Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT New Modes
By Jacob Clifton | Season 3 | Episode 1 | Aired on 09.25.2008
Ooh! You know what I just noticed? We've never really had that story. Fey Sommers died before the show started, and then it's just been Daniel, with occasional interference from cartoony villains. We've never had the full-on real-life experience of Lady Editrix going off on people. (And while I think Amanda will eventually be crowned in some capacity, I don't think she'll ever turn into her mother. She's too nice, not to mention a functioning schizophrenic.) So I just stopped caring if Daniel ever gets Mode back.
Betty heads into Daniel's office, but it's been transformed into a creepy black and white devil baby room. It's awesome, there's like a gothic crib in the center of the room illuminated by evil and a creepy lace ... mosquito net thing. There are thousands of black and white teddybears (Cliiiiffffffff!) everywhere you look, and then a sledgehammer comes through the wall, and needless to say it's wielded by Wili, who has decided the contractors aren't doing the job right. She talks about putting in a window, so there will always be light on her little angel, and then spots Betty through the new hole in the wall: "Oh my. It's back." She informs Betty about the change of masthead and sends her downstairs to Daniel's new offices.
Which are sterilely grotesque in a Zoolander halfpipe scooteriffic kind of "zoomazoomzoom anna boomboom" way, which is to say a cliché, but maybe this time it's on purpose. I never know with Daniel. It's basically like a cross between your imaginary Google campus and your imaginary Maxim campus, but with women included. The magazine's called Player and its offices are raucously themed in Arrested Latency orange, Seventies Bush Is Back black, and Don't Tase Me Bro red.
Daniel comes running up in a track suit that is clearly evil in that it is less tailored, if you see what I'm saying, than usual: He's always been 40% pectoral. Daniel's in a bad, bad way. He explains to Betty about how Alexis has become so unrecognizable and unbearable that Romijn is quitting, but before doing so she and her giant circus tits are now evil, so he's out. Betty's flummoxed and calls Player "smutty," but Daniel defensively justifies that Player is "the third best-selling, no-nudity men's magazine," behind I assumeGQ and Esquire, so really he should express the numbers a little differently: by my count that makes it the number one best-selling straight men's magazine.