Episode Report Card Sara M: F | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Fostering Failure, Adopting Apathy
By Sara M | Season 9 | Episode 8 | Aired on 10.31.2004
Greta calls RevCam's home office with some information about where he can find the Davis mother. She tells RevCam to bring Kevin, in uniform, with him. Is Kevin allowed to dress in uniform when he's off-duty? I thought there was a rule against that. RevCam tells Greta that his plan is to try to reunite the Davis family, to which Greta responds that the father is dead of a drug overdose and the mother is halfway there herself. RevCam says she might be their only chance. Greta laughs at him and rolls her eyes.
RevCam and Kevin pull up to a halfway house: "halfway between here and Hell," Kevin wittily points out, looking at its surroundings. How sad that the halfway house seems to be in a better neighborhood than my apartment. I must live three-quarters of the way to Hell. RevCam tells Kevin to wait in the car while he finds Mrs. Davis, and suddenly Mackenzie Phillips appears in RevCam's window to make fun of RevCam for bringing a police escort. "Aren't you a minister? Isn't God watching over you?" she asks. Obviously, Mackenzie knew RevCam was coming to see her, so I guess they have working telephones halfway between here and Hell. Good to know that I can call people when I'm on my way down. Although I don't know what we'd talk about.
RevCam asks Mackenzie if they can have a chat. Mackenzie proceeds to exhale her cigarette smoke directly in RevCam's face. Methinks the Davis family has yet another daughter, and her name is Betty! Mackenzie agrees to speak to RevCam, and he exits the car just as Kevin's cell phone rings. It's Lucy, of course, and she needs to fill another five minutes of screen time:
Lucy: How's it going?
Kevin: It's going. I'll call you back.
Lucy: Have you seen the mother yet?
Kevin: We just met her. I'll call you back.
Lucy: What does she look like?
Kevin: Can I call you back?
Lucy: Is she standing right there?
Kevin: Pretty close, yeah. I really would appreciate if I could call you back.
I'll bet Kevin's so glad he married that naghag, especially after seeing what else was available to him at Low Standards U and even the halfway house. To get rid of Lucy, Kevin says it will be a miracle if RevCam can fix things for the Davis family, although I don't know what he's basing this on other than the probability that if Mrs. Davis gets her kids back, she'll immediately burn them and their house down in a miracle conflagration that incinerates the entire house but leaves the front door unscathed. Kevin says he thinks RevCam is just as over his head as Kevin was when he had to deal with Simon. So, not really at all?
RevCam and Mackenzie talk in a nice little park you wouldn't expect to see adjacent to a house halfway between here and Hell. My apartment is adjacent to a highway and bright purple church. I really need to look into how to get a room at a halfway house. RevCam tells Mackenzie he wants to help her so they can help her children. She says she doesn't need help; she has plans for her post-halfway house life. "I'm going to go back to what I do best: getting high," Mackenzie proudly states. Because drug addicts just love being drug addicts. It's not like they get out of rehab and try to stay clean but find life too difficult to deal with without drugs. They're drug addicts by choice! They're happy that way! ["Although it occurs to me that the 7H writing staff might have more than a little experience in the area of drug addiction as pain management." -- Sars] Mackenzie says she's "done with all that. [Her kids are] all fine anyway." RevCam says they're not fine. They don't have homes, and they're separated from each other. He asks Mackenzie if there's anything she can do to help her kids. Maybe she could "take some drug-counseling classes" or "go to school" or even "come to church." Mackenzie laughs at RevCam and calls him an "innocent little lamb." Seriously. The only way I could see going to church helping here is if Mackenzie takes to staring at RevCam's ugly-ass stained glass office window and finds that it mimics all the effects of hallucinogens with none of the expense or addiction. RevCam says he's not innocent, just optimistic. He tells Mackenzie that if she won't be a mother to her children, she could at least sign away her parental rights to give them a better chance of being adopted. Mackenzie says she'll do no such thing, and if that's what RevCam came to ask, then he can leave. RevCam asks if her if she's jealous that he's trying to help her kids and not her. "What do you need?" he asks her. "Talk to me." Guess what? Mackenzie needs money. That's the only reason she agreed to come on this show. I mean, "talk to RevCam." He won't give her anything, so she bids him farewell. I wish she had blown smoke in his face again, or better yet, extinguished her cigarette on his semi-parabolic widow's peak.