Episode Report Card Sars: D+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Failing Down
By Sars | Season 4 | Episode 2 | Aired on 10.10.2000
Over at McPhee Manor, Jack "My Subplot Is Not Like A Box Of Chocolates, Because I Already Know What I'm Going To Get: A Whole Lot Of Nothing" McPhee comes into his room with two mugs of tea and says to Jen "Mack And Cheese" Lindley, "You've gotta be kidding me. That's like the umpteenth time today you've checked your e-mail." He hands Jen one of the mugs. Without tearing her eyes away from the product-placed blueberry iBook, Jen tells him, "You lie." Jack points out that, every time he passed a computer lab today, he saw her behind a computer. She admits it. Sipping her tea, she says it's clear that Henry has "forsaken [her] for another." Jack tells her she needs to give Henry time "to get acclimated" at his new school. Getting up, Jen says that "it's becoming a thing," and goes on to explain that all summer long she and Henry called and e-mailed and IM'd each other "to the point of exhaustion" (ew), but now, whenever she goes online, "he's never there," and when she calls, he's unavailable: "I mean, I'm starting to feel like I did something wrong." Submitting to his advances in the first place, for one. Jack gets up to check his own e-mail as Jen wonders aloud, "Is it possible that I'm not a very good cyber-sex partner?" Bleah! Ew! Jack chuckles that he's sure she's "a very generous and giving cyber-lover," like, STOP it with that! The AOL guy tells Jack, "You've got mail!" and Jack's face falls. "Who wrote you?" Jen asks casually. "Uh…no one," Jack says, staring into the middle distance and closing the iBook without even reading the e-mail from his agent explaining that sorry, but he's stuck on the show until 2012.
Capeside Yacht Club And Marina. A woman wearing a Liz-Claiborne-knockoff suit and way too much goldtone jewelry asks Joey, "And what exactly is an Icehouse?" Once again -- SMALL TOWN. She would have HEARD OF IT. Jesus. Joey explains that it's a restaurant which burned down last year. "Oh, how unfortunate," Non-Liz Non-Claiborne says flatly, adding with a sneer that it "sounds like a charming little joint." NLNC and Joey sit at a table, and Joey lies that "Daddy" thought she should "get out and mingle with the little people." Continuing the central conceit that these two women would never have met or heard of the existence of the other, NLNC asks, "And what does Daddy do, dear?" Joey says that he "made his fortune in the pharmaceutical world." And now he's moved on to license-plate production and distribution, I suppose. NLNC is surprised, then, that the Potter name doesn't appear on the club's membership roster. "Well…I guess we're just not much of the joining kind," Joey says, leaning her chin on her knuckles all Dietrich-style. More back-and-forth about where Joey summered, she spent it sailing, blah bling blah, and then NLNC busts her by asking, "Were you a deckhand or a stowaway?" Ouch. Joey sets her jaw and says, "Excuse me -- but, um, before I submit to another second of your thinly-veiled bitchery, do you need a waitress or not?" Nice one. NLNC says icily that she's already filled the position. "Terrific," Joey snaps, gathers her things, and heads for the door, saying on her way out that NLNC should tell the Rosses she says hello. NLNC, brought up short, asks, "You know the Rosses?" Joey lies easily that she does, and rattles off a few key details. NLNC thinks that she and Joey "got off on the wrong foot."