Episode Report Card Cate: C- | 2 USERS: C+ YOU GRADE IT Lip Service
By Cate | Season 6 | Episode 17 | Aired on 04.14.2002
The unexpected guest is International Pop Sensation Joy Enriquez! Yeah, I'm not exactly thrilled either, though at least the writers have the good sense to make this a very brief appearance and they don't give her many lines. She and Robbie start making out instead. Naturally, Mary and Lucy are spying on them from the stairs. The sisters are suddenly great friends again, as they pretend that Joy's appearance settles the question of this ongoing Robbie situation once and for all. Sure it does -- until the next episode, probably.
Annie and Rosina are apologizing profusely to each other in the kitchen. Annie gets in some trite observations about how she's always telling her kids "to be themselves," yet she didn't follow that advice herself and went overboard trying to impress Rosina and Richard. I guess that's supposed to explain her annoying behavior throughout this episode. Rosina explains away her own behavior by telling Annie how upset she is that her only daughter is an adult already. She says, "This little girl, who used to come to Shabbat dinner as my daughter, was there about to become someone's wife, and it felt like I was losing her." The two women continue bonding with some irritating observations about motherhood, like this one, when Annie says, "When my oldest daughter, Mary, moved out, I was devastated. I thought I'd never be the same." Is she forgetting that it was she and Eric who shuffled Mary off to Buffalo? I'm not sure that's quite the same thing as Mary "moving out." There's a genuinely nice moment when Rosina says, "Annie, I'm glad you went overboard. It makes me feel so good to know that my daughter's marrying someone who has a mother who cares enough to go overboard." Wisely, Annie makes no mention about that other time she went overboard and banished her children to the unfinished Garage Treehouse.
RevCam and Rabbi Richard are undergoing some bonding of their own in the rabbi's study. Eric apologizes for freaking out while Richard tries to be understanding, explaining, "You got blindsided. You stepped off a curb and got hit by a furniture truck." Hey, that's a fabulous idea for a future episode. Take note, writers! RevCam calls himself a hypocrite for not following the advice he always gives his children: to make decisions and then live with them. He gets more specific by saying that he's disappointed in himself for not being able to live with Matt's decision. Note that this really has nothing to do with making a decision oneself and then not being able to live with it, but when does this show ever make sense anyway? It's probably just a contrived opportunity to wield the theme mallet, as Eric says, "I have to do more than pay lip service to these things I teach my children." Yeah, okay, someone finally said the episode title. Duly noted. Rabbi Richard goes on to explain that he had trouble accepting his daughter's decision to marry Dopey at first, and he destroyed a lot of ping-pong balls in his frustration. He shows a bunch of them to RevCam, which is kind of weird. You'd think he would have thrown them out a while ago, but there they are, still on his desk. He also shows RevCam his favorite ping-pong paddle that he also destroyed.