Episode Report Card Monty Ashley: A- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Bickering Isn't Going to Solve Anything!
By Monty Ashley | Season 3 | Episode 17 | Aired on 03.05.2009
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Mode is broke, so Daniel and Wilhelmina have to act poor in hopes of getting a federal bailout. That's silly; poor people don't get federal bailout checks. They only give 50 million dollars to people who look like they're used to having 100 million. Also on the list of "not getting fat government checks" is "people who whoop it up with a $400 bottle of wine in the New York Post," so Daniel and Wili decide to liquidate some of their considerable personal assets to keep Mode alive. And this motivates Daniel to go get Molly back, which is nice.
Meanwhile, Marc and Amanda borrow Wili's baby so they can date a hot guy (Marc) and come to a deep, meaningful realization about parents (Amanda). And they wear entertaining clothes while saying funny things.
Anyway, the main plot is that the Ignacios are suddenly in danger of being evicted unless they can raise $15,000. Ignacio tries to win $10,000 on a cooking show, but fails. Hilda's attempt to jack up the rates at the salon also fails. Even Justin's street-corner performance of Cabaret fails to generate the long green. Even when it turns out that Matt's family has billions of dollars and he wants to give Betty the money, her pride gets in the way. But the cooking show was rigged and Ignacio goes to work for the host and incidentally sells his chicken molé recipe for enough to keep the house.
So the moral of the story is that it was time for Ignacio to get a job cooking already. Good!
Discuss this episode in our forums, then see what vlogger Sean Crespo thinks about Betty when he has No Prior Knowledge!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Welcome back to Ugly Betty. To begin this week's episode, Betty will be going through her closet and looking appraisingly at a number of outfits. Those of you with a low tolerance for bright colors and prints are advised not to look directly at your television. And if you think you've got it bad, keep in mind that I'm looking at these clothes in HD. Betty eventually selects a black dress and goes downstairs, where Hilda, Justin, and Ignacio all assume someone must have died. In fact, Betty just thought she should wear something less cheerful because Meade is broke. Even her opening-credits smile is less wide than usual. Justin praises her outfit effusively. Although to be fair, Justin does most things effusively. He's just an effusive kid.
Hilda expresses disbelief that Connor could steal the entire contents of the bank account without being caught (I'm with her!), and Betty says that Connor seems to have completely vanished and there's no way to track him. Ignacio is more concerned with shouting at the cooking show on the television, which is behavior I can identify with. He's angry at a show called Kitchen Rumble, in which Frankie Burrata (Steve Schirripa, who played Bobby Bacala on The Sopranos) challenges everyday cooks. There's a prize of $10,000, but if you lose, all you get are Frankie's leftovers. Ignacio has been calling and demanding to be on the show, but so far to no avail. Not even a small avail. No avail whatsoever for Ignacio.
Betty reports that she's having dinner tonight with her New Friend Matt, and Justin gives her some final praise for her perfect company-in-ruin outfit. Then she turns around to leave and we see that she has a giant, colorful fabric flower affixed to her butt. Justin: "So close, and yet so far." Wouldn't you think Betty would own a black dress to go to funerals in? When you live inside a telenovela, you're in mourning a lot.
Betty arrives at her desk in a tizzy. She sets the tizzy carefully by the phone and answers it. It is Matt, who wants to know if she's received his gift. She has not. Matt claims that he's looking forward to imagining the look on her face when he hears her getting the present. That sentence was a lot more complicated than the other ones in this paragraph, wasn't it? Daniel shows up and seems worried about the company needing a couple million dollars so it doesn't go bankrupt. Betty asks about Molly, and Daniel says that he's leaving Molly alone, as per her wishes. A heart-shaped mylar balloon attached to a jar of jellybeans arrives for Betty, and she gets a little flustered trying to get the balloon to behave. She probably set it too close to the tizzy. After Daniel leaves, Betty picks up the phone and assures Matt that her face is smiling. But we see it reflected in the mylar balloon so it looks all distorted and weird.