Episode Report Card Couch Baron: A- | 762 USERS: A YOU GRADE IT The Cat is Out of the Bag…
By Couch Baron | Season 3 | Episode 11 | Aired on 2009.10.25
Some number of bottles of wine later, Roger is unsteadily helping Annabelle into her coat as she tells a drunken-loud story about something or other, and they giggle and lean against the wall, but when she tries to escalate things, he tells her he's a newlywed. She obviously doesn't take that declaration particularly seriously to start, but he keeps up the resistance, and he finally informs her, "It's different with this girl." It may be a surprise even to him that he's saying this, but regardless, the statement is more effective than a hose would have been, as Annabelle's smile fades and she gets out of there in a hurry. And there isn't even anyone on hand to discuss the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Joan gets home to find Greg drinking a beer and watching TV with his feet up on the coffee table, and the moment she takes to process the tableau and just noticeably stiffen is great work by Christina Hendricks. She asks him how it went, surely already knowing the general answer, and he sullenly replies that he totally screwed it all up. She tries to tell him she's sure that's not true, but he pulls away from her touch and tells her she wasn't there, so she can stop acting like she knows everything; besides, he doesn't want to be a psychiatrist, as "it's not medicine." Joan keeps it together but does lay down the law, a little -- she doesn't care what he does, but he has to do something, as they need money. Not responding to that, he whines that he did everything he was supposed to do, and he's wanted to be surgeon since he was a kid. She soberly tells him she's sorry, but suggests it's time to move on, prompting Greg to shout that she doesn't know what it's like to want something and plan for it your whole life and then not get it. Let me just say in advance that what follows is so awesome it makes me hope you all have DVR. Joan, who was looking forward to being a mother so, so much, after a moment in which a storm gathers so quickly on her face it could cause you to go blind if you stare at it directly, picks up a vase and, without even bothering to take the flowers within it out first, literally breaks it over the back of her idiot husband's head, like, that was nowhere near an even payback for all the things he's done to her, but it seems like it now that I've watched it somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred times. Joan storms off into another room and slams the door as Greg shouts that she's insane. Not if she follows this up by getting a divorce, she isn't.