Episode Report Card Cate: B+ | 3 USERS: B YOU GRADE IT Drunk
By Cate | Season 6 | Episode 13 | Aired on 02.03.2002
Mary and Lucy sneak Simon in through the front door, just in time to see Dopey bringing the twins into the front hall. Everyone hurries upstairs. There's no time to reach the bathroom, though, since RevCam has been spotted, so Dopey rushes everyone into the twins' room. Are you enjoying the comedy of their zany antics yet? Ruthie is just in time to distract RevCam, saying that she has to talk to him about sex. Eric looks taken aback. Ruthie adds, "Yes, I said sex." Hallelujah -- someone finally said it. Part of me longs for the simpler days when it was called "adult relations," but I'm really moral and uptight like that. Ruthie leads RevCam up to her room, giving Mary a chance to get Simon to the bathroom, while Dopey and Lucy take care of the twins.
Ruthie kills a lot of time getting around to her sex question. The best part is when she stalls by trying to get him to guess her question. RevCam asks, "Are you embarrassed?" Ruthie dryly replies, "Yeah, that's it. I'm embarrassed." Then she adds matter-of-factly, "Start guessing." RevCam looks worried. Maybe he's afraid she'll ask about contraception and he will have to admit that he's completely ignorant on the subject.
Dopey leaves Lucy to take care of the twins, but not before they have a jaw-droppingly dull debate about whether Simon should be punished.
Mary's indulging in similarly annoying behavior with Simon in the bathroom, insisting that if he's not punished, he will just go do something like this again. Or maybe he'll even kill someone. You know, this really pisses me off. I grew up in New York State, where the drinking age was eighteen the whole time I was in high school. Six months before my eighteenth birthday, they raised it to nineteen. Then six months before my nineteenth birthday, they raised it to twenty-one. And trust me, there's not a whole hell of a lot to do in bloody Schenectady if you can't go to a bar once in a while. I'm not saying you have to drink while you're there -- I certainly didn't always drink when I snuck into them -- but it's at least nice to be able to do something different occasionally, other than just hanging out at the mall. Okay, so here's the big secret to not killing people. Are you ready? Don't drink and drive. Ever. And teach your children not to drink and drive either. It's pretty simple, isn't it? Millions of people have gotten the hang of it, but obviously Mary's too dense to see that. Part of the justification the government used for raising the drinking age in my state was to cut down on teenage drunk driving. Yet I remember that my friend's mother's friend, Claire, who was in her forties, used to get picked up for DWI all the time. In fact, the last time she got caught, she was blacked out and couldn't even remember what happened. But I know she never did jail time for any of this, and she still had her license. How fucked up is that? I know the laws and the enforcement are tougher now, but back then I was never able to understand why the government didn't just come down hard, and I mean really hard, on drunk drivers. That would have been a real solution. I guess Mary (and Brenda Hampton) are a little unclear on the fact that A) it's possible to go into a bar and have one alcoholic drink, or even none at all; and B) not everyone who has a drink is going to get behind the wheel of a car. Who knows? Maybe Brenda assumes that the core audience who can't see past the misogyny and the stalking and the child abuse and insist that the show is chock-full of family values-y goodness would find those concepts too confusing to grasp. After all, it's easier just to say wholeheartedly that something's bad, right? In any case, as always, it's a little hard to take Mary seriously.