee puts her foot down: Minard must do this or face the possibility of shaming the Kechuan people (and thus keeping them away from the clinic). The one upside of this is that Minard invites Plastics to be her guest for the party, they both get splendidly drunk, and then they fool around in Zee's garden.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously: plane crash, heart failure, waterfall sex, all leading up to the moment when Mateo held his arm out and invited Lily Brenner to behold the nocturnal beauty of his family's precious blow emporium.
Currently: we pick up Brenner and Mateo in the middle of a Murphy Brown-style rapid-fire political debate about the ethics of growing coca. Mateo: "It's a leaf! You could make herbal tea from it. Very, very potent herbal tea!" Brenner: "Poppycock and balderdash! You're a drug dealer and so's yer mom!" Mateo says that the police are trying to muscle him and his family off the land, and when Brenner's like "Um, because they should? Because they're the police?" Mateo counters that she thinks "just like an American." It's not like the police will shut the farm down. They'll just appropriate the plants -- and the profits -- for themselves. "I grew up on Nancy Regan," she offers, by way of explanation. Mateo gets that it's probably not going to work between them.
Back at the cantina, it's movie night, and Plastics is somehow less than thrilled with the choice of Splash. Not only because it's a billion years old, but Alma gets so caught up in it that she doesn't have any interest in the macking which Plastics so desperately needs. (Guess that whole celibacy thing was doomed to fail from the start.) When Daryl Hannah has to return to the ocean, leaving Tom Hanks all alone, Plastics tries to comfort a heartbroken Alma. (He could do so my mentioning their career trajectories since then, but he doesn't get that far.) She's too emotional, though, and pushes him away. I'm not sure Alma knows how to do movies.
The next morning, a harried Zee blames the rainy season for why she's got five mothers about to give birth today, while Cole smirks and partakes of his sno cone. So their dynamic is back to normal, then. Keeton comes by and hands Cole a case: trespassers got caught in a nearby mine. Zee's like, "Again?" and blames some Incan curse, while Cole takes the more pedestrian explanation that the fools were probably looking for gold. Cole grumbles that Keeton should be the one going, as he's the resident Indiana Jones. Keeton remarks that Cole's the one wearing the stupid hat. Check and mate, sir. Keeton then stares off outside, at Clark horsing around with some child. The concern on his face is obvious, and he tells Cole that she needs a heart transplant. He also looks like he's about half a second from hauling Clark inside, strapping her to a chair, and forcing her not to exert herself anymore, but for now, he's holding steady.