Episode Report Card Deborah: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Maybe He's Born With It...Maybe It's Maybelline
By Deborah | Season 1 | Episode 21 | Aired on 05.06.2004
Joan brings some garbage out to the garage, where her mother is sitting sadly. Helen: "Hey, what are you doing?" Joan, cheerily: "Purging!" Helen: "Everything you own?" Joan: "Yes!" Helen: "That your father and I paid for?" Joan asks her mother what she's doing. Helen: "Agonizing." Joan noticed. Helen indicates her painting, and adds, "Especially with that staring at me." She sighs. Joan decides to be helpful by throwing a tarp over the painting. Helen freaks: "Hey, don't touch that!" They start bickering -- Joan was just trying to help, Helen resents being interrupted, Joan was just taking out the garbage -- until Helen hollers, "Don't touch my painting!" Joan: "Okay! Chill!" Helen, in her most threatening tone: "Don't tell me to chill!" Yikes. Joan looks somewhat bewildered by Helen's vehemence, and her expression causes Helen to say, "Oh, God, I'm sorry. I have to recreate that and I don't know what I'm doing." Joan, still willing to be helpful, asks, "Well -- well, what were you thinking about when you painted this one?" Helen says it was different: "It was a burst." Joan: "From you. So burst again. What's the problem?" Helen suddenly takes a whiff of Joan and asks, "Is that you?" Joan says proudly that it is. Helen informs her: "You stink." Joan: "Thank you." Helen, the Southern belle coming out in her expression: "Why do you stink?" Joan makes a dramatic gesture across her face and replies, "Because I am not vain. Caring about your appearance is soulless expression of vanity." Helen: "If you've been smoking marijuana, honey, you need to tell me." Heh. Joan explains she's freeing herself from the media's ideals of feminine beauty. Helen: "And you're doing this by stinkin' and lookin' like hell." Joan starts to reply, and then just apologizes for interrupting her mother. Helen apologizes for yelling, adding, "Get your clothes out of the garbage and go take a shower." Joan: "I like me…just the way I am. Focus on your bursting." She leaves, and Helen sits down again, dejected. She looks at her good painting again and then flies at it with a tarp. Good work by both Mary and Amber in that scene: very convincing interplay of moods and emotions. However, Joan just had this epiphany about vanity and appearances earlier today -- and she stinks already? Huh? Sorry, but I can't help paying attention to timelines. Maybe she just put on some dirty clothes, I don't know.
Kevin waits for Beth in some little patisserie or other. She enters reluctantly and says she was surprised to hear from him. He admits he's surprised she showed up, given the way he's acted toward her. Kevin says Joan told him something he doesn't remember, and he wants to know what really happened. He asks if she wants to sit down, but she's not sure if she does: "What do you want to know?" Kevin says Joan told him Beth did visit him in the hospital: "Why didn't you stay when I came to?" She doesn't really answer, and Kevin explains that his memories of the days around the accident are basically gone, and he just assumed she couldn't handle what happened. She decides to sit down, and tells him that he dumped her. Kevin's flummoxed: "But I was crazy about you." Well, apparently he was also crazy about some girl named Jeannie Heron. He was two-timing Beth, and she called him on it at the post-game party they attended the night of the accident. He didn't like that happening in front of his friends, so he dumped her. He doesn't seem to have much trouble believing that he would have done something like that, which tells us a lot. She adds that he'd just gotten his scholarship to Arizona, and that he was so full of himself that he was unwilling to feel guilty about his behaviour, so he took off -- for the car ride that paralyzed him. Wow. Like he didn't already have enough issues with that choice. Kevin says he didn't know. Beth says sadly that it's okay. Kevin, finally facing up to what an enormous jerk he can be: "No, it's, uh -- it's -- it's not." He sits there looking disappointed in himself. I think that ever since the accident, whenever Kevin acts like a jackass, he explains it to himself by blaming his situation. It's good to see him get that most of that isn't about the accident at all. He was always selfish and arrogant and had an entitlement complex the size of Massachusetts.