Episode Report Card Demian: B | 0 USERS: N/A YOU GRADE IT I've Got You Under My Skin
By Demian | Season 1 | Episode 2 | Aired on August 20, 1985
Before I start, I have to throw copious amounts of gratitude as well as a great big cooler chest of Beer Without Pity in SunMoonStar's direction, as she has so kindly lent me her Season One tapes for recapping purposes this summer. Special thanks also go to the many people who offered various forms of assistance, including Ozzie, Dr. No, and others from the forum boards, as well as Stefan69 from Fan Forum. (And if you're one of the TWoPpians who emailed me whose name I didn't mention specifically, know that it's because I was hopelessly and stupidly unable to link your email account to your user name, and not because I feel like skimping on the love and the props and the Beer Without Pity and whatnot.) And now, on to the continuing adventures of the Original Glamorous Ladies of Halliwell Manor…
We fade up on a latticed arbor, beneath which is suspended a shattered slab of reinforced concrete stenciled with the logo "[quake]." Actually, the word itself is split by a great, jagged rip through the rock, through which a couple of shafts of twisted rebar can be seen, so I suppose the name of this place would be rendered in text more accurately as "[qua=ke]." A bulbous bruiser of a doorman escorts a beaming twenty-something heterosexual couple into the bar area as various chicly-clad extras mill about, giggling into their cocktails. At this point, I could go off on an irate tear about how the dot-com yuppies of the closing years of the last century were so falsely secure in their overrated IPOs, their overpriced condominiums, and their overindulged sense of entitlement that they felt free to mock in the most obnoxious manner possible the very real threats to the security they so took for granted, and that such behavior now, in these dark early days of the twenty-first century, seems downright surreal, but you know what? I've been wondering why some cunning entrepreneur in Chicago has yet to open a nightclub called Dirty Bomb, so I should probably keep my mouth shut. To be honest with you, I've always wondered why my city lacks a restaurant chain named Gacy's! with festive clowns available to twist out balloon animals for the kiddies' birthday parties. Oh, shut it. It couldn't be any worse than Ditka's.
Anyway, the camera tracks through the restaurant to land on Phoebe, looking terribly demure in a simple, spaghetti-strapped sheath with her bobbed hair swept back behind her ears. As she wanders through the crowd, she nearly runs right into Piper, who emerges from the kitchen with her bitch already set at seven and threatening to ramp up rapidly to fifteen. "I'm gonna kill him," she seethes. Speaking for the audience as much as herself, Phoebe yelps, "Who?" thereby allowing Piper to launch into the sort of rapid-fire expository tirade I now know has been this series' stock in trade from the beginning. "Chef Moore," Piper spits, referring to the odious toad from the premiere. "He of the phony accents hires me, and then quits to open his own place?" she continues as the two pedebitch to the bar. "Thank you very much!" While I'm ecstatic I'll never have to deal with that irritating tertiary character again, I should point out that Chef Moore's place of business in the premiere was a glass-enclosed, chrome-laden, über-trendy boutique café called "L'Opera Ristorante" and not this lovely little faux-Tuscan-courtyard of an eatery with the unfortunate name. Continuity, clearly, was the first casualty when the WB picked up the pilot.
Piper screams some more at Phoebe along the lines of "Dammit, Jim! I'm a chef, not a restaurateur! And why are you wearing my dress?" before this big bleached blonde we've never seen appears at the bar. Phoebe greets "Brittany," and compliments the cheap-looking "tattoo" of an angel Brittany sports on her right hand. It looks more like a hand-stamp they'd use at the old Limelight chain of nightclubs, but whatever. Phoebe PSAs that she thought hand tattoos were forbidden, due to the proximity of the veins to the surface of the skin in that area. Brittany blithely notes that such tattoos are indeed illegal in the United States, which is why she got hers in Tahiti. Bad Brittany! Bad! You'll suffer for such flagrant flouting of this great nation's laws, you whore! Do you think we should stone her? I think we should stone her. Brittany, having thus established her credentials as a suitable object of both audience scorn and demonic violence, announces that she has to "jam," which as far as I'm concerned is the real strike against her. I'm sure she'll be sparking up her crack pipe and kicking a few puppies on her way out the door. Then again, considering how screwed the WB's priorities always are, she'll probably just light a Virginia Slim on her way to that fuel-efficient Japanese import of hers in the parking lot, which along with the tattoo should be more than enough to mark her for death on the Frog.
Meanwhile, Phoebe glances down the bar at a rather u