Episode Report Card Couch Baron: B+ | 755 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT Something Interruptus
By Couch Baron | Season 3 | Episode 1 | Aired on 2009.08.16
Welcome to Season Three! I'm loving how much great press the show's getting, aren't you? I can only hope the ratings see a spike because of it. All that said, this episode didn't grab me quite the way most of them have up to this point on first viewing, but it rather grew on me the second time around. Also, I thought last season's premiere was a little underwhelming too, and we know how that turned out. Anyway, let's get to it.
We start as usual with some close-ups: Pajama bottoms leading down to bare feet in front of a refrigerator; a burner on an electric stove coming to life in the dark; the lights flipping on as a pan is placed on top of the heated metal. Don, smoking a cigarette (guess that recurring cough he had last season hasn't worsened), pours some milk into the pot and idly stirs it, but his attention focuses when he hears some muffled crying. He looks up, and in front of him is a scene from the past: A woman in her late thirties, I'm guessing, is lying on a bed, shaky both physically and emotionally due to the fact that she's just delivered a stillborn, apparently not for the first time. She wonders why God has forsaken her, but the person to whom she's talking, a woman of a somewhat more advanced age, firmly tells her that God will give her a child. Her faith must be pretty strong for her to deliver that statement with such authority while holding a basin containing God's latest failed attempt. The would-be mother insists on taking a peek at the corpse, and after she does so, a surly, rugged man enters and snits, "So you killed another one." The midwife snaps back that possibly if he'd "get off her" every once in a while things like this wouldn't happen, and I agree, not just because it would relieve the physical strain but because the kid might be less inclined to commit suicide in utero were she less sure that Archie was going to be her father. Yes, these are the younger Archie and Abigail Whitman (played by the same actors they've always been), and I guess it's nice of the show to give us a reminder of how screwed up a childhood Don had before they make him into a big old cheater. Again. Archie growls at the midwife, who vamooses...
...and then after a cut to Don, the scene has changed, and we see a young man begging a pretty young woman to cut him a discount on her, uh, services. Of course, we know that Don's mother was a prostitute, so it's not a big leap to conclude that this is she. After some discussion about the fact that he doesn't have enough money for a "sheep," she consents to fulfill his needs, but "you get me in trouble, I'm gonna cut your dick off and boil it in hog fat." Looks like Don's gift for flowery speech wasn't inherited, although there's a certain similarity in the number of sexual partners they enjoy. We see Don smile at his mother's sassiness...