Episode Report Card Drunken Bee: A+ | 16 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT The Work
By Drunken Bee | Season 4 | Episode 5 | Aired on 06.04.2010
Credits. Vince wakes up on the pull-out couch in his living room to the phone ringing. He answers and it's Coach asking if he's seen the paper yet today; Vince tells him he doesn't get the paper and Coach informs him that he's got his picture in it: he's made "Co-Conference Player of the Week." Vince perks up and grins, asking how he looks. Coach, no nonsense tells him he looks like an idiot. Coach, putting his tie on in the middle of a busy Taylor morning, tells Vince that they want him to go over to a pancake breakfast at one o'clock to talk to the little Pop Warner kids. Vince immediately wants to know why they call it a breakfast if it's at one o'clock and Coach just sighs and says "Son, I don't know why they call it that, it's just the way they do it." Nice reminder that Vince is an outsider to this world with all its rituals and customs. Vince says he'll be there, hangs up the phone and goes over to the kitchen where he finds the light switch inoperable, the fridge warm, the milk in the fridge soured, the water turned off. "Hey Mom, we ain't go no electrics, no nothin'" No response from his mom so he goes out the front door and finds his mother passed out on a bench out on the exterior walkway of their second floor apartment. He rushes over to her, picks her up and brings her inside, at least a few prying and judging neighborly eyes on the kid with too much on his plate.
Cut over to the shopping mall, garish music playing while garish young girls stand on a stage decorated garishly with silver tinsel streamers, all performing various garish "talents": pom-pom routines, hula hooping, ribbon dancing. . . xylophone playing. Out in the audience, Tim jokes with Becky's mom over the poor girl performing the xylophone for her pageant talent. She laughs and then grumbles about the empty seat next to Tim, which is saved for Becky's father who is apparently shiftless and no-good, and never makes it to Becky's pageants. Becky takes the stage and luckily we cut away before having to hear her sing again.
Extreme close-up on Matt Saracen's face as Buddy Garrity tells him that he just has to know that his father died in service of an important cause. The camera cuts abruptly to shots of plates being filled with food, Matt's attention is drawn away from Buddy's droning toward his Grandmother's quiet crying, he glances this way and that, stuck in this chair, wearing a tie. Buddy drifts off and the camera cuts some more around the room, which is stuffed full of people. Julie is now sitting next to Matt, she remarks that he hasn't moved from his chair in an hour. He says that he doesn't need to, everyone keeps coming over to him. Then in a non sequiter he blurts, "He stepped on an IED" and then "How long do these things go for?" The whole effect is to emphasize how we experience grief as both extremely volatile and also extremely tamed through ritual and community. Matt's rage bubbles up when he thinks of the IED, but there he is, amidst potato salad and button-down shirts, saying please and thank you.