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
Visiting room. A blonde woman with confoundingly sizable (I have no use for this or any variation on this word like, ever, so I'm gonna dig real deep and go once more time with ) knobs waits across the table. Rebadow gives her flowers he has brought, and she returns the favor with a gift of a Miss Sally hat. He deadpans, "There are guys in here who would kill for this. Literally." She laughs. And so he takes this opportunity to point out that the real-life Sally does not look, act, or laugh the way she does on TV. Curious. And so the Sally doppelganger has her cover blown, and this "Norma Clark" admits that she is a just a secretary at the television station that airs the show. Turns out Norma infuriated the real Miss Sally when she suggested that the star might want to visit this stalking prison lunatic (just as the empathetic David Letterman was so often to be found weeping on the cell floor of his stalker, face to the bars and quietly sobbing, "If only these walls were not here to keep us apart. And then there was the whole trying-to-run-me-down-in-your-car thing"), so Norma decided to try out a wig and pasties and see if she couldn't make a go at the ruse herself. She couldn't. Rebadow promises that he will keep writing letters, only this time, "I'll write to you." She thinks that would be swell. And even if their relationship should suddenly find itself in the pantheon of great television entertainment, I will still maintain that this was a pretty stupid way for it to get itself off the ground. I have nothing to add to that.
Hill knows everybody gambles. He really, really does.
The Two Least Interesting Death Row Inmates Ever continue, despite my loudest protests to the contrary, to have a life on camera and at all. Miles continues to Bob Vila the place up real pretty, while Moses continues to pick away at the adjoining wall with his pointy instrument of wall destruction. Simply as a method of inducing conversation as a short cut to the identical conversation they shared last week, Miles asks just what on Earth that noise is, and Moses inexplicably explains that he is "digging an escape hatch." Into the neighboring cell? You can practically hear the rain-drenched, cover-of-darkness jubilant wails of, "I'm free! I'm free! I'm -- oh, wait a sec." Glynn and his merry band of law-enforcing Glynnettes (LoPresti and, I don't know, some other guy) try to infuse all this anti-excitement with a jolt of something that looks just like drama when they enter to tell Miles and us that he has to choose a method of execution for his big day, two weeks from Thursday; Moses quickly covers up the hole with a poster. Miles lies on his bed in the fetal position and commences repeatedly screaming, "No!" Glynn sends in a guard to pull Miles out of his cell and "take him down to Psych." But Miles chooses this moment to kick it into gear, and he punches the guard away and makes for one of several locked doors that, even if opened, would continue to lead to a Russian doll's worth of hallway after hallway of impermeable metal bars. And what better way to imbue your average action sequence with a palpable sense of thrills? So said pushed-aside guard secures Miles on the bars right in front of Moses' cell. Moses spits in his face. Drama!
Cut to psychiatric evaluation, where a shackled Miles admits to Sister Pete that he is "scared shitless" about his approaching execution date. He invokes the names of Fun Death Row Inmates Past (whose memories he serves admirably by calling them "Shirley Bellinger" and "that fag kid"), and whispers something inaudible and doubtlessly deranged about not wanting to die. Sister Pete begins her comfort speech, and I wonder why she doesn't just go straight for her ace-in-the-hole "choose God blah blee us" material when she admits that, though opposed to capital punishment, there is precious little she'll be able to accomplish from a lobbyist perspective in the next two weeks. Stupid bureaucrats.