Episode Report Card Djb: D | 3 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT In The Claire
By Djb | Season 4 | Episode 8 | Aired on 08.29.2000
In an obvious season faux-finale shout-out to Megyn and myself, Adebisi is in the middle of some rather ambiguous looking calisthenics of some kind which require his head to hang down, and I would very much like for everyone to know that the hat, as imagined, sticks to his head with all great tenacity. Magnets? Suction? Telekinesis? Tiny men holding four wooden posts like it's a float in Thanksgiving Day Parade? That's probably it. Anyway, he is holding a private meeting of the drug-addled minds inside of a classroom, and Mobay enters to hear the disturbing news, compliments of Simon himself, that "there's an undercover narc in Oz." Mobay expresses his concern with the eye-rollingly enunciated swear word "sheet," and I practically expect the good people of Berlitz to enter the classroom pod all in a huff and withdraw their carefully positioned but obviously misappropriated product placement funds when Mobay delivers this word with the stage direction "as if terribly faking a Jamaican accent" fully heeded. Because the narc is allegedly one of Mobay's customers, the Jafakin' is ordered to whack the guy himself.
Speaking of which, we shoot over to Mobay and Hill's pod, where Hill laughingly informs Mobay, "Y'know, for a minute, I thought you was undercover." But, Hill continues, with the amount of nose candy Mobay has been consistently trafficking into his bloodstream, Hill has come to believe that this is an impossibility. "But that night you were so cranked up on tits that your accent suddenly disappeared. I was like, 'What the fuck is that?'" Yeah, Hill. Which time? Hill continues on that he figured out that Mobay's girlfriend was a "dead ringer" for a police officer who approached him when he was thrown off the roof of his building in S1, and I feel the same encroaching fear I experienced during Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves while waiting for the good people of Sherwood Forest to figure out that Kevin Costner was really from Los Angeles, so egregiously SoCal was his non-inflected patois. Honestly, folks, that is what I thought the plot of the movie was the first and only time I sat through it in its eternal non-glory. Mobay's accent falls at about the same "middling to disastrous" spot on the Me Talk Funny Some Day Spectrum of bad dialect decisions propagated throughout the Hollywood universe, a scale that pretty much claims that if you don't have the last name Streep, you should speak in your own damn voice or hire someone else. Now excuse me while I return this broken-down soapbox to its proper location of not-in-my-recap. Anyway, a guard calls for lights out, and Hill chattily offers the parting, "Well, good night, Mobay. Or Officer Whoever the Fuck You Are," and the Jafakin' advances on Hill and keeps him in a stranglehold long enough to tell him, and I can't even tell if he's using the accent or not, to keep his damn dirty mouth closed. Hill says he won't be telling anyone anything, including this pithy speech: "I'm telling nobody you're a cop. A cop who breaks the law all in the name of the law. I just want you to know that I know that you're a fraud." But then he keeps talking, and his words become increasingly filled with the didactic blather that typifies his One to Grow On fourth-wall-sacrificing segments. So Mobay loses patience and takes Hill down with a punch. The wheelchair goes over. Mobay punches some more. The guards run in and carry Hill out to get him the proper medical attention, perhaps fearful that a sudden dearth of preachy, fourth-wall-breaking narration would force them to be more thematically unambiguous when it comes to acting out the Big Issues we see played out on this show with such regularity. As if that were even possible.